With his aunt and cousin out of the way, Clegg begins to pursue Miranda. Clegg sees them off and makes plans for what to do with his money in particular, he wants to become more involved in collecting rare butterflies. He grows tired of the presence of Aunt Annie and his disabled cousin Mabel he wants more privacy, especially so that he can buy books with images of naked women, and he gets this freedom when his aunt and cousin go on an extended trip to Australia. He tries to have sex with a prostitute but finds himself unable to become aroused. At the start of the story, Clegg has won 73,000 pounds, a vast sum equivalent to $2-3 million American dollars today.ĭespite his new-found wealth, Clegg finds that he is still looked down upon for his relatively low class origins. When Clegg turned 21, he started to play the football pools (a low buy-in, high potential rewards betting system for soccer games). (His father died when he was two and his mother subsequently left him.) Clegg was close to his uncle Dick, but Dick died when Clegg was fifteen. After venturing to London himself, Clegg keeps tabs on this young woman and gets upset whenever he sees her with another man.Ĭlegg then explains his personal history: he was raised by his Aunt Annie and Uncle Dick after losing his parents during his youth.

He soon learns that Miranda has won a scholarship to attend the Slade School of Art, a college in London. In addition, Clegg is an amateur butterfly collector he compares Miranda's beauty and rarity to the splendor of the butterflies he has seen and captured. He has seen her around town a few times and has fallen deeply in love, or so he tells himself. Clegg has grown obsessed with Miranda Grey, a beautiful teenager. The narrator, Frederick Clegg, is a young clerk at the Town Hall Annexe of his hometown in England.

The Collector by John Fowles