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are emblems of the free will–determinism conundrum that obsesses him. At one pole is Oedipus Rex, the man who cannot escape his fate, run as he will. At the other pole is Faust, who damns himself by clear-headed choice. Both tragic heroes are doomed, but the machineries by which they meet their doom are opposite. The ‘Dream’ (which Collins altered significantly in the manuscript) overlays the narrative as prophecy, its fulfilment as inevitable as the Delphic oracle’s. But Ozias is not entirely convinced. His uncertainty as to whether his destiny is to be that of Oedipus or Faust, automaton or free agent, feeds into what is the most striking scene in the novel, when Major Milroy’s elaborate clock goes wrong. As the hour chimes and the little figures crash into each other (the Major is meanwhile buried in the entrails of his machine) Ozias is seized with uncontrollable hysteria at the ‘catastrophe of the puppets’:
    His paroxysms of laughter followed each other with such convulsive violence, that Miss Milroy started back from him in alarm, and even the patient major turned on him with a look which said plainly, Leave the room! Allan, wisely impulsive for once in his life, seized Midwinter by the arm, and dragged him out by main force into the garden, and thence into the park beyond.
    â€˜Good heavens! What has come to you!’ he exclaimed, shrinking back from the tortured face before him, as he stopped and looked close at it for the first time.
    For the moment, Midwinter was incapable of answering. Thehysterical paroxysm was passing from one extreme to the other. He leaned against a tree, sobbing and gasping for breath, and stretched out his hand in mute entreaty to Allan to give him time. (p. 225 )
    It is a surreal episode, more so given Ozias’s heroic self-control later in the novel. The reason that he reacts as he does at the débâcle of the Major’s horological automaton can, however, be guessed at. It is a spontaneous and uncontrollable surge of relief that clockwork can actually go wrong. It is a hopeful catastrophe. Life’s outcome is not necessarily ordained.
    As T. S. Eliot (an unlikely admirer of the novel) said,
Armadale
has the great virtue of melodrama – that of ‘delaying longer than one could conceive it possible to delay, a conclusion which is inevitable and wholly foreordained’. 19 In general this is true (we know that Allan must live happily with Neelie and that Lydia must come to an appropriately bad end). But
Armadale
none the less retains its ability to surprise us with regard to Ozias. To the very last page, Collins keeps us in suspense as to whether the narrative will climax with the deterministic vision of the dream (the fatal woman killing Ozias) or whether, like the Major’s clock, the machine will break down, allowing Ozias to live. The manuscript suggests that Collins himself – for all his talk of foreplanning – was not entirely certain in his mind as to what Ozias Midwinter’s end should be. It is one of the many features that make
Armadale
one of the most gripping of Victorian page-turners.
Notes
    1 . Kenneth Robinson,
Wilkie Collins
(London, 1951), p. 149 . Following references are shortened to ‘Robinson’.
    2 . Catherine Peters,
The King of Inventors: Wilkie Collins
(London, 1991), p. 227 . Following references are shortened to ‘Peters’.
    3 . Nuel Davis,
The Life of Wilkie Collins
(Illinois, 1956), p. 216 . Following references are shortened to ‘Davis’.
    4 . D. A. Miller,
The Novel and the Police
(Berkeley: California, 1988), p. 146 . Miller’s influential essay on Collins draws on a close reading of the texts and Foucauldian theory.
    5 . See Richard Altick,
The Presence of the Present
(Columbus: Ohio, 1991), pp. 540 –45, for a description of Madame Rachel’s notoriety in the 1860s. Following references are shortened to ‘Altick’. For Collins and the