This is an original issue and includes all of the editorial material (articles, stories, poetry, etc.) as well as the advertisements and covers. A good issue overall, generally clean, with moderate exterior wear, but spine significantly chipped top to bottom, cover lightly soiled with a touch of damp staining at the top edge internal binding solid, paper generally clean and moderately yellowed with some light scattered foxing and a few small singular stains. Small quarto, 10 1/4' tall, pages 137 to 272 + 8 ads, printed beige wraps. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability. When the elderly Allan Armadale makes a terrible confession on his death-bed, he has little idea of the repercussions to come, for the secret he reveals involves the mysterious Lydia Gwilt: flame-haired temptress, bigamist, laudanum addict and husband-poisoner. She remains among the most enigmatic and fascinating women in nineteenth-century literature and the dark heart of this most sensational of Victorian 'sensation novels'. The character of Lydia Gwilt horrified contemporary critics, with one reviewer describing her as 'One of the most hardened female villains whose devices and desires have ever blackened fiction'. Her malicious intrigues fuel the plot of this gripping melodrama: a tale of confused identities, inherited curses, romantic rivalries, espionage, money - and murder. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.Paperback. At the novel's end, the doctor is found to be planning a murder using those pipes. When the local ladies come to tour the facilities he espouses a system of liberal care, when in actuality the building is laid out with an intricate system of pipes that allow him to keep his patients continually sedated. When that operation is shut down by the police, he opens a private sanitarium for monetary gain. The novel also features a doctor who is running a clandestine abortion clinic.

Midwinter learns the story and is uncertain whether to leave Allan or to work at changing their fate.

On his death bed, Midwinter's father warns that if these two sons ever meet, tragedy will occur. Originally serialized in The Cornhill, in Armadale the two heroes of the novel, Ozias Midwinter and Allan Armadale, are born under a curse since Midwinter's father had murdered Armadale's father. A close friend of Charles Dickens, Collins is one of the most readable of the Victorian novelists and some critics credit him with the invention of Sensation/Detective novel.

Armadale novel