Collins’s Heart: Childlike Sympathy and Coincidence in Late-Victorian Literature and Science Debates

Wilkie Collins's Heart and Science: A Story of the Present Time (1882- 1883) channels the controversy that surrounded debates on vivisection and animal rights at the Victorian fin de siècle. Initial reviewers homed in on Collins's oversimplified arguments against vivisection, which villainized experimental science and scientists; modern critics emphasize the negative associations casting women of science as absurd practitioners and hysterical patients. This analysis explores how Heart and Science encourages sympathetic dialogue between the arts and science; communicates anxiety in depictions of vivisection and women; and draws meaning and hope from narratives driven by music and children. Through metaphors of acoustic science and plots shaped by border-crossing children, the novel stresses listening as a necessary and healing component in discourses of difference.