Wordsworth, 'Daffodils'
Jane Austen letter
Guide to fashion and etiquette
Alphabet books
Soldier's letter: Battle of Waterloo
Jane Austen, Persuasion
P B Shelley, 'Ozymandias'
Sir Walter Scott, Rob Roy
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Coleridge's notes on Shakespeare
Keats, 'Ode to a Nightingale'
Lord Byron, Don Juan
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
Grammar for children
Yorkshire dialect
Punctuation for children
Anti-slavery poem
Diary description of London
Execution of a 12 year old boy
Modern Flash Dictionary
Dickens, Oliver Twist
London dialect in Dickens
Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby
Browning, Dramatic Lyrics
Dickens, A Christmas Carol
Lear's Book of Nonsense
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
The Communist Manifesto
'How do I love thee?'
Poverty and the workhouse
Poor Letter H
'The Charge of the Light Brigade'
Get your ‘air cut!
Cookery for the poor
Mary Seacole's autobiography
Mary Seacole newspaper article
Nursery rhymes
Florence Nightingale letter
Coal mining
The Woman in White
Mrs Beeton
Mrs Beeton's Christmas
Melodrama: East Lynne
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
The Queen's English
Letter from Charles Darwin
Text message poetry
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Music Hall
Victorian fashion
Freakshow posters
Street sellers
Invention of the telephone
Illusionists and conjurers
Oxford English Dictionary
Afrikaans novel
Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
Anglo-Indian dictionary
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Circus poster
Jack the Ripper murders
Match Girls Strike
Babu English
Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
H G Wells, The Time Machine
English 'down under'
There, in the middle of the broad, bright high-road – there, as if it had that moment sprung from the earth or dropped from the heaven – stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments.
The Woman in White was the first example of the Victorian ‘sensation novel’, a genre that overflowed with suspense, passion and melodrama. It was first published in serial form in 1859-60 in the periodical All The Year Round, and its twists, turns and cliffhangers reflect these origins. Its dramatic opening chapters tell the story of a late-night encounter between a young drawing master, Walter Hartright, and a mysterious woman, clad in white and in a state of extreme distress.
The plot, which turns on the themes of disguise, madness and wrongful imprisonment, held an enormous appeal for the new reading public of the mid-Victorian age: one commentator noted that ‘everyone was raving about it’. The novel is notable today for its use of multiple narrative voices and for Collins’s careful plotting, influenced by his background in the law. It is also memorable for its eccentric villain, the menacing Count Fosco, an obese Italian who carries his pet mice with him in his pockets.