In BASIL'S secret and unconsummated marriage to Margaret Sherwin, the linen-draper's sexually precocious daughter, and the consequent shocks and horrors of betrayal, insanity, and death, Collins reveals the bustling, commercial London of the first half of the nineteenth century wreaking its vengeance on a still powerful aristocratic world. But although BASIL himself does not recognize them, the story forces other conflicts on the reader's attention-between man's sexual and romantic needs and between men's and women's sexuality.