Free Thinking

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The ideas shaping our lives today - with artists and thinkers in debates and interviews.

The ideas shaping our lives today - with leading artists and thinkers in extended interview and debate.

Free Thinking: Wilkie Collins and disability

Wilkie Collins and disability

BBC Radio 4 - Free Thinking, Wilkie Collins and disability

How the Victorian author’s own pain and drug dependency fed into his sensational novels.

How the Victorian author’s physical pain and drug dependency fed into his sensational novels. Matthew Sweet is joined by Clare Walker Gore, Tom Shakespeare and Tanvir Bush.

A blind woman who temporarily regains her sight is the heroine of Wilkie Collins’s 1872 novel Poor Miss Finch.  Matthew Sweet is joined by Clare Walker Gore, Tom Shakespeare and Tanvir Bush to discuss how Collins’s own poor health led him to write about disability and physical difference in a more nuanced way than many of his contemporaries.  Apart from Lucilla Finch, who has more agency when blind than sighted, other examples include the apparently monstrous Miserrimus Dexter ('the new centaur: half-man, half-chair') in The Law and the Lady, and the shockingly moustachioed Marian Halcombe in The Woman in White. 

Tanvir Bush is the author of Cull.  You can also hear her discussing John Wyndham's novel The Day of the Triffids on Free Thinking.
Clare Walker Gore has contributed to a Free Thinking discussion about Depicting Disability and written essays for Radio 3 about authors including Dinah Mulock Craik and Margaret Oliphant.
Tom Shakespeare is Professor of Disability Research at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.  You can hear his  Radio 3 essay on Tolkien on BBC Sounds.

Producer:  Torquil MacLeod

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