Sensation Novels Research Articles

The Boy Detective in Early British Children’s Literature: Patrolling the Borders between Boyhood and Manhood, by Lucy Andrew

Reviewed by: The Boy Detective in Early British Children’s Literature: Patrolling the Borders between Boyhood and Manhood by Lucy Andrew Caroline Reitz (bio) The Boy Detective in Early British Children’s Literature: Patrolling the Borders between Boyhood and Manhood, by Lucy Andrew; pp. ix + 243. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, £86.41, $109.99. Detective fiction fans might recall Gooseberry, the boy detective who tantalizingly appears in a single chapter of Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868). We all know about Sherlock Holmes’s Baker Street Irregulars, and children today are still reading some of the juvenile series detectives who appeared in the early-to-mid twentieth century, such as Enid Blyton’s child investigative groups (the Famous Five, Secret Seven, and the Five Find-Outers) or the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. But there is clearly a lot more to it, as Lucy Andrew demonstrates in her diligently researched and clearly argued The Boy Detective in Early British Children’s Literature: Patrolling the Borders between Boyhood and Manhood. Focused on a subgenre of detective fiction, it is also an intervention in the fields of children’s literature and periodical studies. Andrew covers a dizzying array of texts, illustrating both the promise and challenges of working in periodical studies and keeping before the reader seemingly countless stories by multiple authors in many periodicals featuring a range of boy sleuths. Andrew additionally weaves in important social context such as changing ideas about education, child labor, public health, and adolescence from the second half of the nineteenth century through World War I. The story begins with the familiar worry about what newly literate people are reading. If critics in the 1860s feared the effects of sensation novels on female readers, publishers worried about the increasing appetite for the criminal-centric penny dreadful on the part of young male readers, increasingly able to read and purchase story papers. A “potentially delinquent boy audience,” Andrew explains, “was perceived to be in need of discipline and guidance in order to suppress undesirable characteristics” (9). Enter Ernest Keen, the morally upright and proudly British hero of the anonymously authored serial The Boy Detective; or, the Crimes of London. A Romance of Modern Times (1865–66). Detection was a relatively new profession for adult men in England during this period, so it is interesting that the boy detective makes his entrance. Andrew also notes that around this time two novels focused on female detectives appeared, Andrew Forrester’s The Female Detective (1864) and Revelations of a Lady Detective (1864), attributed to William Stephens Hayward. Such timing raises an interesting question about whether the genre, traditionally associated with realism, actually had its first stirrings in fantasy. Andrew’s reading of Keen in chapter 2 is as a fantasy of moral policing, a figure who facilitates a proper movement from boyhood to adulthood. Originally from the middle class, he gets into the detective business, as does many a sleuth, to investigate the murder of his father. But Ernest “is committed to public justice over personal vengeance” (24). As we later see in Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, the “text’s role extends beyond suppressing vice to actively encouraging virtue” (28). Andrew argues, however, that these stories promote “middle-class behavior,” not “social mobility,” so the boy detective here “reinforces class boundaries” even as he tries to glamorize law and order (29). Society is not ready, it seems, for the tensions that resulted from a boy detective who is “socially superior and generationally inferior to the law enforcement system alongside which he works” (38). And so the boy detective disappears for about thirty years. Chapter [End Page 702] 3 picks up his trail again as Holmes’s popularity in The Strand Magazine inaugurates a world of countless detectives, some with boy assistants. The Harmsworth Brothers’ half-penny story papers (which would become the Amalgamated Press) featured detective Sexton Blake, with his Chinese boy-helper We-wee, and Nelson Lee with Nipper. These teams made their debut in the Halfpenny Marvel between 1893 and 1894, and journals like this, as well as Pluck and The Union Jack, were cheaper than the more supposedly respectable and expensive The...

Creating character: Theories of nature and nurture in Victorian sensation fiction, by Helena Ifill

Reviewed by: Creating character: Theories of nature and nurture in Victorian sensation fiction by Helena Ifill Tara MacDonald (bio) Creating character: Theories of nature and nurture in Victorian sensation fiction, by Helena Ifill; pp. viii + 232. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018, £80.00, $120.00. In Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1861–62), Lucy Audley claims that the "hereditary taint" in her blood caused her to cross "that invisible line which separates reason from madness" (edited by Lyn Pykett [Oxford World's Classics, 2012], 300, 301). Yet the doctor who sees her says, notoriously, that she is not mad but dangerous. Can Lucy's desperate actions be explained by heredity or simply by her impoverished circumstances? In Creating character: Theories of nature and nurture in Victorian sensation fiction, Helena Ifill argues that sensation novelists were deeply invested in such questions. These writers, specifically Braddon and Wilkie Collins, were not merely interested in portraying good or evil characters but, rather, in detailing how characters came to be good or evil. This is a key way, Ifill suggests, in which sensation novels depart from melodrama: instead of simply being a villain, a character like Mannion in Collins's Basil (1852) might instead be diagnosed as a "dangerous monomaniac" (Collins qtd. in Ifill 35). Ifill demonstrates the ways in which Braddon and Collins were developing arguments about determinism and the influence of biological inheritance at the same time that a range of scientists and psychologists were. One of the more innovative aspects of her argument is that she places these discussions within the context of theories about degeneration and eugenics. While acknowledging that eugenic ideas were especially dominant in the 1890s, the book demonstrates the ways in which they emerged in the 1860s via notions of undesirable hereditary influences. The introduction devotes some space to defining sensation fiction as a genre distinct from realism, a topic to which later chapters might have returned. Ifill notes that [End Page 473] determinism has typically been linked to realism, specifically to the work of George Eliot (and we might add Thomas Hardy here, too). Yet she persuasively notes that sensation novels are attentive to the impact of irrepressible, external forces on characters' development. She claims that "sensation fiction's emphasis on plot can be interpreted as considering the human condition in a manner that acknowledges that a combination of internal and external pressures drive the individual through life, often precluding the possibility of truly independent action" (8). This is a persuasive point, and she notes further that degenerationist thinking and sensational plotting are linked in that every small action or weakness has great meaning. These ways of thinking about sensational plotting will be useful to critics working on the genre, especially since sensation fiction was (and perhaps still is) often thought to subordinate character to plot. Given the use of the term character in the book's title, it would have been helpful to hear more about the ways in which she sees Braddon and Collins as crafting ideas about literary character: did they understand character differently from Eliot or, say, Charles Dickens? Braddon's and Collins's letters and Collins's prefaces would have been potential resources here. The book is divided into three sections: part 1 discusses monomania as an exploration of the limits of free will, part 2 discusses biological inheritance, and part 3 departs somewhat to focus on education and environmental influences. Each section includes one chapter on Braddon and one on Collins. While the prodigious output of both authors means that Ifill has more than enough material to choose from, she could be more explicit about why the book focuses only on these two sensation writers. Ellen Wood's St. Martin's Eve (1866) is briefly mentioned, and indeed that novel, as well as others by Wood, is invested in upper-class degeneration, as well as the impact of possible hereditary madness. Throughout each section there are frequent quotations from Victorian doctors and philosophers like William Carpenter. In this way, Ifill follows in the footsteps of scholars who have been attentive to crossovers between psychological and scientific writing and sensation novels, such as Jenny Bourne Taylor and Laurie...

Incorporeal and Inspected: Aristocratic Female Bodies and the Gaze in the Works of Mrs Henry Wood

ABSTRACT This article posits that sensation novelist Mrs Henry Wood, despite her complex representations of gender and class, articulated a proto-feminist stance through many of her works through the trope of the disembodied aristocratic female. Wood represents the impossible, contradictory spaces that women in general are supposed to occupy by using the high visibility of aristocratic female characters as a magnifying glass for gender norms. Wood sees aristocratic women as doubly trapped by patriarchal structures as these women attempt the paradoxical “public vs. private” and “viewed vs. intangible” demands placed on them by their gender and class statuses. By representing all women, but especially upper-class women, as constantly seen but lacking corporeal forms (especially in comparison to the highly embodied male characters in her texts), Wood stresses the tension between conflicting ideologies of conventional femininity in the Victorian period.

The “Ambiguous Sex”: Cross-dressing heroines in Sensation and New Woman fiction

As exemplified by Louisa May Alcott’s “Behind a Mask” (1866), Sensation fiction is a genre preoccupied with questioning notions of Victorian femininity. However, while heroines like Jean Muir have the power to use their feminine identity to suit their own intentions, other Sensation novels, including Albert Eubule Evans’ Revealed at Last (1873), challenge assumptions regarding the inherent binary of gender through their use of cross-dressing heroines. Anticipated by Evans’ portrayal of his cross-dressing heroine, New Woman novels such as Lady Florence Dixie’s Gloriana; or, the Revolution of 1900 (1890) and George Moore’s “Albert Nobbs” (1927) also contested the contemporary conviction that gender was inseparable from anatomical sex, and that masculinity and femininity were two distinct categories. However, unlike Evans’ novel where the ability to alter one’s gender is based on a performance of masculinity, Dixie and Moore suggest that masculinity is biologically inherent in women. By focusing on the figure of the cross-dresser in Florence Marryat’s Her Father’s Name (1876) and Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893), this essay challenges twentieth-century mis-readings of nineteenth-century gender theory, specifically the two-sex model Thomas Laqueur in Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990) identifies as holding precedence in the Victorian period. This essay argues that Laqueur disregards the forward-thinking narratives of Sensation and New Woman fiction in which ideas about women and gender are radically challenged.

Creating Character: Theories of Nature and Nurture in Victorian Sensation Fiction by Helena Ifill

Reviewed by: Creating Character: Theories of Nature and Nurture in Victorian Sensation Fiction by Helena Ifill Ashton Foley-Schramm (bio) Helena Ifill, Creating Character: Theories of Nature and Nurture in Victorian Sensation Fiction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), pp. viii + 229, £75/ $110 hardcover. Helena Ifill's Creating Character: Theories of Nature and Nurture in Victorian Sensation Fiction analyzes the works of popular sensation authors Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon in relation to contemporaneous ideals of identity formation. Focusing on texts from the 1860s and 1870s, Ifill demonstrates how these authors employed an evolving understanding of determinism to highlight the complexity of character formation in sensation fiction, a previously underappreciated aspect of these novels. Unlike realist fiction, or "novels of character," sensation novels were often viewed as "novels of circumstance" (6). Such texts seemingly value plot above providing characters with "psychologically nuanced personalities embedded in detailed social networks" (6). However, Ifill argues that Collins and Braddon carefully crafted their characters by employing determinism, or the belief that personality and character are formed (to varying extents) through forces outside the individual. Furthermore, this deterministic approach to character overlaps with ideas about religion, morality, free will, self-control, criminality, education, insanity, and heredity in the works Ifill analyzes. Creating Character is organized thematically, and part one (comprising the first two chapters) grapples with issues of self-control, will-power, and monomania. Ifill draws on medical discourse about monomania and moral insanity, including sources from several periodicals, to analyze Basil's (1852) titular character and Robert Mannion. Although the novel never directly classifies Basil or Mannion in these terms, Ifill argues that Collins's readers would recognize delusional symptoms as clear markers of these diseases. This chapter questions the extent to which Mannion is responsible for his actions because his type of mental deterioration was generally understood as manifesting in individuals with a hereditary "constitutional predisposition" to insanity (41). Similarly, in No Name (1862), Magdalen Vanstone suffers from monomania. However, Collins depicts her inner moral struggle through her outward actions, showing how Magdalen works to overpower her drive for revenge through will-power and self-control. Ifill draws on Sally Shuttleworth's observation that many women in sensation fiction "suffer from insurmountable hereditary insanity" to highlight the uniqueness of Magdalen's situation (59). She suffers from a "'masculine' form of insanity" and is able to "regain the ranks of respectability" by overcoming it (59–60). Both Basil and No Name, Ifill argues, show Collins raising "the same ethical and social dilemmas concerning personal responsibility and the assignment of blame as those debated in [End Page 207] medical and popular works on the subject" while depicting characters that demonstrate an individual need for self-control and will-power (63). John Marchmont's Legacy (1863), rather than focusing on an inciting incident that causes monomania, explores how daily external factors test a person's internal character. In this novel, Braddon also engages directly with ideals of womanhood and femininity, showing the consequences for an individual woman who does not fit these aspirations. Ifill reads Olivia Marchmont as a character stuck between contradictions. Despite these complications, Ifill agrees with other scholars who argue that Braddon ultimately upholds patriarchal ideals because depicting Olivia as insane minimizes her threat to the patriarchy. As Ifill points out, Olivia's repression of her natural instincts leads to her mental breakdown. Mary Marchmont and Belinda Lawford, identified as the two heroines of the novel, offer alternative models of ideal women. Both Mary and Belinda use their womanliness and femininity to serve those around them. By interpreting the three women through the lens of Herbert Spencer's social Darwinism, Ifill shows how their characterization is influenced by theories of heredity and how upbringing and daily life influence procreation. Part two focuses on heredity and degeneration as seen in Braddon's The Lady Lisle (1862) and Collins's Armadale (1866). Braddon and Collins both examine education and upbringing as ways of developing or negating inherited traits. Ifill points out that Braddon's careful selection of ideas in The Lady Lisle leads to "a class-inflected engagement with several issues that relate to character formation, including the perceived degeneration of the upper and...

“I Wrote Them All”: Forgery and Forms of Classification in Trollope’s Orley Farm

“I Wrote Them All”: Forgery and Forms of Classification in Trollope’s Orley Farm Katherine Gilbert (bio) Anthony trollope’s Orley Farm (1862) depicts the consequences of a forgery undertaken in the dead of night by Lady Mason, the second wife and widow of Sir Joseph Mason. In the opening pages, we learn that immediately after Sir Joseph’s death twenty years before, his first-born son by an earlier marriage, also named Joseph, unsuccessfully contested his father’s will. He did so because an unexpected codicil, one secretly forged by Lady Mason, left Orley Farm to Sir Joseph’s younger son with Lady Mason, Lucius. Orley Farm opens just as Lady Mason’s two-decade cover-up is beginning to receive renewed scrutiny. With the emergence of new evidence that undermines the legitimacy of her original testimony, Lady Mason is eventually to be put on trial for perjury. What underlies this charge is the suspicion that Lady Mason forged the codicil and then maintained her deceit for twenty years. In the end she is cleared of all charges, but Lady Mason is, in fact, guilty of both forgery and perjury. A transgressive woman, a forged will and codicil, perjury, and an old secret on the verge of exposure: Orley Farm has all the makings of a sensational plot. Published in the same moment as Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860) and No Name (1862), Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861), and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), Orley Farm shares many of the features of sensation fiction, and we might expect reviewers of Orley Farm to have expressed surprise at Trollope’s foray into the popular 1860s genre. Yet early reviewers of Orley Farm refused to deviate from descriptions of Trollope’s work as consummately realist; instead, the reviews discuss Orley Farm as another novel that carefully portrays the quotidian in the lives of characters whom readers might recognize as neighbours. These early reviews draw distinct borders around Trollope as a realist and allude to sensation fiction only to insist that Orley Farm does not belong in that category. The Spectator claims that Trollope writes “with the manner of a distinct witness who wishes to give the most perspicuous evidence.” The characters feel so familiar that readers may have to remind themselves that they “are the creatures of Mr. Trollope’s imagination and not the mere objects of his observing eye” (147). An essay in the London Review makes similar claims. [End Page 307] Referencing the supposed effects of sensation fiction, the reviewer writes that when reading Orley Farm, “no one” will be “wrought up to any high pitch of feeling; no enthusiastic young lady will sit up shivering through the livelong night over Mr. Trollope’s pages.” Instead, Orley Farm “derives its main attractiveness from its close and studied similarity to the domestic life of the nineteenth century” (153). Finally, a review in the National Magazine suggests that while Orley Farm had the potential to cross genres into sensation fiction, it does not: Lady Mason, “a lady forger, and a perjurer to boot, is a character which might well become a ‘sensational’ feature in other hands; but the author, who disdains all clap-trap or stage trickery” avoids such pitfalls (164). Such reviews remind us of the stakes in literary classification. Sensation fiction was often written by and for women. It was considered dangerous because of its depictions of women characters who, like Lady Mason, reject legal authority, challenge social traditions, and often do so while pretending to be someone they are not. In opposition to realism, sensation fiction was decried as “clap-trap,” a lesser genre that employs “trickery” and corrupts easily excited readers. Reviewers drew a firm border between sensation novelists and Trollope, and rejected the possibility of genre crossing in Orley Farm. While reviewers policed genre boundaries to claim Orley Farm as realist, critics of sensation fiction were also unsettled by the genre because of its tendency to challenge classifications altogether. Patrick Brantlinger notes that “[s]ensation fiction emerged in the midst of controversies about gender, class, and race” and that early critics identified novels as sensational in part...

Serialization, Illustration, and the Art of Sensation

This essay explores the multiple intersections between text and image in the illustrated serial editions of Lady Audley's Secret (London Journal, 1863) and The Woman in White (Harper's Weekly, 1859–60). It argues the illustrations connect to political articles, biographical profiles, and the images accompanying other fiction serials. These lateral connections relate the text to current events, underscore the importance of some characters over others, and, most importantly, enhance the emotional resonance of texts and images. Ultimately, they reveal the reading of serialized sensation novels as a participatory process, where meaning and emotion are expanded through iterative and contextual readings.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon’un Lady Audley’nın Sırrı Başlıklı Romanında Feminist Çelişki

1860ların sansasyonel romanları, alışılmadık ve sıradışı kadın karakterleri nedeniyle yazıldıkları dönemde hararetli tartışmaların çıkmasına neden olmuştur. Çünkü, bu romanlar daha çok kadın okur kitlesine hitap etmiş ve zina yapan, iki eşli ya da bir şekilde suça bulaşmış kadın karakterlerin kadın okurlar üzerindeki olası etkileri edebi çevreleri endişelendirmiştir. Öte yandan, yirminci yüzyıl feminist edebi eleştirmenler bu olağandışı ve tartışmalı kadın temsiliyetini feminist uyanışın dönem edebiyatındaki yansıması olarak yorumlama eğilimi göstermişlerdir. Fakat, bunun tam tersi yaklaşımlardan bahsetmek de mümkün. Örneğin, cinsel, sosyal ve kültürel normların dışına çıkan kadın karakterlerin romanlarda cezalandırıldığı ve disipline edildiğine vurgu yapan farklı okumalar de bulunmaktadır. Bu çalışmanın yaklaşımı ikinci görüşe daha yakındır. Bu makale anlatılardaki feminist içeriğin aslında anti-feminist bir bakış açısı ile ele alındığına vurgu yapmayı amaçlar. Bunun için sansasyonel roman türünün en iyi örneklerinden kabul edilen Mary Elizabeth Braddon’ın Lady Audley’nin Sırrı (1862) başlıklı romanının detaylı okuması sunulacaktır.

“DREAMING TRUE”: EMBODIED MEMORY, TRANSUBJECTIVITY, AND NOVELTY IN GEORGE DU MAURIER'SPETER IBBETSON

InConfessions of an EnglishOpium Eater(1821), Thomas De Quincey famously describes the mind as a palimpsest upon which inscribed memories are never truly lost to the passage of time. These memories, especially of childhood, lurk under the conscious surface of the mind, waiting to be rediscovered during intervals of intensified desultory memory that are made possible for De Quincey by opium-induced dreaming. Opium is utilized during these dreams as a perception-altering technology; memories of childhood are not only recalled while under the influence of the drug, but are revivified in a way that extends beyond the dreamer's normal mental capacity. The formulation of dreaming as a state in which memories buried under the palimpsest of time were retrieved and “relived” was important to a wide array of philosophers, medical doctors, and psychologists over the course of the long nineteenth century, culminating in Freud's seminalThe Interpretation of Dreamsin 1899. Alongside the theorization of ‘dream science’ in psychological and medical contexts, the Victorian literati provided their own contributions in both sensation novels and realist fiction. Reciprocally, as has been discussed in much recent work within Victorian studies, well-known characters and scenes from contemporary literature were often used to illustrate dream theories, neurological conditions, and philosophical conceptions of the self in scholarly journals and medical textbooks. The most fantastical literary treatment of dream space as a wholly separate realm within which the dreaming subject can fully recover and even surpass the sensations associated with earlier memories occurs in George Du Maurier's oft-overlookedPeter Ibbetson(1891). Over the course of the novel, the titular narrator reveals (inconsistently and in sometimes contradictory ways) dream space to be a world in which the habitual reliving of childhood events is an endlessly satisfying, novel, and strangely embodied experience for the protagonist and his lover, while also possessing connections to human evolutionary precursors and the afterlife. InPeter Ibbetson, habit is not the deadening enemy of novelty and experience that is so often portrayed in contemporary interpretations of Victorian literature. Rather, habit qua the mental technology of “dreaming true,” a form of intense, consciously-directed dreaming practiced by the novel's central characters, is paradoxically portrayed as a method by which the freshness of sensation associated with an original event can be endlessly recreated and even surpassed within a dream of that event. Contrary to twenty-first century depictions of dreams as events that help the subject to become habituated to emotional stresses, Du Maurier presents dreaming true as a practice that intensifies rather than inures the dreaming subject's emotional relationship to vivid or traumatic childhood events (Hartmann 2). Inherent in this reading is a radical formulation of the relationship between habit and novelty as understood in the late Victorian novel, revealing the generative power of habit that is disclosed within dream space.

Danger and Vulnerability in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Crash and Burn by Jennifer Travis

Reviewed by: Danger and Vulnerability in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Crash and Burn by Jennifer Travis Daniel Mrozowski (bio) Danger and Vulnerability in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Crash and Burn, by Jennifer Travis. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018. xii + 174 pp. Cloth, $90.00; Ebook, $85.50. Jennifer Travis's resonant study of vulnerability in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature analyzes how writers have confronted the complex cultural and psychological realities of endangerment. Travis persuasively links seemingly disparate texts from the likes of E. D. E. N. Southworth and Stephen Crane through a "shared idiom" responding to environmental disasters and industrial accidents, drawn from the kind of economic, ethical, legal and scientific grammars familiar to scholars of naturalism (32). In the hands of writers like Theodore Dreiser and Kate Chopin, this "shared idiom" revised notions of injury, suffering, and victimhood. Against the kind of anti-community visions of earlier works like James Fenimore Cooper's The Crater (1847), Travis proposes that a notion of universal vulnerability, dramatized by literary texts of the era, challenged "hegemonic notions of individual autonomy, white masculine citizenship, and sovereign political agency" (3) as well as "cultural fantasies of control, self-reliance, and security" (7). Even as our own twenty-first-century forms of endangerment—the spectacular eruptions of gun violence, the inexorable wake of the Great Recession, the inevitability of massive storms—haunt these pages, Travis articulates how writers like Mary Austin and Jack London imagined the experiences of vulnerability in ways that "mobilized toward empathy, compassion, community, and social change" (9). To this end, the book is more exploratory than encyclopedic. Each chapter engages with a form of endangerment, like railroad collisions or earthquakes, that prompted a wellspring of writing, including literature, journalism, insurance reports, conduct manuals, and legal proceedings. Travis finds common analytical cause with a range of contemporary discourses, from feminist legal theory to disaster studies to ecocriticism. The book's animating principle—calling for a subtler attention to vulnerability as a felt, expressed and represented condition—is perhaps its most innervating contribution, as Travis charts a cultural shift from "privileged inviolability to universal vulnerability" (32). [End Page 106] The strong first chapter, "A 'damsel-errant in quest of adventures': E. D. E. N. Southworth, Sensation and the Law," considers Southworth's sensation novels, The Hidden Hand and Ishmael, as her female characters negotiate accidents within the rubric of a tort law typically in place to mitigate the realities of their injuries. Through particularly deft readings of the courtroom scenes, Travis asserts that Southworth "embraces human interdependence and fragility not as weakness or powerlessness but as a condition of modern personhood" (36). In Chapter 2, "Crash Lit: Trains, Pains, and Automobiles," Travis examines the cultural meanings of vulnerability and victimhood through what she calls "crash lit": texts that imagine mechanized collisions in order to provoke "a wider recognition of social injuries" (46). Through tropes of speed, energy and chaos intrinsic to modern transport, stories like Harriet Spofford's "The Black Bess" and Rebecca Harding Davis's "Anne," as well as Eleanor Porter's popular Pollyanna series, reveled in modern accidents as sites of personal and social identity formation, especially for marginalized characters. In Chapter 3, "'Hurts That Will Not Heal': Theodore Dreiser, Masculinity, and Railroad Labor," Travis shifts the focus to the traumatic wounds that seem to transcend broken male bodies in industrial capitalism. Regarding his early career as a journalist recounting his own struggles with loss and rehabilitation, Travis suggests that Theodore Dreiser reconfigured the stigmas of masculine trauma in ways that staked new claims of cultural authority by embracing rather than effacing psychic wounds in his unfinished memoir An Amateur Laborer and short narratives like "The Mighty Rourke" from Twelve Men. For Travis, Dreiser exemplifies the ways men in the post-Civil War era often "embraced injury's presence" and "expressions of vulnerability as constitutive of masculinity itself" (71). The attention to gendered questions of mobility, bodily autonomy, and emotional life prompted by industrialized and mechanized danger helps the first three chapters hang together with a rich coherence. Though the final two chapters are not as explicitly connected, Travis suggests how the "shared idiom" of vulnerability and...

An Empire of Print: The New York Publishing Trade in the Early American Republic by Steven Carl Smith

Reviewed by: An Empire of Print: The New York Publishing Trade in the Early American Republic by Steven Carl Smith Thomas Augst (bio) An Empire of Print: The New York Publishing Trade in the Early American Republic steven carl smith University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017 244 pp. The United States saw a dramatic expansion of printing in the 1830s, ushered in by changes in technology and improvements in transportation. The building of the Erie Canal opened new transportation routes to the interior that would consolidate New York's dominance of a publishing business being radically transformed by industrialization. Mechanization came to the production of paper, simplifying the process and significantly lowering cost. The cylindrical steam press, which first appeared in the United States at the New York Daily Advertiser in 1825, would exponentially increase the speed and quantity of printing, while the introduction of stereotyped plates would radically disrupt the costly and slow process of setting type. Such changes would produce by the 1830s and 1840s a national market that offered readers access to diverse and inexpensive penny papers, tracts, sensation novels, and much else. As Steven Carl Smith argues in his new book on the New York print trade in early America, as the publishing business developed, a number of individuals in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries created a national print market well before the emergence of a modern publishing industry. Through five case studies of individuals who built the city's print trade amid the economic and political upheavals of the Revolution and the early national period, An Empire of Print explores the "gradual development of local, regional, and national distribution networks" through which an American book trade delivered books "to the masses" (2, 3). Relying primarily on financial records, business correspondence, and newspapers, Smith seeks to better understand the political values and economic [End Page 977] motives of entrepreneurs who "coordinated the financing, and dissemination of Print in the Early Republic, evolving well beyond their traditional roles as 'printers' and 'booksellers' into 'publishers' who focused on marketing and distribution while outsourcing the labor of producing a book to local job printers" (3). In shedding new light on trade relationships and business practices of the print trade in New York, this book argues for the city's larger share in a story of early American print typically dominated by Philadelphia and Boston. So too, in the detail its case studies bring to careers in the New York book trade, it illuminates sites of enterprise that flourished through intercity and intrastate networks of commerce and exchange: government printing, the bookshop, literary fairs, and the wholesale book trade. The first chapter follows Samuel Loudon's successes in the print trade during and after the American Revolution. Loudon was a Scottish-born immigrant who opened a short-lived general store in lower Manhattan in 1753, which was followed by a shop for maritime goods in 1857, which evolved into a bookstore in December 1771, selling a variety of books and stationery. Loudon opened the city's second circulating library two years later, catering to a burgeoning literary culture also served by the New York Society Library, founded in 1754. In 1775, without training as a printer's apprentice, Loudon added a printing press, and in 1775 established a newspaper, the New York Packet, with which he would shrewdly navigate a dangerous political landscape. Joining other Manhattan printers who fled British troops, Loudon settled for the duration of war in Fishkill, where the Provincial Congress had decided to meet, only to return to Manhattan in 1783, where he would subsidize his newspaper through advertising and job printing. From 1785 to 1790, he took on with his brother the lucrative state printer's job, which entailed publishing laws and proceedings on short notice, and required him to follow the legislature as it moved to Poughkeepsie, Albany, and back to Manhattan, with equipment, journeymen, and families in tow. Foregrounding archival evidence on business practices, the chapter also details the pricing of advertisements. Subsequent chapters document other pathways into the book trade in post-Revolutionary New York. Chapter 2 examines the publication of a New York edition of William Gordon's...

Conrad’s Popular Fictions: Secret Histories and Sensational Novels by Andrew Glazzard

Conrad’s Popular Fictions: Secret Histories and Sensational Novels by Andrew Glazzard

“THE FASHIONS OF THE CURRENT SEASON”: RECENT CRITICAL WORK ON VICTORIAN SENSATION FICTION

Henry Mansel, writing in 1863, was confident in his prediction that the current popular vogue for sensation novels was an ephemeral phase, soon to pass into a deserved oblivion. Yet by the end of a decade marked by extensive and frequently hysterical debates over the genre, the future Poet Laureate, Alfred Austin, was still bemoaning the ubiquity of sensation fiction: “the world may congratulate itself when the last sensational novel has been written and forgotten” (424). Mansel and Austin would doubtless have been astounded (and appalled) at the current status of mid-Victorian sensation fiction in the realm of academic scholarship. Far from being a long-forgotten, inconsequential moment in literary history, the sensation novels of authors such as Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Wood, and Ouida have prompted a plethora of critical studies, which have impacted on our wider understanding of the dynamics and influences of mid-Victorian literary and publishing practices.

POSSESSING DRESSES: FASHION AND FEMALE COMMUNITY INTHE WOMAN IN WHITE

Margaret Oliphant much preferredThe Woman in White(published serially 1859–1860) toGreat Expectations(published serially 1860–1861). This partiality emerges in a comparative treatment of the texts in her oft-quoted 1862 treatise on sensation fiction, and it rests on the desirability of authors producing thrills using “modest and subtle means” (“Sensation Novels” 569) instead of “by fantastic eccentricities” and “high-strained oddity” (“Sensation Novels” 574). While the existence of an argument against the allegedly regrettable excesses of fantastical narratives will not shock any reader familiar with contemporary criticism of sensation fiction, or, for that matter, Romantic-era novels or Gothic works in general, the primary evidence Oliphant uses to argue her case might come as a surprise. In order to discredit Charles Dickens's ghostly accounts of Miss Havisham's bridal tomb in favor of Wilkie Collins's eerie images of Anne Catherick appearing on a moonlit moor, Margaret Oliphant turns to clothing.

“THESE VERBAL PUZZLES”: WILKIE COLLINS, NEWSPAPER ENIGMAS, AND THE VICTORIAN READER AS SOLVER

In 1861, in a reviewof Wilkie Collins'sThe Woman in White, a critic for theSpectatorcomplained that, “We are threatened with a new variety of the sensation novel … the whole interest of which consists in the gradual unraveling of some carefully prepared enigma” (“The Enigma Novel” 20). He was hardly the only reviewer to use a vocabulary of “puzzlement” or “enigma” when discussing Collins's work. Whether we look to an earlier review ofThe Woman in Whiteto find Collins faulted as “not a great novelist … the fascination which he exercises … [is] that he is a good constructor. Each of his stories is a puzzle, the key to which is not handed to us till the third volume” (Rev. ofThe Woman in White249) – or whether we turn to a critic ofThe Moonstone, who found Collins and his latest production “[un]worthy”: “We are no especial admirers of the department of art to which he has devoted himself, any more than we are of double acrostics or anagrams, or any of the many kinds of puzzles on which it pleases some minds to exercise their ingenuity” (Page, ed. 171–72) – we come up against the fact that Collins's novels, and especially his sensation novels, were sometimes known as “enigma novels” in the Victorian period. We can see too that this was not necessarily intended as a complimentary label. Indeed, though our own contemporary tendency has been to employ this particular moniker in a more neutral, descriptive register – to denote simply some fictions' reliance on mystery – we quickly find that Victorian reviewers were not so dispassionate in their usage. Instead, tracking names like “conundrum novel” or “enigma novel,” and terms like “puzzle,” “enigma,” and even “anagram,” shows that Collins's critics often used such phrases to index some of the same kinds of problems or concerns they more familiarly described with a rhetoric of “sensation.” A short survey suggests that their language of “puzzles” and “enigmas,” like their language of shocks and nerves, expressed disappointment at Collins's tendency to create anticlimaxes (the novel fizzles when the “puzzle” is solved); his emphasis on plot – or “carefully prepared enigma[s]” – over character; and his potential to render readers amoral and passive – patient attendants of solutions (“the key to which is not handed to us”) – rather than creatively engaged thinkers or moral questers. A simple nickname would seem to be a damning label indeed, on fuller survey.

The Sympathy of Suspense: Gaskell and Braddon’s Slow and Fast Sensation Fiction in Family Magazines

In this essay, I argue that the cliff-hanger excitement of sensation fiction may be overstated, and thus we should consider other affective ways that installments could draw readers back to the periodical in which they were published. After analyzing the use of suspense at the end of installments in Gaskell’s A Dark Night’s Work (1863) and Braddon’s Eleanor’s Victory (1863), I contend that sympathy constitutes a large part of the affective experience of reading serialized sensation novels, slowing down the pace of what has been thought of as a very fast genre.

The Trials of Lizzie Eustace: Trollope, Sensationalism, and the Condition of English Law

The Eustace Diamonds was published in 1872. It was the third of Anthony Trollope's famed Palliser series. It represented, however, something of a diversion, telling the story of the ‘cunning’ Lizzie Eustace who declines to return a priceless diamond necklace to the estate of her recently deceased husband. Critics have supposed that The Eustace Diamonds can be read as a contribution to the contemporary genre of ‘sensation’ novels. Sensation novels were full of sex, crime, and scheming young women like Lizzie Eustace. The law should of course have brought to Lizzie to justice. But it does not; indeed it barely tries. For the law in The Eustace Diamonds, as in so many ‘sensation’ novels, is conspicuous only in a failure that is as metaphorical in purpose as it is prosaic.

Chaste Polygamy: Mormon Marriage and the Fantasy of Sexual Privacy in <em>East Lynne</em> and <em>Verner's Pride</em>

Victorian sensation fiction is usually regarded as an indigenous product, circulating a set of anxieties about bigamy, divorce, and remarriage that have been persuasively correlated to important challenges to English marriage law at mid-century. However, this article argues that two sensation novels in particular, Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861) and Verner’s Pride (1863), participate in a much broader conversation about the shifting status of monogamous marriage in Western culture that was animated and inspired by the chaste, scientific, and progressive polygamy offered to Victorian women in Salt Lake City. Wood’s novels, I argue, are instinctively repulsed by the Mormon mission, but experiment with a fantasy of female domestic privacy and sexual autonomy within polygamy that monogamy appears, by contrast, to deny.

Surround, Background, Context: Response

Surround, Background, Context:Response Amy Woodson-Boulton (bio) These essays struck me because of their overlapping concerns with foreground/background, center/surround, and boundaries of several kinds: between disciplines, modes of interpretation, genres, classes, and spaces. Discussing various aspects of late nineteenth-century visual culture, these studies reveal the ways in which, through changing technologies of production and reproduction, photography, painting, and architecture became venues for different historical actors to explore new kinds of identities and to participate in the construction and deconstruction of traditional boundaries of class, gender, and race. In doing so, however, these new forms also created profound anxieties, often expressed in the periodical press in terms of taste or vulgarity (note the etymology of the latter word: from the Latin for the common people). By studying such debates through specific examples, practices, and works, these papers give us a very useful way of understanding the connection between visual form on the one hand and, on the other, the commercial and class contexts of Victorian Britain. New forms of representation, new technologies, and an expanding market allowed for the participation of those previously excluded from visual culture, and this democratization (or vulgarization) provoked cultural elites to react: to attempt to redraw the boundaries of taste, propriety, morality, and decorum, the bywords of class demarcation (Dowling 1–24). Such cultural conflicts were closely connected to debates over political participation in the period of the 1867 and 1885 Reform Acts, which extended the vote to working-class men (and, one might add, to debates over the status of the Empire and [End Page 490] the question of Irish Home Rule, 1886–1914, and over the rights of female citizens, 1867–1919). kate Flint, Rachel Teukolsky, and Samantha Burton, in different ways and through different media, approach visual culture with a profound concern for context as a mode of interpretation, analysis, and understanding. Flint directs our attention to the artificiality and artifice of studio portrait-photography backdrops and the new spaces revealed by flash photography, illuminating for us the constructedness of photographic practice, production, and consumption through distinctions between the surround and the background. Teukolsky considers cartes-de-visite and sensation novels as related forms of a new, highly gendered mass culture that both participated in and helped to create a liberalized and destabilizing marketplace, itself epitomized by the shop windows that displayed the cartes-de-visite of actresses and courtesans next to those of Queen Victoria. Burton examines the relationship between James Tissot’s polished, popular paintings of society subjects and his London conservatory, which was attached to his studio and often formed the background for his suggestive and entertainingly enigmatic productions. Paintings and photographs, these essays argue, produce meaning through the interplay of foreground and background. The act of interpretation continues this interplay, as it illuminates new aspects or areas of images, changes our focus, and extends the “background” to events, meanings, texts, and images outside of the original frame. A further context—acting perhaps as a lens or filter—is that of our own time: visually saturated, fragmented, anxious, and very aware of the extent to which our images and self-presentations are staged and our identities constructed. All three writers delineate context through retracing the implications of certain choices—the exotic plants of Tissot’s conservatory, the ordering of a shop window, the props and backdrops of studio photography—not only for viewers at the time but also for what these works can tell us about the use of representation itself in a culture increasingly defined through mass production, reproduction, and consumption. The essays take us inside images and then pull us outside again to think about how, and by whom, they were made, seen, bought, and sold. What emerges are, for me, fascinating meditations on the consumption of visual culture in nineteenth-century Britain and on the relationship between the nature of such consumption—its class differentials and market pressures—and the forms that such visual [End Page 491] culture assumed. For all three scholars, their chosen images are fraught with anxieties and discontinuities, slippages and erasures, gaps and shadows, even as they purport to reveal all, to be what they seem, and to operate...

Never Great, Only Popular: Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife and The Literary Marketplace

From the time of its initial publication, Mary Elizabeth Braddon's 1864 novel The Doctor's Wife (1) has most frequently been read in relation to Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1856), the plot of which Braddon borrowed for her first serious foray into realist fiction. In terms of style, character, and, for the most part, plot, The Doctor's Wife presents an ostensible departure from the sensation fiction on which Braddon had built her reputation, yet as the Pall Mall Gazette recognized in an 1865 review, the tie to Madame Bovary rather cleverly positioned the novel for success in the literary marketplace: [A] good stroke of business may sometimes be done by taking a clever but improper French novel, omitting the improper incidents or transforming them when they are not hopelessly bad into proper ones, and giving the residuum to the world as an entirely original story. The great advantage of this literary and commercial operation ... lies in the fact that in England the improper original, whatever scandal may say to the contrary, is tolerably sure not to have been read by ladies; and they are the great supporters of novel literature. (4) In his analysis of the commercially-driven motives he assumes were behind Braddon's choice to adapt Flaubert's novel, this reviewer conflates Braddon with Sigismund Smith, her sensation novelist alter-ego within The Doctor's Wife; to Smith, the reviewer attributes the ingenious plan to make money by transforming Flaubert's story for an English audience, while to Braddon, he assigns blame for presenting a corrupting influence to impressionable young ladies through a novel that is superficially 'proper' but altogether unsound (4). The business of novel-writing, the destructive models of behavior fiction provided for women readers, and Braddon's self-representation through Smith are indeed central concerns in The Doctor's Wife, yet these themes work together to quite different ends than the Pall Mall Gazette's reviewer supposes. Braddon's novel certainly resembles Madame Bovary in its use of a romantic heroine who marries a boring country doctor and then engages in an extramarital relationship (albeit an innocent one in Braddon's version of the story) to experience some of the romance she desires in her life, but the two novels are quite different beyond this shared plotline. Reading novels initially feeds Emma Bovary's dreams of a luxurious lifestyle, yet Flaubert shows little interest in chronicling the details of what Emma reads. (2) The Doctor's Wife, on the other hand, is concerned with the specifics of the heroine's reading as well as the business of novel-writing. Unlike Flaubert, Braddon includes references to specific character names and plot points when describing Isabel Gilbert's reading, and she could safely assume that her readers would understand these allusions because she cites only famous, highly-respected authors--Byron, Shelley, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Bulwer-Lytton, Tennyson, and Charlotte Bronte are featured most prominently. Braddon moves even farther away from Madame Bovary through her inclusion of Sigismund Smith, who allows her to engage quite pointedly in the heated debate over sensation fiction at the center of which she found herself because of her wildly successful novels. Braddon's contemporaries were confused by her overt references to sensation fiction in The Doctor's Wife. The Bristol Mercury (in a favorable 1864 review) misinterprets Braddon's characterization of Smith as well as the types of works her heroine reads: To show how much she despises the fame of a mere 'sensation' writer, as against the reputation of an author who regards true artistic development, she introduces, as one of the characters of the book before us, Sigismund Smith, a shining light of that 'raw-head and blood-bones' kind of literature which figures in numerous penny publications, and no small pains are taken to hold up the class he represents to ridicule. …