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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.8
EAN: 9781551111247
ISBN: 1551111241
Label: Broadview Press
Manufacturer: Broadview Press
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 381
Publication Date: 1997-01-15
Publisher: Broadview Press
Studio: Broadview Press

Heart and Science, one of Wilkie Collins' later novels, is concerned with the debate over what he termed 'the hideous secrets of vivisection.' The tale of a family split by various opinions and sentiments, as well as the novel's clear parallels to the animal welfare/animal rights debates of today will strike chords of understanding with modern readers, who always relate well to the accessible conversational style of Collins' prose.

Appendices of contextual material include contemporary reviews, Carroll, Cobbe and others on the vivisection debate of the 1870s, Collins’s letters, and R. Browning’s anti-vivisectionist poems.

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: A Great Read
Review: Collins's book is very interesting--it's the story, by the inventor of the detective novel, of a tall, evil neurologist driven by the frantic pace of science to disect living, screaming animals in his search for a cure for brain disease. And the Broadview edition is excellent--it provides the primary texts of the vivisection debate of the 1870s and 80s, including Francis Power Cobbe's essay and documentation of the court case. Excellent scholarly work made available and accessible to beginners--I've used the novel in a course on Literature and Science with great success.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Steve Farmer presents a strong edition of Heart and Science
Review: Heart and Science is a very interesting novel, both for it's historical connection to late-Victorian anti-vivisectionist movement and for Collins's interesting story. I won't say it is one of his strongest novels but it is quite readable and nicely intriguing.

Farmer's edition is quite strong.His notes and appendicies are thorough and extremely useful, as are the introduction, the select bibliography,and the other accompanying material, of which there is plenty.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Farmer vs. Collins
Review: This book, one of Collins's late sensation novels, is decidely less well constructed than "The Woman in White" or "The Moonstone": you are very often able to tell what will happen next and even how the whole thing is probably going to finish.

The editor has done his best to increase the attractivity of the book by adding to it an exhaustive documentation. But what is really VERY annoying is that the editor, who according to his introduction pretends to give a philologically reliable text of the novel, obviously has dispensed himself of a serious proof-reading.

A great number of misprints have not been corrected -- in some instances, the sense of the text has been almost perverted (e.g. because quotation marks are missing so that you don't know that it is a person of the novel and NOT the narrator who is talking).

Things like these shouldn't occur in a text edited by a professor of philology.

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