SENSATIONALISM IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY FICTION

Just as the phenomenon of sensationalism existed before the term entered general usage in the 1860s, sensation conventions and plots continued their existence long after the sensation boom of the 1860s had passed. The tentacles of sensationalism spread widely into many different kinds of fiction in the mid- Victorian period, extending their reach into a number of fictional developments at the end of the century. Whether or not they were labelled as sensation novelists, most novelists of the 1850s and 1860s – and beyond – worked with the same complex multiple plots as the sensation novelists and, like them, engaged in the process of defining, reworking and redefining realism. They were also concerned with similar issues: class, social change, sex, money, family, morals, manners and marriage and its alternatives. In short, sensation plots, sensation types, sensation themes, and sensation machinery were integral parts of the storehouse of conventions from which all Victorian novelists drew.

The appropriation and revision of melodrama which was such a significant feature of sensation fiction was also undertaken by numerous other nineteenth-century novelists from Dickens to Hardy. Indeed, several nineteenth-century reviewers and critics regarded Dickens as the founder of the ‘sensation school’. Certainly Dickens shared the sensation novelists’ interest in crime and criminals, and novels such as Dombey and Son (1846–8) and Bleak House (1852–3) anticipated the sensation novel 's concern with women with secret, problematic marriages, adultery and irregular sexual liaisons. In Bleak House Dickens also made use of the detective as the hunter out of the secrets of women and the family and the evils of society. Great Expectations, which was reviewed alongside The Woman in White, has many sensation elements, including white collar crime and men and women with secret histories. Moreover, like many sensation novels, it contrives to suggest that respectable society both conceals and is supported by a dark, criminal under-life. Like Collins, Braddon and Wood, Dickens is what Peter Brooks calls a ‘social melodramatist’. His is a serious reworking of the forms of melodrama, which strives ‘to articulate, to demonstrate, to “prove” the existence of a moral universe which, though put into question, masked by villainy and perversions of judgement, does exist’