10 Major Differences Between The Wilkie Collins Book And The BBC Series
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t ended in the desert sands: in the final image of The Woman in White, Marian Halcombe was liberated at last to pursue her own enthusiasms, her gender discreetly hidden behind a raffish veil. It was a lovely affirmative way for the BBC One drama to free Wilkie Collins’s feminist heroine from the shackles of Victorian conformity. In the novel she loyally sticks around to watch her sister’s first-born son inherit Limmeridge after Frederick Fairlie’s sudden death. But that was by no means the only liberty taken by writer Fiona Seres and director Carl Tibbetts...
Erasmus Nash was a fiction
coincidence
In the drama the scrivener was recommended by Walter Hartright’s mother as a legally-minded investigator who might help restore Laura Glyde’s stolen identity. In the book it is Walter who does all the sleuthing and gathering of evidence: the narrative is a set of jigsaw pieces each written by the characters closest to the action. Walter Hartright begins the story, the lawyer Gilmore continues before Marian’s journal takes it up. Fosco even cheekily makes an entry in her diary while she is delirious with fever. With so many dead or absent fathers in Collins’s story, Nash had a secondary, redemptive function as a neglectful father who saw the error of his ways.
There is no getting around the weirdness of Walter and Anne Catherick having distant Limmeridge in common when they meet at night on a road between London and Hampstead. Collins blithely sprinkles coincidences around like confetti. When Walter returns from the Americas (having frequently diced with death) he makes a pilgrimage to Lady Glyde’s supposed grave in Cumberland. There he is astonished to encounter Marian and a veiled Laura, who just happen at that very moment to be passing by as they go into hiding after Fairlie refuses to accept their story. If either of them had passed five minutes earlier or later there’d have been no resolution.
Philip Fairlie is less harshly judged in the book
What a trio of siblings. Frederick Fairlie’s mewling self-pity and Countess Fosco/ Eleanor Fairlie’s icy villainy were both faithfully transplanted from the book. But the late Philip Fairlie is merely described by Collins as “constitutionally lazy in his principles, and notoriously thoughtless of moral obligations where women were concerned”. He seduced, impregnated and abandoned Anne’s mother, and got away with it. Unlike in the novel, the drama punished him with blackmail: Glyde extracted the promise of his daughter Laura’s hand in marriage in return for his silence.
Television audiences have not inherited the Victorian tolerance of sensational
Were asylums that bad?
Collins did considerable research into private asylums, and dedicated the book to the Commissioner in Lunacy who advised him. But the book is squeamish about describing the indignities suffered by inmates. Other than the denial of her identity, Laura seems to be benignly treated. In the drama, however, Laura was graphically brutalised by a cruel regime. On the plus side she was easily sprung from incarceration with a bribe of a few coins. In the book Marian cashes in her entire fortune and hands over nearly half of it, to the tune of £400.
Count Fosco is no matinee idol
The BBC’s latest adaptation is the first to cast an actual Italian to play the Count. While the actor Riccardo Scamarcio brought unfakeable swagger, and plausibly rendered Rossini in a booming bass, Collins’s original is not a looker. Marian takes three pages to note down her first impressions. At the age of 60, he is “immensely fat” if light
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