Deception and detection: the domestic setting in William Wilkie Collins’s sensation fiction

This essay explores William Wilkie Collins's ability to evoke “the terrors of the cheerful country house and the busy London lodgings”, as Henry James famously wrote, by focussing on three of his early novels — "Basil: A Story of Modern Life" (1852), "The Woman in White" (1860) and "Armadale" (1866). A “coda” is devoted to a later novella, "The Haunted Hotel: A Mystery of Modern Venice" (1879). This study aims to show how Collins’s usage of the domestic setting rejuvenated and refashioned the formula of Gothic romance, combining it with an interest for detection and the urban environment. The result is a peculiar technique that is here termed as “architectural physiognomy”, since the houses Collins describes in his novels mirror the identity of their owners and often conceal a secret, precisely like the characters' outward appearance.