WHAT WAS SENSATIONAL ABOUT THE SENSATION NOVEL?

In 1863, in the pages of the Quarterly Review (a heavyweight organ of conservative opinion) Henry Mansel, then Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford and later Dean of St Paul's, launched a fierce critical and moral attack on a species of fiction which was just then enjoying considerable success. The literary phenomenon about which Mansel wrote – in both sorrow and anger – was the sensation novel, which, he claimed: ‘must be recognised as a great fact in the literature of the day, and a fact whose significance is by no means of an agreeable kind’. Nearly one hundred and twenty years later Patrick Brantlinger described the sensation novel as ‘a minor subgenre of British fiction that flourished in the 1860s only to die out a decade or two later’.

A ‘great fact’ in the literature of its day? A ‘disagreeable’ sign of its times? An ephemeral, minor subgenre? What was the sensation novel? Why did it come to dominate the literary scene for a time in the 1860s? What did it signify? What, if anything, does it have to offer to twenty-first-century readers of novels, students of fiction and students of Victorian culture? These are some of the questions which this book seeks to address.

The 1860s was a decade of sensational events and sensational writing. It was the age of “‘sensational ‘’ advertisements, products, journals, crimes, and scandals’, and of sensational ‘poetry, art, auction sales, sport, popular science, diplomacy and preaching’. The 1860s was also, pre-eminently, the age of the sensational theatre, most notably the stylized dramatic tableaux, heightened emotions and extraordinary incidents of melodrama. As Michael Booth has so amply demonstrated, in Victorian Spectacular Theatre, 1850–1910 (1981), this was an age of increasingly spectacular ‘special effects’, involving dioramas, panoramas, elaborate lighting systems and machinery of all kinds. Theatrical illusion and Victorian machine culture combined in a new technology of representation. In short, this decade was a moment of consolidation in the ‘era of the spectacle’ – inaugurated by the French Revolution, and consolidated by the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the International Exhibition of 1862 – in which the ‘mode of amplification and excess’ became ‘a mode of producing the material world’.