Published 2024
“…Chapter 2 considers the extent to which the text engages with specific aesthetic and cultural issues that were to the fore in the summer of 1851, in particular Pre-Raphaelitism and the Great Exhibition; that leads to a discussion in chapter 3 of the way in which Basil’s verbal portraits of certain characters imitate an aesthetic of naturalism in portraiture, intended to enable the viewer to effect a physiognomical reading of the character of the sitter, that was at the time being advocated both by Collins himself and by his friend Tom Taylor and put into practice, in different ways, by his close friends John Everett Millais and Edward
Matthew Ward. But while Collins causes Basil to imitate that aesthetic of portraiture, he also undercuts the imitation by making Basil unable to understand the significance of what he sees and describes to the reader. …”
Thesis