Armadale (Collins, 1866)

• Allan's dream (vision?): Allan falls asleep and dreams of a drowning man, followed by three other visions: the shadow of a woman by a pool at sunset; the shadow of a man with a broken statue; and a man and woman passing him a glass, after which he faints.
• 155-169 "Lurking Mischief" chapter uses the technology of the penny post (from 1839 according to sutherland) to keep the plotting between Lydia and Mrs Oldershaw moving fast
• 169-70 description of Thorpe-Ambrose as specifically unromantic and not at all gothic (modern, in fact) - AA thinks it will calm Midwinter's nerves
• 169 he mentions midwinter writing to Brock - the narrative interplay between fragments (letters) and diegesis
• 178 Maj Milroy talks about the risks of advertising for a governess -- the other end of the problem of Jane Eyre (1848) advertising
• 183 the respectable middle class library: Waverly, Maria Edgeworth, Felicia Hemans
• 190 the town's sniffiness about Armadale's arrival is at least in part one between time scheme's: Allen's busy penny post modernity vs the formal slowness of town life welcoming the squire as of old
• 200-1 Allen exposes a nice vein of country petit bourgeois snobbery
• 206-8 Letters between the Milroys indicating that Lydia is inbound as governess and from Brock spying on Gwilt and Oldershaw
• fill in
• 235 Bashwood's son is Oldershaw's private investigator
• 239 midwinter's pocketbook of papers a textual model of the narrative
• fill in
• 284-5 "I have been proved not to be myself"
  • then Lydia's caustic anti-bourgeois description of Allan and Eleanor, but also playing the role of dutiful daughter better than the latterj
• 302-3 Midwinter's indecision about leaving a good example of collins' focus on characterization here -- we get much less inferiority in Marian Halcombe
• 305 Allan thinks he's seeing the fulfillment of the second part of the vision as Midwinter departs
• 312 "the age we live in is an age which finds no human creature inexcusable" (abt Mrs milroy) -- unclear if this form of Victorian modernity is more or less sympathetic
• 318 an actual scene of an envelope being steamed open as Mrs milroy arms herself to take down Lydia
• 331 "I am a great sufferer" -- Mrs milroy quite a different type of invalid than Frederick Fairlie in Woman in White, more cunning, "unscrupulous ingenuity"
• 333 interesting form -- Allan talking to himself while writing a letter, the writing in prentheses
• 345 it would appear that the house where Lydia's reference was sent from is a brothel
• 348 Pedgift suggests going to the Great exhibition with Allan (and talks about dabbling in Latin "from a crib" book)
• 350 "the interval day passed": narrative time is structured by post time
  • interesting to think of the vision of the intervening period being filled by the fantasia of a letter traveling in Framley Parsonage (Anthony Trollope, 1861)
• 378 seeing Lydia through Bashwood's eyes, an irresistible "mixture of the voluptuous and the modest"
  • formal and informal espionage -- Pedgift's man watching Lydia, Bashwood watching Allan
• 383 Midwinter observing her "sexual sorcery" (!)
• 385 Lydia's bald manipulation of Midwinter, the contrast between talk and thought -- compare to Lady Audley's relative decency -- no wonder reviewed found it scandalous
• 398-9 the second vision comes true as Lydia comes between Allan and Midwinter
• 410 Oldershaw quotes Midsummer Night's dream incorrectly in a letter to Lydia
• Ch X - Lydia Gwilt's diary - seems to be the dark heart of the novel (424-53)
• 424 Midwinter has revealed his identity to Lydia, and here she processed it in her diary
• 430 Lydia believes Allan has permanently rejected her
• 432 LG has a nice little swipe at "the nauseous domestic sentimentalists of the day" like Trollope or Gaskell
• 435 LG quite acidly satirical of high toned old Christian women visiting her and talking about her relationship with Allan
• 438 Midwinter has prospect of being a correspondent for a new newspaper in London, one of the many founded in the 1850s after the Taxes on Knowledge were repealed -- cf Altick 1952
• 441 LG realizes she could marry Midwinter and still be Mrs Allan Armadale (she notices her writing goes strange when she does)
• 442 she wonders what Lady Macbeth would have done in her situation
• 445 her final plot falls into place: she will marry Midwinter and kill AA so she might be then the widow of Allan Armadale
• 453 interesting fragmentation within the fragmented letter/diary structure: to conclude the chapter (part?) she returns to the end of the letter that she was concluding on 423 in order to tell off Mrs Oldershaw
• 454-5 Neelie is nervous about eloping with allan based on the plot of a novel she read -- he returns to pore over Blacstone's Commentaries with her
  • nice little statement about fatality and narrative method then - "the widely discordant elements of the grotesque and the terrible were forced together by that subtle law of contrast which is one of the laws of mortal life" when AA and Neelie are looking over Blacstone even as Lydia's letter accepting marriage to a Midwinter reaches him
  • Neelie makes a pro-con table to help them understand Blacstone on marriage law
• 458 Sarah Waters' Fingersmith uses the same banns and residency in parish law as a part of its central secret marriage plot (tho this plot seems not to turn on that entirely)
• 462 Lydia congratulates herself that she wrote a letter to the Major warning him about Neelie planning to elope as "if I had been a professed novelist" writing in the register of a servant
• 482 Bashwood writes to his son the PI to help him investigate Lydia's past -- on 484 the son reveals Mrs Oldershaw's name to the Thorpe-Ambrose cluster of characters (I think) for the first time
• 489 again as on 462 Lydia is self-consciously a novelist: "I must rouse my invention, and make up my little domestic romance" (and still making fun of Trollope)
  • 491 "There was nothing new in what I told him [Midwinter, of her invented past]: it was the commonplace rubbish of the circulating libraries"
    • a nice little swat at moralizing critics, intentionally validating their suspicions about women reading novels, with the extra turn that Mudie's especially prided itself as an arbiter of good morality and taste -- here used to deceive someone into marrying under false pretenses
• 496 Lydia observes the "connection between virtue and vice" in the major setting the stage with Allan/Eleanor perfectly to her own purposes
• 512 Brock chides Midwinter about his "paralyzingly fatalism" in his last letter
  • 514 though here Brock's portent that Midwinter will finally save Armadale makes Lydia fatalistic
• 515 Bashwood's laughably bright clothes is reminiscent of Nalcolio in Twelfth night -- overall the tone is reminiscent of the tragicomedies and "problem" plays more than the lighter comedy or full on tragedy Collins cites
• 516 Collins' special bile for private detectives like James Bashwood, perhaps related to his colleagues' investigations into his own and Dickens's lives