In Wilkie Collins's sensation novel The Woman in White (1859–60), the villainous Count Fosco articulates the materialist qualities of the genre when he claims, ‘Mind, they say, rules the world. But what rules the mind? The body’ (617). Victorian sensation novels are filled with detailed descriptions of bodies that affect and are affected by others. A familiar example is the meeting of Anne Catherick and Walter Hartright in Collins's novel. As Walter walks along London's Finchley Road near midnight, he is interrupted by ‘the touch of a hand laid lightly and suddenly on my shoulder from behind me’ (20). Prior to their meeting, Collins stresses Walter's cognitive vacuity: ‘my mind remained passively open’, Walter records, ‘I thought but little on any subject – indeed, so far as my own sensations were concerned, I can hardly say that I thought at all’ (19). Walter's unthinking body is set to receive ‘sensations’, and the passage continues as follows: ‘I had mechanically turned … and was strolling along the lonely high-road – idly wondering, I remember, what the Cumberland young ladies would look like – when, in one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop by the touch of a hand laid lightly and suddenly on my shoulder from behind me’ (20). Walter turns ‘on the instant’ to see ‘the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments’, her ‘hand pointing to the dark cloud over London’ (20). The affective transmission between these two characters is brought about by touch, as critics from Margaret Oliphant to D. A. Miller have emphasised. Walter does not first see Anne but feels her, an aspect of this encounter that he remarks upon as odd: ‘Steal after me and touch me? Why not call to me?’ (22). Collins imagines skin not as a barrier between individuals but as a porous surface through which sensations pass. Additionally, Collins emphasises how Walter's body acts independently of his mind. He ‘mechanically’ turns in the direction of London, just as he finds Anne's voice to be ‘mechanical in its tones’ (20, 21). His legs move involuntarily, ‘on the instant’, and Anne, initially, is simply a disembodied hand (20).