‘Mad To-day and Sane To-morrow’: The Sensation Novel and the Asylum

Abstract

Like The Woman in White, Collins’s Armadale and Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret contrive both to evoke Gothicism and to keep a distance from it. In Armadale, Mother Oldershaw, the confidante and accomplice of the rogue-heroine, Lydia Gwilt, assumes the name of Mandeville, a pseudonym evoking various preceding Mandevilles, actual or fictional or a mixture of the two. There is the ostensible fourteenth-century traveller and author, Sir John Mandeville, with — as The Oxford Companion to English Literature remarks — his propensity for ‘romance and marvels, such as the fountain of youth and ant-hills of gold dust’. Mandeville was the eponymous, misanthropic hero of a novel by William Godwin which Thomas Love Peacock satirised in Nightmare Abbey. Less fantastically, Bernard de Mandeville was the name of the early eighteenth-century economist who had driven a wedge through what was to become Victorian orthodoxy by postulating alternative courses of life for men — altruistic virtue or worldly prosperity — and insisting that they were strictly alternatives. Oldershaw prefers to lay stress on the more sonorous resonances which she finds in the name: ‘I am quite in love already with my romantic name; it sounds almost as pretty as Mrs Armadale of Thorpe-Ambrose, doesn’t it?’1 In her views and behaviour, however, she defers to the social philosophy of Bernard de Mandeville, author of The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Public Benefits.KeywordsMoral PanicBlack BandMoral UniverseMoral TreatmentBeautiful ObjectThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.