how deeply the production and evaluation of literary texts may be entangled with the shifting circumstances of the historical situation in which they emerge, and, more specifically, how profoundly the critical reception of popular literary forms might reflect the very cultural stresses and contradictions that both call those forms into being and seek to obliterate them.
Histories of the novel have traditionally identified the origins of sensation fiction with the work of Charles Dickens's brilliant protégé, Wilkie Collins, if not with Dickens himself. But while he was the most distinguished among the writers of this most popular novelistic subgenre in the nineteenth century, Collins did not invent the sensation novel. Dickens, his mentor and friend, did not invent it, nor did the other most famous and prolific practitioners of the form, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charles Reade, or Mrs. Henry Wood. The 'sensation novel' was a genre invented in the 1860s by the same outraged literary critics and reviewers who condemned it. They coined the term and created the category to describe and contain a disreputable form of literature that they generally regarded as morally diseased, aesthetically bankrupt, and socially dangerous. Because of its treatment of scandalous domestic situations and its supposed appeal to physical and emotional sensations rather than to the higher rational faculties, the 'sensation novel' became the exemplary case by which the corrupting influence of «low» art could be distinguished from the elevating effect of «high» art in mid-nineteenth-century England.
Despite its almost universal rejection by the literary establishment as morally and artistically nothing more than a scandal, the sensation novel was, however, commercially, nothing less than a sensation. Sensation novels made considerable fortunes for their writers, for the magazine publishers who initially presented them in installments to the public, for the book publishers who then produced them in bound volumes and often published pirated editions of them, for the producers who staged equally popular theatrical versions of the novels, and for the manufacturers of such products as soap and perfume commonly named after the protagonists and titles of the most sensational among them. The sensation novel was as much merchandise as it was art. But the widespread and intense controversy sensation fiction inspired suggested that it was merchandise of a very significant-perhaps even subversive-kind. -480-
The prevailing critical consensus about the 'sensation mania' of the 1860s was as paradoxical as it was ardent. While sensation fiction was commonly dismissed as «light» and insubstantial reading, it was also regarded as a virulent and dangerous phenomenon. The public's insatiable appetite for sensation fiction was thought to manifest a morbid and infectious social disease, a symptom of widespread cultural disorder, a nervous desire for excitement and «perversion» of the most undesirable and French variety. While sensation fiction elicited some of the most repressive of Victorian attitudes among critics, however, it also provoked important exchanges on the subject of literary realism during the period. Figures such as G. H. Lewes, George Eliot, Henry James, Anthony Trollope, and William Thackeray, among others, made some of their most sophisticated articulations and defenses of literary realism in the context of their generally negative reviews of sensation novels. What we now identify as the novel of high Victorian realism might well be said to have defined itself against the tenets of sensation fiction. In fact, the specter of sensation fiction so dominated the critical discourse of the 1860s that by the mid -1870s, Trollope would ironically suggest in his Autobiography that the sensation novel was responsible for giving rise to the realistic novel itself:
Among English novels of the present day, and among English novelists, a great division is made. There are sensational novels and anti-sensational, sensational novelists and anti-sensational, sensational readers and anti- sensational. The novelists who are considered to be anti-sensational are generally called realistic. I am realistic. My friend Wilkie Collins is generally supposed to be sensational.
Even that final line of defense fell, however, before the pervasive and corrupting influence of what the Quarterly dismissed as 'mere trash or something worse.' Trollope himself succumbed to writing a novel in the sensation mode with The Eustace Diamonds (1873), and in the Transome plot of Felix Holt (1866) even George Eliot, the acknowledged master of Victorian realism, was accused of being infected by what Punch called 'the black, black ink' of sensation fiction.
If the sensation novel was an artificial invention of the conservative literary establishment of the 1860s, it also constituted a genuinely new and identifiable literary form-a form, however repudiated, that directly engaged the complex historical forces out of which it emerged. The commercial success of the genre is the first clue to that engagement. -481-
The thematics of sensation fiction almost never concern trade or manufacturing or commerce. Rather, they are always deeply concerned with money and success, with the elaborate financial intrigues that surround the common preoccupations of the bourgeois family-inheritance, marriage, profession, and class status. Borrowing from the stock and trade of Victorian stage melodrama, the plots of sensation novels also invariably center around some menacing secret that threatens to expose the family's very identity as a humiliating lie and to destroy its financial and psychological security as well. That secret normally originates with an elaborate fraud that has taken place in the past, a secret plot in which class boundaries have been ruthlessly transgressed for profit: an illegitimate son passes himself off as a baronet and imprisons the true heir to his fortune in an asylum; a working-class woman murders her husband and changes her name to marry a gentleman; a servant-woman and her barren mistress exchange identities to provide the master with a child he wrongly believes to be his own. This fictional form that caused such a popular sensation among the middle class, in other words, worked directly on class anxiety and instability, symptomatic perhaps of a widespread nervousness at the very center of the culture's sense of itself. These plots offered up the disturbing possibility that the secret terms in which personal identities and intimate relations had been established within the culture and within the family were themselves fictions, acts of commerce, forms of trade, commodities to be bought and sold. While such novels may have reinforced superficially the conventional values of their readers by promising that every sin would come to light and that overweening class ambition would eventually end in disaster, the plots were on a more fundamental level deeply subversive of those same values. The secret they ultimately exposed was the essential commercialization of the family and of the individual subjects involved in its most intimate transactions.
The commercial interests of the period in which the sensation novel dominated the literary marketplace are the focus of a period of general European prosperity referred to by historian E. J. Hobsbawm as the 'Age of Capital' (1848 to 1875), a period which in his analysis followed the 'Age of Revolution' (1789 to 1848) and anticipated the 'Age of Imperialism' (1875 to 1914). These are, of course, arbitrary dividing lines between interlocking historical movements, but they offer useful registration points for understanding a literary genre that dramatizes the ways the British economic revolution may be said to have swallowed -482- up the failed European political revolutions and to have foreseen the eventual extension of British economic expansion into a worldwide empire. While sensation novels invariably deal harshly with the transgression of class lines-both upward and downward-they are not primarily concerned with preserving the integrity of traditional class boundaries. Rather, they are concerned with how those lines have been reconfigured as a form of social technology instead of as a mandate of natural inheritance. Written in the wake of the reform acts that were being debated in mid-century England to extend the franchise, these novels show how completely the restructuring of the social world had already been accomplished by the 1860s through economic means. They tell the story of the rise of a professional class of lawyers and physicians who established themselves as a powerful elite by taking control of the very terms upon which persons would be recognized and authenticated. In that story, the class warfare of 1848 has retreated from the street- corner barricades to be restaged inside the confines of the middle-class household.
These historical transformations are faintly detectable even in Margaret Oliphant's crucial early essay on 'Sensation Novels,' which appeared in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in 1862. Mrs. Oliphant, who published a number of novels herself in the 1860s, defines the 'entirely original position' Wilkie Collins's novels take up in the history of literature, claiming for them the status of 'a new beginning in fiction.' While Dickens, Bulwer Lytton, and even Nathaniel Hawthorne may be said to have written sensation novels earlier on, Collins charts a new path, which Oliphant sees as reflecting very specific historical circumstances. Unlike the more fantastic devices of his predecessors, she explains, Collins's sensational effects 'are produced by common human acts, performed by recognizable human agents, whose motives are never inscrutable, and whose line of conduct is always more or less consistent.' 'A writer who boldly takes in hand the common mechanism of life,' she goes on to say, 'and by means of persons who might all be living in society for anything we can tell to the contrary, thrills us into wonder, terror, and breathless interest with positive personal shocks of surprise and excitement, has accomplished a far greater success than he who effects the same result through supernatural agencies, or by means of the fantastic creations
