Railway Fiction or Seaside Sensation? Journeys to the Sea in Lady Audley's Secret and No Name

Abstract

Railway Fiction or Seaside Sensation?Journeys to the Sea in Lady Audley's Secret and No Name Carolyn W. De La L. Oulton (bio) Reading on the Rails If the seasoned traveller of the 1860s knew (long before Oscar Wilde's Gwendolen) the value of having "something sensational to read in the train" (The Importance of Being Earnest 40), the very act of reading could itself be sensationalized in the context of "rail travel as a time out from normal constraints" (Bailey 11). But while the now familiar image of sensational "railway fiction" is a powerful one in itself, it implies an important question that has attracted surprisingly little critical attention—where are all these readers going and are they likely to continue with the books that they have started (or at least taken with them) on the train? The link between the major circulating libraries such as Mudie's, the innovative W. H. Smith's railway bookstalls, and the success of 1860s sensation fiction is well established. But positioning the railway experience as a transitional or mid-point, and not necessarily as a defining context for the reading of sensation fiction, uncovers a second determinant in the writing and consumption of these novels: the Victorian seaside holiday. At a time when resorts were still catering to a significantly large number of invalids, the question of what and how visitors were reading was both vital and controversial. At the very least an over-indulgence in the latest novel could interfere with the health cure, as popular medical author Spencer Thomson explained: "one man goes to the sea-side, and lolls on the beach, or in the reading-room, and takes it easy, but gets half measure of the new air; whilst another exercising himself gets double measure and double good" (14). Possibly inappropriate reading forms a crucial link between travel and the seaside resort itself, but one that is largely predicated on a discourse of nervous debility in which the sea air was [End Page 232] prescribed as a restorative while "reading implied a transmissibility of emotions from text to reader that paralleled medical and psychological discussions of suggestibility" (Vrettos 97). In Kelly Mays's analysis, "While reading habits resembled the automatic motions of the machine, they were also and more consistently described with reference to bodily ingestion—eating, drinking, and drug-taking" (172). This threat to bodily integrity was of course exacerbated in the case of women, with reading appearing "as a topic within the literature of hysteria" (Flint 58). But despite concerns about the impact of sensation fiction on women in particular, periodicals of the time routinely advertised the latest titles to the seaside holiday market. Two major novels of 1862, Mary Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret and Wilkie Collins's No Name, provide a test case for this difficult relationship. The increasing tendency from the 1860s to use "railway reading" and "seaside reading" as interchangeable terms has been largely overlooked in studies of the sensation genre and its contribution to debates about gendered reading. But Lady Audley's Secret and No Name use the trope of the coastal resort as a means of exploring affective responses in the context of wider debates surrounding physical and moral health and the proper function of the seaside holiday. Both writers insistently portray the sea as both sinister and overtly sexual, in what amounts to a deliberate assault on the nerves. In a strategic move these novels engage directly with the debate on the ill effects of sensation fiction. Both include seaside settings in the context of women's health, flagrantly playing to the preoccupations of female readers. But far from claiming that sensation fiction is beneficial to readers, these novels internalize the concerns widely expressed by critics, welding images of reading itself to themes of debility and breakdown between the railway and the coast. It has become almost a cliché that the types of fiction read on the train are mirrored by anxieties about rail travel itself. The organization of the journey may have, in Jonathon Grossman's phrase, "standardized time and space" (9), but it could not standardize social behavior. If travellers "found themselves in a fluid environment...