Sensation Novels Research Articles

George Lippard's Fragile Utopian Future and 1840s American Economic Turmoil

ABSTRACT Nineteenth-century U.S. novelist and social activist George Lippard wrote his 1845 best seller, The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall, in the wake of economic chaos following the Banking Panic of 1837. While most of the novel portrays sensationalized acts of violence and sexual aggression used to call attention to the dire social circumstances of his era, Lippard includes two contrasting prophecies of America's future: one, a dystopian nightmare set in A.D. 1950, and the other, a brief, utopian vision set in approximately A.D. 2040. Lippard's inclusion of this utopian revelation, which portrays a United States free of violence, provides insights into the fate of utopia in America during troubled economic times. This article examines Lippard's early brand of urban socialism and his role as a sensation novelist, noting his narrative method for articulating utopian ideas. By selecting a precariously stationed female character as his visionary, Lippard underscores the fragility of utopian potentiality amid 1840s U.S. economic chaos. Because of Lippard's allegorical structure, as his heroine is threatened, so too is the utopian future she foresees.

Television: Horror’s ‘original’ home

Abstract Unquestionably, horror has always existed on television. Nevertheless, a number of scholars and critics have argued that the horror genre belongs properly to film, that television is too much a product of the industrial conditions that both regulate and create it to achieve ‘true’ horror. Not only is this position no longer viable (if it ever was) but it is based upon an assumption about what the horror genre is or should be. If we consider modern horror in relation to the Gothic novel and its immediate counterparts the stage melodrama and the sensation novel/drama, it soon becomes clear that television has a special and perhaps unique affinity with the genre as cultural and literary product. Television can do what film cannot, through its historical and contemporary strengths in the deployment of melodrama, particularly in serialized form. Through seriality, television horror reveals the melodramatic nature of the genre. Moreover, it (re)creates that original horror in a way that speaks, perhaps, to some of horror’s less appreciated pleasures and less acknowledged audiences. This article examines this claim through a sketch of Gothic and melodramatic traditions, tracing these through sensation novels, early film melodrama and ultimately contemporary serialized genre television, particularly the CW series Supernatural and The Vampire Diaries. In both series, the Gothic elements are manifested in the show’s manipulation of any and all elements of fantastic lore alongside plentiful gore and intense family drama.

Жанр “сенсаційної повісті” в українській еміграційній літературі

The literary process of the Ukrainian immigration is a special segment of Ukrainian culture and shows an “alternative way” in the development of literature. The purpose of this article is to study the specifications of sensational novels in the Ukrainian immigrant literature. The literary genre “sensational novel” appeared in Great Britain in the second half of the XIX century. These novels typologically descend from another popular Victorian genre – gothic fiction. Later they transformed into detectives and thrillers. The Ukrainian writers and critics used this term as a marker of any action novel with elements of adventures or crime investigations, or even science-fiction. Thus the term “sensational novel” was used to define such works as “The Petrijs and the Dovbushchuks” by I. Franko, “Doctor Caccioni” by H. Zhurba, “The mystery of the Red embassy” by Y. Bohenskyi etc. Most of the so-called “sensational novels” in the Ukrainian postwar immigrant literature were represented by the spy novels of B. Polianych and Z. Donchuk. The “Dictionary of literary studies” (2007), edited by R. Hromiak, presents sensational novel as a subgenre of the adventurous novel, noting that “it contains an event or message, which produces a strong impression”. As we can see, this criterion is not enough to use “sensational novel” as a fully functional term in relation to the spy and adventurous novels, written by Ukrainian immigrant authors. But it still can be a marker of a special modification of texts which main function was to make literature more popular among the immigrants.

Inconvenient Husbands and Superfluous Wives

Inconvenient Husbands and Superfluous Wives Maia McAleavey (bio) Let us begin with a family scene from Tennyson’s narrative poem “Enoch Arden” (1864): a fire crackles in a snug cottage, where a husband, “Stout, rosy, with his babe across his knees,” and his loving wife, her beauty replicated in her “fair-hair’d” daughter and son, pass their evening amid a cozy setting, including “cups and silver on the burnish’d board” (lines 768, 771, 764). The scene readily summons the Victorian ideal of domestic harmony, [End Page 35] defined and metonymically produced by countless hearthside family portraits just like this one. But a supernumerary lurks on the edge of this familial bliss: Enoch Arden himself gazes longingly on the “genial … hearth” through the window (765). He is looking at his own wife, who has remarried, believing him lost at sea, and two of the three children are his. This framed scene (the window is as central to its iconography as the fire) enshrines the nuclear family at the moment of its greatest narrative threat, when bigamy might replace monogamy and illegitimacy devour patrimony. This is the crisis of a story that poses the question of who is inside and who is outside the social and narrative institution of marriage. Enoch, though structurally poised to attack, does not expose the couple; he manages to prevent himself from emitting “a shrill and terrible cry, / Which in one moment, like the blast of doom, / Would shatter all the happiness of the hearth” (790–93). On the one hand, Enoch’s decision to refrain from destroying “all the warmth, the peace, the happiness” of this nuclear family underscores the power of its ideal, trebly rehearsed in Tennyson’s threadbare phrase (783). But on the other hand, the proximity of one wife and two husbands opens up the possibility—part fantasy, part nightmare—of multiple marital partners. As Enoch’s wife, Annie Lee, first hoped and then feared, her seafaring husband was alive when she married his rival. All three had long been friends, and both men had loved her as boys, when they had “play’d at keeping house. / Enoch was host one day, Philip the next, / While Annie still was mistress” (24–26). In the moment at the window, Annie has fulfilled her childhood promise that “she would be little wife to both” (36). The monogamous couple at the heart of Victorian literature is shadowed on all sides by alternates for the husband or wife, in the shape of parents, wards, governesses, or sisters-in-law, among others. Setting aside these more indirect challengers for the moment, I would like to consider here the many rivals to the married pair that are institutionally confirmed through bigamous marriages. In numerous novels, plays, and poems published in Great Britain throughout the nineteenth century, but especially in the 1860s, a husband or wife remarries bigamously, believing (or merely wishing) that his or her first spouse is dead. The resulting melodrama often includes bribery, arson, and murder, as the story struggles to find places for what the reviewer Alfred Austin derided as “an inconvenient number of husbands, and a most perplexing superfluity of wives” (413). These plots develop a variety of narrative solutions to this crisis, all of which demand the elimination of one of the inconvenient spouses: Bertha Mason is burned in the Thornfield fire; Lady Audley pushes George Talboys down a well; and Enoch Arden quietly expires after his rough decade at sea. Only one husband and one wife can sit by the fire; any extras must be left out in the cold, murdered by either a fellow character or the author. [End Page 36] Many critics argue that these reprisals effectively police the conservative social order. Nancy Armstrong, for instance, writes that Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) “slowly but surely exiles or kills off those characters who dare to exist in alternative living arrangements, … [universalizing] a radically restricted notion of kinship based on the married couple and their biological offspring” (144). Armstrong reiterates the logic of some Victorian reviewers, who interpreted the bigamy plot, commonly associated with the fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon and other sensation novelists, as counterintuitively reinforcing marriage. For...

“ROMANS FRANÇAIS ÉCRITS EN ANGLAIS”: OUIDA, THE SENSATION NOVEL AND FIN-DE-SIÈCLE LITERARY CENSORSHIP

Of all the female sensation novelists, Ouida was considered the most morally dangerous to young readers. Despite her critical reputation, Ouida's work was stocked by the leading circulating libraries. It has been suggested that she was tolerated, in part, because she wrote sensational romances rather than definitive sensation novels, and that she was perceived to write “French novels […] in English”. This essay extends our understanding of the affinities between English sensation fiction and French realist or naturalist fiction. Ouida's cultivated French identity was a signal of her rejection of Anglo-Saxon codes of sexual morality. Her polemical campaign against literary censorship consistently places French and English realist fiction in opposition—the one written for men and women, the other for young girls. Ouida's contribution to the late nineteenth-century debate about literary censorship is positioned within the context of shifting attitudes to sexual morality. Theatrical adaptations of Ouida's novels were censored by the Lord Chamberlain's Office, and many of the free libraries banned her altogether—although such action was generally reported unsympathetically in the press. Indeed, at this very period, new work by Ouida was made available to a wide readership through newspaper syndicates, such as Tillotson's, which circulated her fiction and essays in provincial newspapers.

STRANGE SYMPATHIES: GEORGE ELIOT AND THE LITERARY SCIENCE OF SENSATION

This essay argues that George Eliot's Romola (1862–63), an exhaustively researched historical romance, shares important concerns and generic conventions with her contemporaries' more popular sensation novels. Heavily influenced by the “science of sensation” developed by her partner George Henry Lewes, Herbert Spencer and Alexander Bain, Eliot explores through plot and characterization the blurry distinction between sympathy and sensation. Her sympathetic heroine, whose feelings are too easily swayed by the mirroring presence of others, must become reattuned to her more instinctual self. Romola thus stands not only for the female reader, who might benefit from exposure to literary sensation, but also for her creator, who remains ambivalent about the unruly effects of double consciousness.

SENSATIONAL SERMONIZING: ELLEN WOOD,GOOD WORDS, AND THE CONVERSION OF THE POPULAR

In the nineteenth century Britainunderwent a period of immense religious doubt and spiritual instability, prompted in part by German biblical criticism, the development of advanced geological and evolutionary ideas forwarded by men such as Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin, and the crisis in faith demonstrated by many high profile Church members, particularly John Henry Newman's conversion to Catholicism in 1845. In tracing the development of this religious disbelief, historian Owen Chadwick comments that “mid-Victorian England asked itself the question, for the first time in popular understanding, is Christian faith true?” (Victorian Church: Part I1). Noting the impact of the 1859 publication of Darwin'sOrigin of Speciesand the multi-authored collectionEssays and Reviewsin 1860, Chadwick further posits that “part of the traditional teaching of the Christian churches was being proved, little by little, to be untrue” (Victorian Church: Part I88). As the theological debate over the truth of the Bible intensified so did the question of how to reach, preach, and convert the urbanized and empowered working and middle classes. Indicative of this debate was the immense popularity of the Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon, who was commonly referred to as the “Prince of Preachers.” Spurgeon exploded onto the religious scene in the mid-1850s and his theatrical and expressive form of oratory polarized mid-Victorian society as to the proper, most effective mode of preaching. In print culture, the emergence of the religious periodicalGood Words, with its unique fusion of spiritual and secular material contributed by authors from an array of denominations, demonstrated a concurrent re-evaluation within the religious press of the evolving methods of disseminating religious discourse. The 1864 serialization of Ellen Wood'sOswald CrayinGood Wordsemphasizes the magazine's interest in combining and synthesizing religious and popular material as a means of revitalizing interest in religious sentiment. In 1860 Wood's novelEast Lynnewas critically categorized as one of the first sensation novels of the 1860s, a decade in which “sensational” became the modifier of the age. Wood, alongside Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, was subsequently referred to as one of the original creators of sensation fiction, a genre frequently denigrated as scandalous and immoral.Oswald Cray, however, sits snugly among the sermons, parables, and social mission essays that fill the pages ofGood Words.

Saverio Tomaiuolo, In Lady Audley’s Shadow: Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Victorian Literary Genres

Saverio Tomaiuolo’s In Lady Audley’s Shadow: Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Victorian Literary Genres is a fairly recent study of the literary career of one of the most renowned Victorian writers of sensation novels. The book opens with the story of Edward Bulwer Lytton’s wife, Rosina Wheeler, who was wrongly incarcerated in a lunatic asylum in 1858. This sensational case inspired many a sensation novel of the 1860s, typifying the way in which the sensation novel borrowed from real life, subversi...

Women’s Authorship and Editorship in Victorian Culture: Sensational Strategies (review)

Reviewed by: Women’s Authorship and Editorship in Victorian Culture: Sensational Strategies Katherine Malone (bio) Beth Palmer, Women’s Authorship and Editorship in Victorian Culture: Sensational Strategies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. ix + 206, $110.00 cloth. One of the delights of studying sensation fiction is reading scandalized reviewers’ remarks about “unnatural” heroines and the questionable female novelists who created them. Traditionally scholars have cited such critical outrage as evidence of the cultural anxiety surrounding women’s agency. But Beth Palmer’s examination of “sensational authorial editorships” goes beyond previous studies to demonstrate how women author-editors manipulated these critical charges and turned them to their advantage (158). Focusing on Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Wood, and Florence Marryat—sensation novelists who edited the Argosy, Belgravia Magazine, and London Society, respectively—Palmer shows how each woman performed a variety of public personae to navigate a male-dominated press and exercise greater autonomy. Palmer challenges stock definitions of the sensation genre by situating it within the context of press culture. Rather than presenting sensation as a subversive fad of the 1860s, chapter 1, “A Different Context for Sensation: Serialization, Celebrity Culture, and the Feminist Press,” analyzes new conditions of the press in the 1850s that laid the foundation for Braddon’s, Wood’s, and Marryat’s sensational editorships. Palmer offers a solid overview of the rise of the celebrity editor, beginning with Charles Dickens’s editorship of Household Words and later All the Year Round. From these popular magazines, Braddon, Wood, and Marryat learned to create a “house style” that reflected their own celebrity characteristics. Samuel and Isabella Beeton’s editorship of the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine provided a model for addressing both leisured readers and aspirational audiences. And feminist periodicals, including the English Woman’s Journal, Englishwoman’s Review, and most particularly the Victoria Magazine, offered a lesson in combining entertainment with politics. Palmer examines how these press developments created not only a genre for these sensational author-editors but also an audience they might address. Chapters 2 through 4 offer case studies of how each author-editor defined and performed sensation to suit her agenda. While Palmer argues that all three women were invested in sensational performance, she is careful to note differences in each writer’s brand of sensation. For example, chapter 2, “Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s ‘Strong Measures,’” demonstrates how Braddon and her contributors used heightened language and rhetoric to align sensation with “what is exciting, modern, and challenging” (62). In contrast to Braddon’s unabashedly “strong measures,” Wood consistently [End Page 505] associated feeling with authenticity rather than sensationalism. We learn in chapter 3, “Ellen Wood, Religious Feeling, and Sensation,” that Wood used the Argosy to refigure sensational discourse and establish its (and her own) respectability. Each chapter clearly demonstrates how the editor imprinted her style on every aspect of the magazine, from her own serialized fiction to her contributors’ texts. For example, chapter 3 analyzes the Argosy’s review section, “Our Log Book,” to reveal that it used a literary critical standard based on Wood’s definition of feeling. So readers of Wood’s fiction could expect other books to be judged by these criteria, and readers of the review section would learn how to appreciate Wood’s fiction according to this standard. Chapter 4, “Florence Marryat on Page and on Stage,” shows how Marryat negotiated her image as a woman editor in her correspondence with contributors and within the pages of London Society. By allowing herself to perform a variety of characters and caricatures in the magazine, Marryat mitigated contributors’ and readers’ potential difficulties in imagining a woman editor. By highlighting the performative elements of sensation, Palmer persuasively argues that this genre offered women a “set of discursive strategies that they could transfer . . . into other cultural discourses and performances” (2). This approach allows Palmer to expand sensation’s reach beyond the 1860s. Just as chapter 1 stretched the parameters for sensation by identifying some overlooked predecessors, chapter 5 pushes the boundaries forward to “The New Woman, the Legacies of Sensation, and the Press of the 1890s.” Although Palmer is not the first scholar to draw connections between sensation and the New Woman, she offers...

“SKINS TO JUMP INTO”: THE SLIPPERINESS OF IDENTITY AND THE BODY IN WILKIE COLLINS'SNO NAME

Victorian sensation literature wasinextricably related to identity and the body: its primary purposes were to elicit a physical response from the senses of readers and to question “the social formation of the self” (Taylor,The Secret2). Sensation fiction regularly relied on different, deformed, or diseased bodies to provoke fear or unease in its readers, and it created anxiety by juxtaposing the domestic with scandal, crime, and Gothicism to disturb the perceived stability of the home and social identity. Lyn Pykett argues that the genre reproduces the “real mid-nineteenth-century anxiety” that domestic selfhood “could be disrupted by danger, death or disease on the one hand, and the vagaries of the law, the banking system or the stockmarket on the other” (“Collins” 59). Nineteenth-century critics’ reactions to sensation novels connected anxieties about the body to fears about the instability of social identity: contemporary reviews described sensation literature and its works as “feverish” (Smith 141), “a collective cultural nervous disorder” (Taylor,The Secret4), and as “symptoms of . . . social disease” (Pykett, “Collins” 51). In his 1880–81 series of essays, “Fiction Fair and Foul,” John Ruskin argues that the “[p]hysically diseased, ‘deformed,’ and ignobly dead bodies [in Collins's and Dickens's novels] are symptomatic of diseased and deformed genres, produced by morally and physically ill writers to cater to the tastes of morally and physically diseased urban readers” (Holmes,Fictions92). These extreme critical responses, as well as the extreme popularity of sensation fiction, call attention to Victorian preoccupation with the body and social identity and with the instability of both. This paper, through analyzing the instability of bodies and identities in Wilkie Collins's sensation novelNo Name(1862) and its serial context, challenges readings by both Victorian and more recent critics that distinctly interpret diseased and disabled bodies in the novel as either symbolic of or a result of social deviance.

"The Interval of Expectation:" Delay, Delusion, and the Psychology of Suspense in Armadale

This article traces the complex interconnections between new, neurological concepts of sensory lag and the formal and conceptual concerns of sensation novels in the mid-Victorian period. Concepts of sensory delay developed when scientists first measured the velocity of the nerves in 1850, a startling breakthrough that revealed an interval between physical stimuli and their resolution in consciousness. But while scientific popularizers emphasized the morbid, even emasculating effects of sensory delay, I show how novelists such as Wilkie Collins would insist upon its more positive potentials. In Armadale (1866), Collins conceived an alternative masculinity defined by nervous irresolution rather than rational action--a strategy that was wedded deeply to Collins' ideas about both popular fiction and about the developing vocation of the professional male novelist.

The Gothic Sublime in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse

This article argues that Virginia Woolf's theory and practice of the novel extends key elements of the gothic sublime shared by nineteenth-century sensation fiction and by contemporaneous psychiatric methods of diagnosis. In novels such as Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret, sensation heroes find access to hidden mental reality through the psychologically revealing power of painted portraits. By doing so, they enact a distinctly gothic version of the sublime, offering a glimpse into the dark psyche by means of a subject's awed inability to conceive its magnitude. Similarly, by relying on the fantastic power of vision he found in paintings and photographs, Jean-Martin Charcot developed into medical knowledge the gothic sublime, which also aided the detective protagonists of sensation novels. Working to extend this tradition, Woolf in To the Lighthouse uses the logic of the gothic sublime as a model for exploring human character. The gothic sublime illuminates in Woolf's theory of consciousness a striking functional resemblance between the mimetic realism of photography and the abstract representations of formalist art. By virtue of the insufficiency of simple perception, both aesthetic modes offer, for Woolf, a window into the very depths of human psychology.

Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era , and: Semi-Detached Empire: Suburbia and the Colonization of Britain, 1880 to the Present (review)

Reviewed by: Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era, and: Semi-Detached Empire: Suburbia and the Colonization of Britain, 1880 to the Present Richard L. Stein (bio) Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era, by Lara Baker Whelan; pp. xi + 177. London and New York: Routledge, 2010, £80.00, $125.00. Semi-Detached Empire: Suburbia and the Colonization of Britain, 1880 to the Present, by Todd Kuchta; pp. viii + 264. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2010, $59.50, $24.50 paper, £53.50, £21.95 paper. For over half a century, led by such scholars as A. J. Dyos, British urban history has enlarged its scope to include British suburban history, particularly by charting—to borrow from the title of Donald J. Olsen's classic study—the "Growth of Victorian London" in developments around the shifting margins of the expanding city. The questions posed by this tradition remain vital: how much of what we think we know about Victorian London belongs to the city itself? Precisely what was that city, and where was it? How should its historical boundaries be drawn? What evidence provides the best measure of its changing character or the changing characters with whom it was identified? How much of its legacy survives? Both books under review address such questions through parallel if distinct approaches. In Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era, Lara Baker Whelan describes what might be termed the psychic geography of London suburbanization in a historically grounded literary survey that gives equal weight to the facts and fantasies of the city's late-nineteenth-century expansion. Todd Kuchta's Semi-Detached Empire examines the same phenomena over a longer period and with a wider lens, remapping suburbanization in relation to the dialogue of city and country and, especially, the history of British colonization, an imperial growth fundamentally (if paradoxically) linked with suburban growth at home. The main outlines of Whelan's story are familiar: incomes rose, people moved, villages developed into something less picturesque. As the size and idea of London shifted, material places gave rise to hopes and fears. Escape from the inner city, once the cherished dream of a rising middle class, produced a social return of the repressed when undesirables joined the march of bricks and mortar out of town. Suburban dreams turned to nightmares; once-placid communities like Lambeth or Chelsea provided backdrops for the gothic drama of sensation novels. By the beginning of the twentieth century the urban exodus reversed as cultural elites like the Bloomsbury Group returned to inner London. Whelan's penultimate sentence sums this up provocatively: "Could Modernism have existed without the Victorian suburb and all it engendered?" (158). As that sentence suggests, this is primarily a literary study, focusing on fiction by numerous well- and lesser-known writers, from Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins to Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Charlotte Riddell. One of its strengths is to treat their work (and that of others) as suburb-specific. Rather than invoke such familiar categories as "Dickens on railway construction," Whelan considers works in relation to their locales, which in turn are placed on a detailed map of social mobility. Hence, Dombey and Son (1846-48) is read in relation to developments in and around Camden Town, episodes like Florence's encounter with Good Mrs. Brown in the context of Victorian anxieties about a migrating "residuum" that found its way into respectable suburbs (45). As Whelan's use of the term "anxieties" in her title suggests, these concerns are grounded less in demographic realities than cultural fantasies, generated (in a notable [End Page 745] example) by the "most titillating sketches" in Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1851-62) (49), among other sources. Whelan's emphasis on fiction reveals how such fantasies were formed and circulated; her detailed account of class measures the distance between fantasy and fact. If Whelan is at her best evoking material environments, she is less successful in distinguishing such subgenres as suburban gothic, suburban mysteries (which are, she acknowledges, a category of the former), or (in the least convincing section) suburban sublime. The treatments of fictional plots and settings...

Victorian Values

The contested values associated with the term ‘Victorian’ call for fresh and informed consideration in the light of far-reaching changes brought about by the global economic downturn. Victorian writers engaged with public questions that were often associated with the issues we must now address, and their vigorously contentious responses reflect a drive to influence a wide audience with their ideas. Fiction of the period, including the sensation novels of the 1860s, provide telling examples of these developments in mid-Victorian writing; but non-fictional texts, including those of the philosopher and political economist John Stuart Mill and the critic John Ruskin, also question the foundations of social thought. As they challenged traditional genre boundaries through the innovative forms that emerged across a range of diverse works, many Victorian authors argued for closer links between the discourses of emotion and those of logic. These are difficult times for researchers and critics, but the stringencies we find ourselves confronting can provide opportunities to create connections of the kind that the Victorians chose to make, bringing together different genres of writing and disciplines of thought, and arguing for a more generous understanding of our responsibilities towards each other.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Henry Dunbar

How to write a Sensation Novel.—Take two breaches of the seventh commandment, and one breach of the eighth, and mix well together. Throw in a few dolls, a soupcon of sermon, and serve up with a handful of (well-paid for) allusions to expensive shop-keepers. (« Recipes for Authors », The Tomahawk : A Saturday Journal of Satire 1 (11 May, 1867) : 159) Henry Dunbar, publie en 1864, est un des « sensation novels » de Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835–1915), maitresse, s’il en est, du genre, comptant a...

Love and Vivisection: Wilkie Collins's Experiment in Heart and Science

Jessica Straley, "Love and Vivisection: Wilkie Collins's Experiment in Heart and Science"(pp. 348–373) This essay examines the paradox of Wilkie Collins's antivivisection sensation novel, Heart and Science (1883). in the plot of the cruel vivisector Dr. Benjulia and the helpless young woman who almost becomes his latest experiment, the novel draws from a familiar bounty of antivivisectionist propaganda, but, this essay argues, the novel also reveals Collins's thinking about his own literary genre and the unfavorable comparison many critics were making between vivisection and sensation fiction: medical experiments on live animals often electrified their subjects, and sensation novels likewise shocked their readers. More than simply a metaphor, this connection between scientific and literary practices pointed to a late-Victorian anxiety about physiological sensation and moral reasoning. The focus on the body, critics of both practices maintained, bypassed the authority of the soul and turned human agents into passive receptors incapable of the higher functions of rationality and ethics. In its preface, Heart and Science disavows any relation between its narration and the medical dissection it deplores, and much of the novel progresses without the sensation genre's characteristic shocks. But Collins's text also seeks to recover and to redeem physiology as the basis for human emotion and ethics and, in so doing, to redefine sensation fiction as an aid, rather than an inhibitor, to moral agency.

Review: Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels, by Laurence Talairach-Vielmas

Book Review| December 01 2010 Review Laurence Talairach-VielmasMoulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels. Aldershot and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2007. Pp. viii + 188. $99.95. Nineteenth-Century Literature (2010) 65 (3): 402–406. https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2010.65.3.402 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Review. Nineteenth-Century Literature 1 December 2010; 65 (3): 402–406. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2010.65.3.402 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentNineteenth-Century Literature Search This content is only available via PDF. ©© 2010 by The Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Toward an Entente Cordiale: The Cultivation of Cosmopolitan Sympathies in Ouida's Under Two Flags

Toward an Entente Cordiale:The Cultivation of Cosmopolitan Sympathies in Ouida's Under Two Flags Kristi Embry In her 1895 collection of essays, Views and Opinions, sensation novelist Ouida (née Marie Louise de la Ramée) defines her masculine ideal in a discussion of Pierre Loti's, Le Livre de la Pitié et la Mort. A cosmopolitan and adventurist, Loti pursued both a naval career and a literary one. He served in the French navy and then drew on his experiences to produce a collection of critically acclaimed Orientalist fiction and travelogues before publishing his more obscure collection of reminiscences, Le Livre, in 1891. Ouida's love of cosmopolitan and imperial adventure draws her to Loti, whom she valorizes, characterizing him as a "daring and brilliant officer" whose career in the navy "has shown that he possesses moral as well as physical courage" (225). Moreover, as Ouida makes clear, Loti is also a man of exquisite sensibility and possesses a deeply sympathetic nature. She writes that he has a sympathetic spirit "wide as the ocean that has cradled and nursed him" (224), and that he "feels and feels intensely the similarity of sentiment between himself and all other forms of sentient life" (229). Loti's sympathetic connection with "all other forms of sentient life" enables him to recognize the value of his social relations. According to Ouida, he is "indifferent to his own interests and prospects when he is moved to indignation against the tyrannies of the strong over the weak" (225). Loti's indignant objection to social tyranny compelled him to publish a series of articles in 1883 detailing the atrocities committed during the French attack on the Vietnamese coastal defense of Hue at the Battle of Thuan An, which earned him official censure and a measure of public notoriety. [End Page 227] Ouida's description of Loti's masculinity which mingles bravery, sensibility, sympathy, and ethics, contrasts sharply with the protagonist of her earlier, best-selling sensation novel, Under Two Flags (1867), who miserably fails to live up to this ideal. An unflappable British aristocratic dandy, Bertie Cecil hails from an old Anglo-Norman family. Like Loti, Bertie serves his country as an officer in the British Army—where he is known as the "Beauty of the Brigades"—and pursues a cosmopolitan existence, feeling equally at home in Britain and the Continent. Where Loti's admirable qualities are on display for all to see, however, Bertie's more heroic qualities, including his bravery and sense of honor, are obscured by his mindless consumerism and the lack of discipline that lead him to squander his time and energy in a thoughtless pursuit of luxury, horse racing, gambling, women, and in his spare time, bad French novels. His generally thoughtless and reckless behaviors and habits blind him to his social obligations, and as a result, he nearly bankrupts his aristocratic estate, the House Royallieu, and jeopardizes the reputation of his married mistress. Bertie staves off the embarrassment for as long as possible, but finally a scandal involving his younger brother erupts. Refusing to ruin either the reputation of his aristocratic name or his married mistress, Bertie takes the high road and flees Britain, escaping to Europe with his faithful manservant Rake, where he gives up his aristocratic identity and enlists in the French Army as a common soldier. Bertie is sent to serve the French flag in Algeria, where he undergoes a remarkable transformation from a dissolute aristocratic dandy into a brave, heroic, sympathetic role model worthy of reclaiming his hereditary aristocratic title and rank. Ouida's work in both Under Two Flags and Views and Opinions speaks to her conjoined interests in Victorian cosmopolitanism and Anglo-French relations. At the time Ouida was writing Under Two Flags, what had become known in diplomatic circles as the entente cordiale ("warm understanding") had developed between England and France. This "warm understanding"—which replaced hostile Anglo-French exchanges with cultural affirmation and sympathetic exchanges—became linked to commerce and eventually helped facilitate the rise of a commercial cosmopolitanism. This cosmopolitanism, in turn, contributed to the development of both bourgeois consumer culture dominated by a belief in commodity fetishism and the aesthetic...

Newlyweds on tour: honeymooning in nineteenth-century America

Newlyweds on Tour is the first historical study to trace the origins and growth of the American honeymoon between 1820 and 1900. Rather than treating the honeymoon as a simple by-product of the privatization of the family, this work argues that it was formed at the interstices between (and helped to articulate) a variety of narratives-patriotic, conjugal, sentimental, and sexual that were central to the modern American national identity. To track these narratives, Barbara Penner moves between primary accounts of newlywed experiences recorded in diaries and letters in addition to entries in a wide range of textual, visual, and architectural representations, matrimonial maps, engravings from the popular press, sensation novels, and palace hotel bridal chambers. Her wide-ranging interdisciplinary analysis demonstrates the specific ways in which newlyweds on tour prompted individual and collective feelings of attachment whether to the ideals of egalitarian marriage, domesticity, nation, or sentiment itself. Above all, she argues that the honeymoon was key to legitimizing the union of sentiment and commerce, a union that continues to thrive today.

The Paradox of a Periodical: Temple Bar Magazine under the Editorship of George Augustus Sala (1860–1863)

The success of William Thackeray's shilling monthly periodical, The Cornhill Magazine, which first appeared in 1859, spawned a series of imitators in the 1860s with titles drawn from London landmarks. Temple Bar, St Paul's, Belgravia and St James's all attempted to court the same metropolitan middle-class family readership that Thackeray had enjoyed with his inclusion of apolitical and non-controversial articles, serialized novels, and poetry. The editor of Temple Bar, George Augustus Sala — one of Dickens's 'Young Men' — promised in the prospectus that his periodical would be 'full of solid yet entertaining matter, that shall be interesting to Englishmen and Englishwomen…and that Filia-familias may read with as much gratification as Pater or Mater-familias'. But, paradoxically, Sala decided to surround himself with a team of contributors hand-picked from his own bohemian circle, London journalists whose political and social outlook were at odds with those of a family readership. This article will argue that Sala, along with sub-editor Edmund Yates and publisher John Maxwell, deliberately and cynically packed the first edition of Temple Bar with material designed to ensnare a 'respectable' middle-class family readership. With selective anonymity and a serialized novel later described by Yates as 'Trollope-and-milk', along with articles of a conservative and London-centric nature, 30,000 copies of the first edition were sold. Once this readership had been established, the editorial team began to introduce content of a more liberal nature. Serialized sensation novels, such as Sala's Seven Sons Of Mammon and Mary Braddon's Aurora Floyd, attacked the dominance of the domestic realist novel, while hard-hitting articles and poems alerted readers to the misery and poverty to be found on the streets of London. Sala slowly created a periodical that, for a time at least, was the most unconventional of the shilling monthlies. This article will reveal the difficulties and subtleties involved in creating a brand personality for a monthly periodical, and by doing so will highlight the complex relationships that existed between nineteenth-century London journalists.