Victorian Sensation Fiction sample chapter by Macmillan International Higher Education

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CONTENTS A cknowledgements I ntroduction

vii viii

CHAPTER ONE Victorian Responses

CHAPTER TWO Genre and For m

CHAPTER THREE Class Debates

CHAPTER FOUR Feminist Criticism

CHAPTER FIVE Sensational Bodies

CHAPTER SIX Sexuality 81 CHAPTER SEVEN Legal Issues

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C O N T EN T S

CHAPTER EIGHT Science 111 CHAPTER NINE Race, Empire, Nationhood

127

CHAPTER TEN Adapting Sensation Fiction

145

C onclusion 1 6 0 N otes 1 6 6 B ibliography 1 6 8 I nde x 1 7 9

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CHAPTER ONE

Victorian Responses

Sensation fiction has, for a long time, been associated primarily with the 1860s. Until relatively recently, critical assessments of the genre cited The Woman in White as the text which inaugurated the form, as though it had at ‘that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven’ (Collins, 2006, p. 63) in much the same manner as Collins’s titular woman herself. Winifred Hughes, in her important early study of sensation fiction, The Maniac in the Cellar (1980), suggests that ‘the sensation novel exploded onto the literary scene at the start of the 1860s’ (Hughes, 1980, p. 5). Richard Albright employs similar language, suggesting: ‘The decade of the 1860s was the decade of sensation fiction. The sensation novel seems to have burst onto the scene [and] experienced a brief, dizzying period of popularity’ (Albright, 2009, p. 168). Yet this association is misleading: Collins’s three novels prior to The Woman in White – Basil (1852), Hide and Seek (1854), and The Dead Secret (1857) – all fit broadly into a definition of sensation fiction, as does the work of several other authors associated with the genre who were writing before 1860, including Braddon. Indeed, the sensation novel, as several critics have noted, has its origins in various other nineteenth-century genres, including Gothic, melodrama, and the Newgate novel, whilst one of the most important intertexts for sensation writers is Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). An article in The Argosy in 1874 cites Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) as the originator of the genre (E. B., 1874, p. 138), although this involves a problematic conflation of the sensation and the Gothic novel. Many key proponents of the genre, including Collins, Braddon, Marryat and Wood, published sensation novels for decades after the 1860s, as Andrew Maunder’s ‘Bibliography of Sensation Fiction’ (2004b) evidences. Victorian commentators were aware of the inaccuracy in the suggestion that the genre is unique to the 1860s – or indeed to Britain: Margaret Oliphant, a staunch critic of sensation fiction, writing in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, noted: ‘Mr Wilkie Collins is not the first man who has produced a sensation novel […] The higher class of American fiction, as represented by Hawthorne, attempts little else’ (Oliphant, 1862, p. 565). 1

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Recent critical work has acknowledged the earlier origins of the genre (see, for example, Mangham, 2013; Gilbert, 2011), but the notion of the 1860s as the decade of sensation continues to hold sway. Several works on sensation fiction, whilst acknowledging it extends beyond the 1860s, nonetheless focus primarily on this decade (see Mangham, 2007; Garrison, 2011; Steere, 2013). So why this persistent association between sensation fiction and the 1860s? The central reason for this lies not in the novels themselves, but in the sensation debates which took place in Victorian literary journals and magazines. It was here that the term ‘sensation novel’ – if not coined (there are examples of prior uses of the term in America) – was given credence as an appropriate description of a certain type of literature. This in itself did not occur until the 1860s, so whilst the sensation novel predates this decade, the label it acquired in the Victorian literary marketplace does not. Articles examining – and frequently deriding – sensation fiction, along with lengthy reviews of sensation novels, made regular appearances throughout the 1860s. Key interventions came from, amongst others, H. L. Mansel writing in the Quarterly Review, the anonymous critic in The Christian Remembrancer, and Oliphant, who contributed three heavily critical pieces on the genre to Blackwood’s Edinburgh M agazine. The latter’s condemnation is particularly ironic given her authorship of s everal novels which can be classified as sensation fiction.1 Some of the heavyweights of Victorian literature, including George Eliot and Henry James, also added their voices to the debate. As Maunder observes, ‘full-scale essays on the sensation novel appear in most of the best-known Victorian periodicals and newspapers. Sensation novelists could not claim to suffer from lack of notice’ (Maunder, 2004a, p. xxxiv). Whilst there are examples of later pieces discussing the genre, by far the majority of these articles appeared in the 1860s. Many of them appeared in several journals, ensuring wide circulation of the debates. Such was the fevered discussion of sensation novels at this time that several parodies emerged, including a mock advertisement in Punch in 1863 for the ‘Sensation Times’, a journal: jjdevoted chiefly to the following objects; namely, Harrowing the Mind, Making the Flesh Creep, Causing the Hair to Stand on End, Giving Shocks to the Nervous System, Destroying Conventional Moralities, and generally Unfitting the Public for the Prosaic Avocations of Life. (Anon., 1863c, p. 193) h

That Punch’s audience was in on the joke tells us something about the c ultural impact of the sensation novel and the debates it provoked by the early 1860s. Indeed, contemporary articles and reviews were in many ways responsible for both defining sensation fiction, and for instigating the terms of the debate which continues in literary criticism today. Whilst Mansel attributes the popularity of sensation fiction to ‘periodicals, circulating libraries, and railway bookstalls’ (Mansel, 1863, p. 252) it is evident that the media response

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to the sensation novel contributed significantly to its popularity. An article which appeared in The Literary Times in 1863 highlighted the media’s involvement in the perpetuation of the craze for sensation fiction: jjThe curious manner in which the press has adopted the word ‘sensation’, and the singular infelicity with which it has been applied to every successful work in literature and on the stage, would seem to imply that the fourth estate itself is not free from epidemics, and that it will rush at a new word or a new idea with as much eagerness as do that public whose taste is so often the subject of its censure. (Anon., 1863b, p. 102) h

The sensation novel, then, was as much a product of Victorian critics and reviewers as it was of the sensation novelists themselves. This chapter examines Victorian responses to sensation fiction, focusing in particular on three key issues which emerged in these debates, and which continue to occupy critics: class, the role of women writers and readers, and the contemporary moral climate. However, before exploring these, it is worth briefly considering Victorian understandings of the term ‘sensation novel’. The word was employed sporadically in reviews of new novels in the late 1850s (as in a review of Caroline Clive’s Paul Ferroll [1855], discussed in ‘The contemporary moral climate’ below), but it was in the early 1860s that the label became widely recognised and debated. However, despite this recognition, there was still no clear-cut definition of the term – anticipating critical debates of the last twenty years (as discussed in Chapter 2). One relatively early discussion of the genre which appeared in The Spectator in 1861 labels the work of Collins and his contemporaries ‘enigma novels’, describing these as ‘a new variety of the sensation novel’. The defining feature of these works is, according to this reviewer, ‘the gradual unravelling of some carefully prepared enigma’ (Anon., 1861b, p. 1428). The following year, an article in St James Magazine attempted a – somewhat ambiguous – definition of the term: jjAs now used, [‘sensation’] means a concentrated interest in any amusement brought particularly under our attention; and it is not only artificially produced, but apparently, as a greater recommendation, is commonly of illicit manufacture, from sources generally considered unwholesome. (Anon., 1862b, p. 341) h

The critic in The Literary Times was more damning, declaring, ‘“Sensation” we regard as the most unmeaning and stupid of the epithets of the day’, and concluding ‘the indiscriminate application of the term to all the specimens of modern taste, is merely the abandonment of healthy criticism in favour of a weak system of strong epithets’ (Anon., 1863b, p. 103). Perhaps the most common consensus about what constituted a sensation novel relates to the type of

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plot offered to readers. In a much-quoted 1868 article, one critic attempted a succinct definition: jjStartling dialogue and thrilling incident seem to be the chief features of the sensational novel. It is a preaching to the nerves, not to the judgement. A sensation novel, as a matter of course, abounds in incident. Indeed, as a general rule, it consists of nothing else. (R. S., 1868, p. 48) h

A sensational plot, then, appears to be a prerequisite of the sensation novel, but as Hughes points out, such plots have a history in English literature which long predates the genre, and encompasses the epistolary novels of Samuel Richardson, the work of the first wave of Gothic writers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and the romances of Walter Scott, amongst others. What, then, distinguishes the fiction of the 1860s with which critics and reviewers were so concerned? Hughes, quoting Henry James, affirms that: jjAll the commentators on the sensation novel – whether scathing or tolerant, obstinate or perceptive, contemporary or later – have seized unerringly on its single definitive feature: its introduction into fiction of ‘those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors’. (Hughes, 1980, pp. 6–7) h

Mansel offers a similar assessment: jjProximity is, indeed, one great element of sensation. It is necessary to be near a mine to be blown up by its explosion; and a tale which aims at electrifying the nerves of the reader is never thoroughly effective unless the scene be laid in our own days and among the people we are in the habit of meeting. (Mansel, 1863, p. 255) h

From the nineteenth-century debates on sensation fiction, then, we can begin to identify some of the key characteristics of the form, even if a definitive definition remains elusive: a sensational plot with an emphasis on mystery and enigmas, a contemporary setting, and something not entirely ‘wholesome’. The notion of the genre as unwholesome permeated much of the Victorian debate, not least discussions around the three issues with which this chapter is primarily concerned: class, women, and the contemporary moral climate.

The literature of the kitchen The fevered debates around the sensation novel are indicative of the cultural anxiety it provoked. This anxiety was in no small part related to the threat the genre appeared to pose to both class and gender boundaries. Class boundaries

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often appear permeable in sensation fiction: East Lynne’s Lady Isabel Vane becomes a poor governess; the poor governess Lucy Graham is transformed into Lady Audley in Braddon’s bestseller; Sir Percival Glyde in The Woman in White is illegitimate, and has no legal claim to his title. All three characters employ various forms of masquerade in order to deceive those around them, and in doing so pose a threat to the sanctity of the upper-/middle-class home. Elsewhere, identities are switched or concealed with an ease which troubled Victorian notions of social status and class boundaries: in Collins’s The Dead Secret (1857), Rosanna Treverton, apparently the daughter of Captain and Mrs Treverton, is revealed as the illegitimate child of a servant; in his later novel, The New Magdalen (1873), the seemingly respectable Grace Roseberry is in fact Mercy Merrick – an illegitimate former prostitute. The sensation novel seemed to suggest that appearances were not to be trusted, and that its readers’ apparently respectable neighbours and acquaintances might be concealing terrible secrets. This breaching of class boundaries is also evident in the readership of sensation fiction, and this was a key source of concern to many Victorian commentators. In terms of content, the sensation novel is far less ‘sensational’ than much of the penny fiction that was circulating at the same time. The difference between these two forms – and the reason for the intense scrutiny faced by sensation fiction – is the readership. Whilst penny fiction was aimed at a poorer class of reader, the sensation novel, it seemed, was being read by everyone – from kitchen maids to politicians to royalty: as Mansel noted, ‘The craving for sensation extends to all classes of society’ (Mansel, 1863, p. 264). Indeed, there is plenty of evidence that sensation novels were consumed in the highest echelons of society: Prince Albert and William Gladstone were amongst fans of The Woman in White, and Edward, Prince of Wales read East Lynne (1862) whilst on a trip to Egypt – electing to finish the novel rather than visit the tombs.2 Of particular concern to critics, however, was the genre’s appeal to ‘respectable’ lady readers, as we shall see. Whilst the sensation novel may have counted royalty amongst its fans, critics were keen to emphasise its lowbrow status. The term ‘kitchen literature’ was initially employed to describe the works read by ‘English domestics’, as an 1856 article in The Saturday Review makes clear (Anon., 1856b, p. 366). Critics of the sensation novel, however, adopted the phrase as a pejorative term for the genre, implying its inappropriateness for readers of a ‘higher’ class. In an 1865 article by W. F. Rae, Braddon is accused of ‘making the literature of the kitchen the favourite reading of the drawing room’ (Rae, 1865, p. 204). Although the article targets Braddon specifically, it is clearly reflective of wider concerns about the sensation novel and its breach of class boundaries. Similar language was employed elsewhere in the Victorian debate around sensation fiction: indeed, as Elizabeth Steere discusses at length (Steere, 2013), ‘kitchen literature’ became the favoured term of contempt for sensation fiction amongst

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some critics, with Braddon dubbed ‘The Queen of Kitchen Literature’ by The Examiner (Anon., 1865a, p. 364). In his autobiography, Passages of a Working Life During Half a Century, Victorian publisher Charles Knight expressed concern about the transgressive nature of sensation fiction. He notes that, ‘Half-penny and Penny Weeklies [...] have acquired the name of Kitchen Literature’ but that, ‘This name is, with some injustice, exclusively applied to these delights of the Servants’-hall; for their unnatural incidents and their slip-shod writing may be traced in the literature for the parlour’. He continues: jjThe grosser evils of the attractive reading that may be purchased for a penny in every street of London have spread, as an epidemic spreads from the hovel to the mansion. The current demand for ‘sensation novels’ [...] has been absolutely generated by the weekly sheets that commanded a sale by suiting their contents to the palates which demanded the coarsest dishes highly seasoned. The diseased taste [...] appears to be now common to the sanded kitchen and the carpeted drawing room[.] (Knight, 1865, p. 179) h

Knight’s comments reflect a commonly-expressed view in the sensation debate. The sensation novel offended Victorian sensibilities in part because it did not ‘know its place’: rather than being content to form the basis for the weekly penny fiction consumed by servants and other workers at the poorer end of the socio-economic scale, it began to infiltrate the parlour and the drawing room, spreading, as several critics observed, like a disease. Mansel suggests that penny serials were in some ways more acceptable than sensation fiction because they represent ‘sensationism [sic] pure and undisguised, exhibited in its naked simplicity, stripped of the rich dress which conceals while it adorns the figure of the more ambitious varieties of the species’ (Mansel, 1863, p. 264). It was, then, its appeal to a wealthier, more ‘respectable’ class of reader which, for some commentators at least, rendered the sensation novel dangerously transgressive. The notion that it did not know its place was also extended to include the authors of such texts. In a particularly vitriolic attack on Wood, The Christian Remembrancer suggested that East Lynne ‘plunge[s] boldly into the manners of a society of which the writer has not the remotest experience’, and singled out her portrayal of Barbara Carlyle for particular criticism: ‘with her flippancy, her vulgar finery, her outspoken declaration of love, [she] might be supposed to be some milliner’s apprentice, but we believe is really intended to be an English lady’ (Anon., 1864b, p. 216, 217). The article, and others in a similar vein, reveal the class snobbery inherent in these assessments of the genre, and in Victorian culture more generally, and thus provide a valuable insight into the reasons behind contemporary responses to the form. For several Victorian critics, the sensation novel was a source of profound distaste, not only because it marketed kitchen literature to ‘respectable’ readers, but because it was a product of the demands of the marketplace, rather

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than an attempt to produce ‘high art’. There is plenty of evidence that this was indeed the case. The sensation novel’s emergence coincided with, and was at least in part a consequence of, the rapid expansion of the Victorian literary marketplace – a result of a combination of factors including increased literacy rates, the development of the rail network (resulting in the appearance of the ‘railway novel’), the abolishment of stamp duty on newspapers and periodicals (giving rise to a significant increase in the number of titles available – many of which contained serialised literature, including sensation fiction), and the increased popularity of circulating libraries. All of these circumstances contributed to a significant demand for serialised fiction, and sensation writers responded accordingly. This commercial atmosphere also goes some way towards explaining the prominence of female sensation writers: with many professions closed off to women, writing represented one of only a few possible work opportunities for the middle-class woman. Braddon, Wood, and Oliphant were amongst those writing to support their families. Braddon is a case in point in terms of the tensions that existed between commercial fiction and serious literature. A prolific author, she sought both critical acclaim and commercial success, and for much of the 1860s published two novels a year – one for each purpose. Writing to her mentor, Edward Bulwer Lytton, in 1865, she admitted, ‘I am always divided between a noble desire to attain something like excellence – and a very ignoble wish to earn plenty of money’ (quoted Wolff, 1979, p. 165). Critics, though, were unsympathetic to the demands of the commercial marketplace. Mansel, in his lengthy review of twenty-four sensation novels, wrote: jjNo divine influence can be imagined as presiding over the birth of his [the sensation novelist’s] work, beyond the market-law of demand and supply; [...] A commercial atmosphere floats around works of this class, redolent of the manufactory and the shop. The public want novels, and novels must be made – so many yards of printed stuff, s ensation-pattern, to be ready by the beginning of the season. (Mansel, 1863, p. 252) h

It was not only reviewers who were offended by the ‘low art’ of sensation fiction. Authors of ‘high’ literary art also begrudged the success of the genre. In a letter to her publisher, John Blackwood, George Eliot lamented the popularity of Braddon’s railway novels: jj[T]he most carefully written books lie, both outside and inside people’s minds, deep undermost in a heap of trash. I suppose the reason my 6 [shilling] editions are never on the railway stalls is [because] they are not so attractive to the majority as [Braddon’s] ‘The Trail of the Serpent’; still a minority might sometimes buy them if they were there. (Eliot, 1865, in Haight, 1954, p. 309) h

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The quality of writing in sensation novels was much commented on in reviews: The Christian Remembrancer, for example, declared Wood’s style ‘vulgar’, and suggested she was unfamiliar ‘with pure English as it was spoken and written’ (Anon., 1864b, p. 216). Thus the sensation novel offended certain Victorian critics not only because it both represented, via its characters, the breach of class boundaries, and rendered ‘kitchen literature’ commonplace in the drawing room, but also because it had no aspirations to high art or literary immortality – a reflection of contemporary attitudes towards popular culture that were to continue until the late twentieth century, and contributed to the genre’s relegation to literary obscurity for over a century after it first outraged critics.

Victorian women: readers and writers Concerns about the sensation novel’s ability to breach class boundaries by attracting middle- and upper-class readers to what was perceived as a form of ‘kitchen literature’ were closely intertwined with anxieties about gender. Several Victorian commentators expressed outrage at the number of female writers producing sensation fiction, and their representations of transgressive women, whilst there was widespread concern about the genre’s influence on susceptible readers – particularly young women. It is no coincidence that the popularity of the sensation novel coincided with the development of the women’s rights movement. Although sensation fiction is generally not overtly feminist like the New Woman fiction of the late nineteenth century, it does offer portrayals of women who transgress the boundaries of Victorian femininity and present a challenge to the patriarchal order. These include figures such as Lady Audley, who recognises that marriage is the only means of securing a good position in society, and weds Sir Michael despite the fact she is already married, and Lydia Gwilt in Armadale, whose beauty disguises her criminality. The genre is, then, at least p roto-feminist in its representation of women and often in its challenging of Victorian law and custom – the questioning of the sexual double standard, for example, is almost de rigueur in sensation fiction, even in the work of seemingly more conservative authors such as Wood. Critics condemning the sensation novel often appear to be seeking to uphold the same values and structures which were being challenged by first-wave feminists, and it is notable that the language used to condemn the genre at times echoes criticisms of the women’s movement. An article published in The Christian Remembrancer suggested that ‘The “sensation novel” of our time, however extravagant and unnatural, yet is a sign of the times – the evidence of a certain turn of thought and action, of an impatience of old restraints, and a craving for some fundamental change in the working

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of society’ (Anon., 1864b, p. 210). This notion of a ‘craving’ for ‘change’ is suggestive of the changes the women’s movement was demanding, whilst the description of the sensation novel as ‘unnatural’ echoes claims made about feminists, and their attempts to gain greater autonomy and freedom for their sex. The article goes on to suggest that, ‘The one indispensable point in the sensation novel is, that it should contain something abnormal and unnatural’ (Anon., 1864b, p. 210), implying that the subversive heroines who feature so heavily in the genre were, like those campaigning for women’s rights, ‘unnatural’.3 H. F. Chorley also drew an implicit link between the sensation novel and the women’s movement in his review of Marryat’s Woman Against Woman (1865), in which he noted, ‘the ideas of women on points of morals and ethics seem in a state of transition’ (Chorley, 1866a, p. 233). This notion of transition is reflected in both the sensation novel and the woman question, and parallels run through the negative discourses around both. Criticism of the sensation genre frequently focused on the prominence of women writers. Oliphant, often identified with an anti-feminist stance, was rigorous in her condemnation of sensation novelists, suggesting that: ‘Writers who have no genius and little talent, make up for it by displaying their acquaintance with the accessories of vice’ (Oliphant, 1867, p. 258). Stressing specific concerns about the role of women in the sensation genre, whilst simultaneously (and somewhat ironically given her own position) highlighting the double standard that women writers had to contend with, Oliphant proposes that ‘were the sketch made from the man’s point of view, its openness would at least be less repulsive. The peculiarity of it […] is, that it is oftenest made from the woman’s side – that it is women who describe those sensuous raptures’ (Oliphant, 1867, p. 259). Elsewhere, she argues that ‘There are […] a great many more feminine writers of novels than are supposed to be good for the health of the public’ (Oliphant, 1858, p. 142), linking the sensation phenomena and the rise in the number of women writers with social degeneration – in spite of the fact that she was herself a prominent and prolific writer. Her comments also echo social concerns about feminists, implying the ‘public’ woman (whether prostitute, campaigner, or writer) was unwomanly and impure. The Pall Mall Gazette was similarly concerned about the p articipation of female writers in the sensation genre. In an article entitled ‘Peculiarities of Some Female Novelists’ (1870), it accused the female sensationalists of a tendency to ‘outrage morals, manners, and probability, with what very much resembles a deliberate purpose’, proposing that ‘Indecorous and proclaimed sensuality in a female writer should be visited with a punishment as appropriate to the offence as it is in the power of critics to inflict’ (Anon., 1870, p. 575). It is clear that although male sensation writers, such as Collins and Reade, attracted criticism, particular vitriol was reserved for the female sensation novelists, evidencing the operation of the sexual double standard in the Victorian literary marketplace.

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Of further concern to critics was the genre’s portrayals of transgressive women. Highlighting the particular problem of sensation fiction’s representation of women, Oliphant argued that ‘What is held up to us as the story of the feminine soul as it really exists underneath its conventional coverings, is a very fleshly and un lovely [sic] record’ (Oliphant, 1867, p. 259). In its scathing article on sensation fiction, The Christian Remembrancer declared: jjThere is nothing more violently opposed to our moral sense, in all the contradictions to custom which [sensation novels] present to us, than the utter unrestraint in which the heroines of this order are allowed to expatiate and develop their impulsive, stormy, passionate characters [...] So far as real life sees, or ever has seen anything like this, it is among the Cleopatras and other witch-like charmers who have misled mankind; not among wives and daughters of repute in Christian or even in heathen times. (Anon., 1864b, p. 108, 112) h

Reviews of Collins’s novels also singled out his (anti-)heroines for condemnation. Chorley, reviewing Armadale, condemned the book and its anti-heroine, Lydia Gwilt, as ‘coarse’, ‘perverse’, ‘vermin’, and ‘horrible’ (Chorley, 1866b, pp. 732–33). Elsewhere, Collins’s female characters are variously dubbed ‘wicked’ (Anon., 1866c, p. 381), ‘vulgar’ (Oliphant, 1867, p. 265), and ‘the paragon of she-devils’ (Anon., 1860, p. 82). Oliphant’s views make clear that at least some of the objections to sensation heroines were founded on their (generally implicit) expressions of sexual desire – a characteristic at odds with the Victorian ideal of respectable femininity which stressed innocence and purity, and castigated excessive sexual desire in women as illness. Oliphant objected to representations of heroines who ‘give and receive burning kisses and frantic embraces, and live in a voluptuous dream’ (Oliphant, 1867, p. 259): characters such as Braddon’s Aurora Floyd, whose impulsive marriage to her father’s groom can only have been motivated by sexual desire, and Wood’s Isabel Vane, who abandons her husband and children for a brief affair with the villainous Francis Levison. For critics, this was further evidence of the genre’s emphasis on ‘animal’ passions, and thus of its degeneracy. The danger of the example set by the sensation genre – both in terms of women’s participation as writers, and its representations of transgressive female characters – was its potentially nefarious influence on impressionable (young) women readers. Oliphant encapsulates this in her diatribe on the genre, expressing outrage at the female sensationalists’ portrayals of female desire as something representative of readers’ own feelings: ‘this intense appreciation of flesh and blood, this eagerness of physical sensation, is represented as the natural sentiment of English girls, and is offered to them not only as the portrait of their own state of mind, but as their amusement and mental food’. This, Oliphant contends, is a gross misrepresentation: ‘The girls of our acquaintance [...] do not [...] pant for indiscriminate kisses or go mad

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for unattainable men’. Yet, she notes, readers were not challenging such characterisations: ‘The fact that this new and disgusting picture of what professes to be the female heart, comes from the hands of women, and is tacitly accepted by them as real, is not in any way to be laughed at’ (Oliphant, 1867, pp. 259– 60). Another reviewer denounced Caroline Norton’s sensation novel Lost and Saved (1863) as ‘unfit for the drawing-room table’, echoing condemnations of sensation novels as ‘kitchen literature’, and suggested it ‘ought to be kept out of the way of young ladies’ (Anon., 1864b, p. 223), evidencing the manner in which discourses around both class and gender infiltrated the Victorian debate on sensation fiction.

The contemporary moral climate Questions over the role and representation of women were central to the moral outrage provoked by the sensation novel, but debates over the form also indicate broader concerns about moral degeneration which sensation fiction and its popularity seemed to presage. Many of these concerns centre on the state of the literary marketplace and what the popularity of the works of Collins, Braddon, and their contemporaries suggested about the collective mind of the general populace. Although the moral panic surrounding the sensation novel peaked in the 1860s, reviewers’ concerns about the morality of contemporary literature are apparent before this – further evidence that the sensation novel predates The Woman in White. Maunder draws attention to the employment of the term ‘sensation’ in an 1856 review of Caroline Clive’s Paul Ferroll, before the term ‘sensation novel’ was firmly established, but this review is also interesting for its warning to authors and readers about the moral content of literature. The novel tells the story of a man who murders his first wife in order to marry his second. The idea, the reviewer notes, ‘is a capital hit’, and has generated rave reviews from an appreciative press, who have described it as ‘strikingly original’, ‘a phenomenon in literature’, and ‘a faultless work of art’. But, the review continues, the book is ‘very horrible indeed [...] It competes successfully with public executions and cases of leprosy’. Novelists, the reviewer concludes, in a passage which foreshadows later condemnations of the sensation novel, have a moral duty to their readers, and should carry out this duty with care: jjThe subjects of novels are fictions but novels are realities. The effect which they produce is at least as deep as that which is produced by an essay or sermon. [...] Let those who have gifts for novel writing, then, take care how they use them, and not suppose that they are at liberty to seek, from any source they please, the materials of a sensation. The author of Paul Ferroll has great gifts [...] We hope to see the same pen employed on a more wholesome theme[.] (Anon., 1856a, pp. 192–93) h

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The notion of sensation novels as ‘unwholesome’ was pervasive in critiques of the genre in the 1860s, as was the idea of the demand for sensation fiction as a contemporary ‘disease’. A letter printed in Public Opinion in 1867 under the title ‘Sensational Novels and Their Moral Aspect’ declared ‘The sensational is fictitious and unnatural [...] The sensational is unhealthful’ (Anon., 1867b, p. 622). Oliphant contrasted sensation fiction with the more ‘wholesome’ novels of the past – those of Sir Walter Scott, for instance (Oliphant, 1867, p. 257). The Ladies Companion and Monthly Magazine carried a short piece describing s ensation novels as ‘unwholesome mental pabulum’ (Anon., 1864a, p. 278), and separate articles in 1874 and 1876 both describe sensation fiction as ‘unwholesome reading’ (Anon., 1874, p. 140; China, 1876, p. 5). In the former, the writer, frustrated at the ongoing popularity of the genre, declares, ‘your sensational novelist and reader both come back like dogs to their vomit’ (Anon., 1874, p. 140). Mansel was amongst several critics to construe the popularity of sensation fiction as a ‘disease’, noting ‘it is easier to detect the disease than to suggest the remedy’. ‘[W]orks of this class’, he suggested, jjmanifest themselves as belonging, some more, some less, but all to some extent, to the morbid phenomena of literature – indications of a wide-spread corruption, of which they are in part both the effect and the cause; called into existence to supply the cravings of a diseased appetite, and contributing themselves to foster the disease, and to stimulate the want which they supply. (Mansel, 1863, pp. 267, 252) h

A later review of Ouida’s novels in The Contemporary Review declared, ‘Precisely as certain diseased conditions of the body give rise to a craving for unnatural food, so do certain morbid conditions of mind produce an appetite for literary food which a sound mental organization would reject’ (Murray, 1873, p. 922). An article in The British Controversialist posits immorality as a defining feature of sensation fiction: jjA sensational novel I should define as one in which the characters act in an improbable or impossible manner, the event leading to a most illogical issue, and the conclusion or moral, if moral there be, utterly at variance with that sense of moral fitness and justice inherent in mankind[.] (R. S., 1868, p. 48) h

For the reviewer in The Christian Remembrancer, sensation novels represented ‘a consistent appeal to the animal part of our nature’ (Anon., 1864b, p. 212), and were to be condemned for their representations of passion and violence – especially in women. An article on Braddon in the North British Review described Lady Audley’s Secret as ‘one of the most noxious books of modern times’, and declared the entire genre of sensation fiction to be ‘one of the abominations of the age’ (Rae, 1865, pp. 187, 203). The London Quarterly Review stated that ‘the

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moral tone of [Collins’s] books is […] to be lamented’ (Anon., 1866d, p. 104), whilst The Examiner dismissed Braddon’s works as ‘crude, coarse, and prosaic’ (Anon., 1863a, p. 99). Inevitably, some of the moral diatribes against sensation fiction invoked religion. Mansel raised concerns that the sensation novel was replacing the preacher as a key influence on the young, ‘usurping in many respects, intentionally or unintentionally, a portion of the preacher’s office, playing no inconsiderable part in moulding the minds and forming the habits and tastes of its generation’ (Mansel, 1863, p. 251). Several religious magazines published articles on the genre, including The Christian Remembrancer and The Christian Observer, whilst a lengthy piece entitled ‘Recent Novels: Their Moral and Religious Teaching’ appeared in the London Quarterly Review in 1866, and the London Review published a piece entitled ‘A Sermon Upon Novels’ the following year. In 1864, the Archbishop of York gave a sermon, subsequently reported on in The Times, in which he criticised sensation fiction, and in 1874, the Bishop of Derry, William Alexander, delivered a sermon on the subject of ‘Sensationalism’ in St James’s Church in Piccadilly. The Christian Remembrancer sets out its justification for a long discussion of sensation fiction in a ‘theological review’, arguing ‘we have thought it well to enter our protest against the form of fiction most popular in the present day’ because it ‘weakens the established rules of right and wrong’ (Anon., 1864b, p. 236). The Christian Observer suggests the debates around sensation fiction were ‘a question of the morals of a country’ before enumerating ‘the evils of sensational literature’, noting its ‘immoral tendency’, and suggesting the remedy for this evil lay in ‘a deeper study and wider use of the oracles of God’, for ‘the more the mind is imbued with Bible literature, the less it will be able to put up with the world’s sinful and shallow literature’ (Anon., 1865b, pp. 809–13). The Bishop of Derry cautioned readers against perusing sensation novels, stating, ‘Sensationalism in literature runs parallel almost along the whole line with St Paul’s list of the works of the flesh: “adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, witchcraft (poisoning), hatred”’ (Bishop of Derry, 1874, p. 94). This intervention in the sensation debate by those espousing Christian beliefs is indicative of broader cultural concerns about degeneration and perceived challenges to traditional religion – evidenced elsewhere in responses to Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), the publication of which coincided with the sensation debates. The sensation novel and the responses to it are, then, part of a wider cultural moment, and extend far beyond the emergence of a ‘minor’ subgenre of Victorian literature. Further moral objections to the sensation novel centred on the fact that this type of literature did not seek to educate the reader – or, if it did so, the kind of didacticism it advanced was not in keeping with the values espoused by many journals and periodicals. Knight’s Popular History of England (1862) notes that ‘in proportion as the number of readers had increased, the desire

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of the mass of the population had been rather for passing amusement than solid instruction’ (Knight, 1862, p. 476). Rapidly increasing rates of literacy, then, did not so much increase the desire for religious and morally didactic literature as it did the popularity of the sensation novel and other popular forms of fiction. And yet, many sensation novels are didactic – some overtly, others less so. The moralising narrator is a persistent feature in Wood’s fiction, as in East Lynne where the reader is implored to avoid the mistakes of Isabel Vane: jjOh, reader, believe me! Lady – wife – mother! Should you ever be tempted to abandon your home, so will you awake. Whatever trials may be the lot of your married life, though they may magnify themselves to your crushed spirit as beyond the nature, the endurance of woman to bear, resolve to bear them; fall down upon your knees, and pray to be enabled to bear them – pray for patience – pray for strength to resist the demon that would tempt you to escape; bear unto death, rather than forfeit your fair name and your good conscience; for be assured that the alternative, if you do rush on to it, will be found worse than death. (Wood, 2002, pp. 334–35) h

Critics, however, were unimpressed with this moralising – sensing, perhaps, an insincerity in the exaggerated tone. Oliphant declares ‘This is dangerous and foolish work, as well as false, both to Art and Nature’ (Oliphant, 1862, p. 564), whilst Geraldine Jewsbury argues that it includes ‘needless sins against good taste’ (quoted Wood, 2002, p. 698). The anonymous reviewer in The Saturday Review, however, points out that ‘the authoress never for [a] moment allows us to doubt of her abhorrence of such a crime’ (Anon., 1862a, p. 186), whilst The Literary Gazette argues that Wood ‘does not fail to parade her moral’ (Anon., 1861a, p. 370). Other sensation writers, notably Collins and Reade, used their fiction to call for changes to the law and to highlight social injustices. In No Name, Collins calls for greater legal protection for illegitimate children, whilst in Man and Wife, he attacks Victorian marriage laws. Reade’s Hard Cash (1863) criticises conditions in lunatic asylums, and trade unions come under attack in Put Yourself in His Place (1870). For some commentators, though, these sensation novels with a purpose were an even worse phenomenon than those without, as Mansel declares in his extended attack on the form. He criticises the tendency of authors such as Wood and Mrs Houstoun to portray ‘sinners’ in order to hold them up as an example to the reader of the type of behaviour that should be avoided: ‘we much doubt the wisdom or the morality of drawing fictitious portraits of noble-minded and interesting sinners, by way of teaching us to feel for the sinner while we condemn the sin’ (Mansel, 1863, p. 258). He reserves even more ire for those writers who attempt to use their fiction as a campaigning vehicle. Dividing sensation novels into two categories – ‘those

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that are written merely for amusement, and those that are written with a didactic purpose’ – he continues: jjOf the two, we confess that we very much prefer the former. [...] [I]t is better that the excitement of a sensation novel should evaporate in froth and foam, than that it should leave a residuum behind of shallow dogmatism and flippant conceit. For what other results can be expected from the popular novelist’s method of prejudice teaching by caricature? (Mansel, 1863, p. 254) h

Though much of the debate around sensation fiction was critical, some articles defending the form, as well as positive reviews of individual works, also appeared. Collins’s fiction, was, on the whole, received more positively than that of his female counterparts – although this is in part indicative of the prejudice towards women writers. The Times published a favourable review of East Lynne (Lucas, 1862, p. 6), in contrast to several other literary journals, whilst positive reviews of Braddon’s work appeared in various titles, including The Saturday Review, which praised her 1863 novel, Eleanor’s Victory (Anon., 1863d, p. 396). Lengthier articles defending the sensation novel include George Augustus Sala’s ‘The Cant of Modern Criticism’ and ‘On the “Sensational” in Literature and Art’, both of which appeared in Belgravia in 1867 and 1868 respectively. The vehicle for Sala’s defences of the genre is unsurprising: Belgravia was edited by Braddon, and frequently serialised sensation fiction. Nonetheless, these articles provide a useful counterpoint to the many detractors of the genre. The first is written in response to Oliphant’s ‘Novels’, which had appeared (anonymously) in Blackwood’s two months previously. Describing the contemporary novel as ‘the outspoken, realistic, moving, breathing fiction, which mirrors the passions of the age for which it is written’, Sala places Braddon alongside Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot – in contradistinction to Eliot’s view. Jane Eyre, Adam Bede, and Braddon’s novels all operate, Sala proposes (not inaccurately), within both a sensational and a realist tradition. He accuses Oliphant of ‘prurient prudery’, and rejects the accusation that the sensation novel is a danger to young, impressionable readers, stating, ‘novels are written for grown people, and not for babes and sucklings’ (Sala, 1867, pp. 52–54). In his later article, he calls into question what he sees as the narrow use of the term ‘sensational’ by contemporary critics, arguing that the sensational is endemic across cultural forms past and present. Dickens’s journal All the Year Round – also home to much serialised sensation fiction – put forth a similar argument to Sala in an 1864 article, which, like Sala, criticised the tendency of critics to cry ‘sensation’, and pointed to the sensational elements of Shakespeare, amongst others (Anon., 1864c). Despite these defences of the genre, the sensation debate which took place in the pages of Victorian literary journals and newspapers was largely derisive of the form – whether on the grounds of its questionable morality or its poor

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literary quality. Yet, this torrent of negative assessments of the genre, and its alleged potentially nefarious influence, did not deter the public’s appetite for sensation – indeed, it may have enhanced it. The debates surrounding the sensation novel provide important insights into the contemporary reception of the genre. Many of the issues they highlight remain pertinent to recent critical discussions of the form, including the role of women (as readers and writers), the representation of female characters, and the breaching of class b oundaries. The chapters that follow examine the legacy of these debates through the exploration of these issues in more recent critical discourses. However, arguably the greatest legacy of the sensation debates is the contribution they made to the notion of these texts as a distinct and coherent genre – their role in the formation of the genre itself. The next chapter considers some of the critical responses to questions of genre which have emerged as part of the developing critical interest in the form.