Taxonomies of Stimulation: Science, Gender and Sexuality in the Sensation Novel Debate

Abstract

The sensation novel is a curious phenomenon of the Victorian press. No single author pioneered a new sensational form of novel writing and no group of authors planned a sensational assault on the domestic novel. Rather, the authors grouped under the term ‘sensation novelists’ were united by a large number of reviews that placed them within this category. Wilkie Collins, Mary Braddon, Mrs Henry Wood and Rhoda Broughton are the authors most commonly designated as sensation novelists across the 1860s, the sensation decade. Many others, such as Charles Dickens, Charles Reade, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Caroline Norton, Catherine Crowe and Ouida, were occasionally cited as sensation novelists, but these authors were also frequently associated with a variety of other genres. Works termed sensational were also disparate in terms of style and content. Collins’s The Woman in White, which for Margaret Oliphant was the ultimate representation of sensationalism, has little in common with either the domesticity of Wood’s East Lynne (1860–61) or the interest in female villainy in Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1861). Dickens’s disturbingly cold female heroine-victims hold little in common with the heated intensity of passion experienced by Broughton’s rebellious heroines. Inclusion within the category may therefore appear to materialize at random, but reviewers did see a common element across these texts: a penchant for inspiring physical excitement in the reader.1 Sensation novel reading depended on bodily responses, often at the expense of higher, more intellectual stimulation according to some reviewers.