While The Woman in White may be an eerie and intense sensation novel, Collins fills it with comical characters and moments. Mr. Frederick Fairlie is one of the characters through which Collins offers his reader comic relief. Most aspects of Mr. Fairlie's character development are permeated with hyperbole—in his own words, he is "a bundle of nerves dressed up to look like a man."
To some extent, then, Mr. Fairlie knows that other characters and the reader experience him as an excessively self-centered, idle, and snobby hypochondriac. Any scene in which he appears features frequent interruptions to the flow of dialogue because of the "lamentable state of [his] health": he wants people to move and speak more quietly, put things away and retrieve things for him, check if anyone has let children into the garden, change the light conditions in his room, and leave his room before the business at hand has been satisfactorily concluded. Most of his motives either come down to his paranoia of getting sick or his desire to emphasize his refinement, intellect, and aristocratic superiority.
Before the reader has the chance to meet Mr. Fairlie, Marian vaguely foreshadows his behavior: "I don’t know what is the matter with him, and the doctors don’t know what is the matter with him, and he doesn’t know himself what is the matter with him. We all say it’s on the nerves, and we none of us know what we mean when we say it." Soon after being let into Mr. Fairlie's room, Walter shares that "Mr. Fairlie’s selfish affectation and Mr. Fairlie’s wretched nerves meant one and the same thing"—which is to say that his bad nerves are nothing more than a certain kind of selfishness.
Mr. Fairlie's hyperbolic nerves make him a caricature of the Victorian elite's romanticization of frailty. The character clearly does not have any real health issues. Rather, he uses his nerves as an excuse to live in an excessively pampered and self-centered manner.
The first time Walter meets Mr. Fairlie is the first time the reader encounters him as well. This first meeting reveals the character to be an excessively neurotic, pretentious, and self-centered man. As he bids Walter farewell, he uses a simile that exaggerates his sensitive nature:
Would you mind taking great pains not to let the doors bang, and not to drop the portfolio? Thank you. Gently with the curtains, please—the slightest noise from them goes through me like a knife. Yes. Good morning!
Throughout this initial interaction between the two men, Mr. Fairlie constantly interrupts Walter or refrains from engaging in the conversation in a customary way, focusing instead on his unreasonable needs and haughty opinions. Mr. Fairlie's claim that noise from the curtains cuts him like a knife is not meant literally, but the mere suggestion that he could derive pain from such a faint sound nevertheless accentuates his neurotic nature for the reader. The hyperbolic simile is comical and leaves the reader with sympathy for Walter and anyone who has to deal with this difficult man—in particular his valet, Louis.
At the novel's final climax, Walter goes to Count Fosco's house to reveal that he has figured out his identity. The men agree that Walter will allow Count Fosco to escape on two conditions, one of which is "a full confession of the conspiracy, written and signed in [Walter's] presence." Collins employs hyperbole in his description of the scene in which Walter watches Count Fosco write:
Each slip as he finished it, was paged, and tossed over his shoulder, out of his way, on the floor. [...] Slip after slip, by dozens, by fifties, by hundreds, flew over his shoulders on either side of him, till he had snowed himself up in paper all round his chair. Hour after hour passed—and there I sat watching; there he sat, writing.
Count Fosco does not literally snow himself up in paper—even hundreds of pages would not pile that high around a large adult man's body. Nevertheless, this hyperbolic image of Count Fosco engulfing himself in paper as he furiously scribbles for hours contains important layers of meaning.
The hyperbolic scene drives home Count Fosco's flamboyant seriousness one final time. He has been caught, and is on the cusp of leaving his house to escape London, but he still takes the time to be faithful to his elegant and eloquent nature. Count Fosco seems aware of the fact that this is his last moment to shine in life—as well as in the novel—as he seizes on the situation with an "enormous audacity" and makes "it the pedestal on which his vanity mounted for the one cherished purpose of self-display."
The scene emphasizes the reader's paradoxical relationship to Count Fosco—he is the novel's evil villain, but he is also the novel's most fascinating character. Collins gives his reader a veritable mastermind in the form of Count Fosco, whose overarching plot is to allure the reader despite his cruelty towards more traditionally sympathetic characters. Even Walter, a character who has several firsthand experiences with the suffering Count Fosco has caused, can't help but feel impressed by "the prodigious strength of his character" as he watches him write.
Count Fosco comes to be buried in the pages of his own narrative. This image is significant because it corresponds with what is taking place on another level: as the Count composes the story of his conspiracy, he is digging his own grave. Similar to how he drowns in paper, he eventually comes to be murdered and thrown into the Seine.
