that person down. Florence Hardy's biography of her husband records a revealing entry in his diary for January 14, 1888, in which Hardy identifies the sensation novel as the model for his own interest in these forces: 'A 'sensation novel' is possible in which the sensationalism is not casualty, but evolution,' he says, 'not physical but psychical [where] the effect upon the faculties is the important matter to be depicted.' While Hardy unduly minimizes the psychological significance of the sensation novel here, he does recognize the genre's importance in emphasizing the «effect» exerted by events upon a character's body, just as his novels would emphasize the effect of circumstances upon a character's psyche. But unlike the novel of psychological realism, both the sensation novel and the naturalistic novel portray the human subject in more «modern» terms-as a problematic physical and psychical construction, as an «effect» composed by a complex of intersecting historical forces rather than as a rational, autonomous will imposing itself upon the world, however limited might be the opportunities that world offered.
The impact of those forces on the individual subject was not a mere abstraction in the sensation novel; it registered directly upon the lives of its authors as much as upon its characters. If the critical history of sensation fiction reads like the plot of a sensation novel, so do the life stories of the most eminent practitioners of the form. The secret scandals of their domestic circumstances often rival those of their most notorious characters in dramatizing the influence of institutional confinement, repressive legal and social conventions, and professional intervention into domestic matters. Miss Braddon bore five children out of wedlock while living illicitly with her publisher, whose first wife had died in the lunatic asylum where she had been confined. Dickens, separated from his wife and family, engaged in an infamous, protracted affair with the actress Ellen Ternan. Charles Reade lived on an intimate basis with his «housekeeper» for years, never marrying because he was committed to celibacy by the conditions of an Oxford fellowship. Wilkie Collins, appropriately, offers the most telling example of the scandalous, sensational life of these 'other Victorians.' The details of his personal affairs were diligently guarded secrets except to his most -504- intimate friends. What is now clearly documented, however, is that Collins maintained two households, an arrangement that was made necessary by his extended liaison with Miss Caroline Graves (the original for the mysterious female figure of The Woman in White), a woman who eventually married someone else and who later resumed her affair with Collins after her marriage. Between the two phases of this liaison, Collins also took part in a relationship with another woman he never married, Martha Rudd, with whom he had two daughters and a son. In addition to the stresses of maintaining this double life, illness dramatically constrained Collins's later years, a period dominated by the dictates of his doctors and, as his later reformist work shows, by his own preoccupation with laws governing everything from divorce to vivisection in England. As Collins's physical ailments became increasingly debilitating, his addiction to opium also became more and more severe. After his astonishing success in the 1860s, the rapid decline of Collins's literary production in the subsequent decades has been variously attributed to some combination of gout (which crippled him with pain), Charles Reade (who encouraged him to write his less effective protest novels), and laudanum (which he consumed daily in quantities that would have killed most men).
These biographical details suggest that in creating a genre of sexual secrets, double identities, domestic intrigues, legal difficulties, and medical confinement, these prominent authors may have been playing out the mysteries of their own private lives as those lives collided with the repressive force of established social conventions. But more important, their considerable body of work also made plain the fact that those collisions were produced by urgent and historically specific conditions of mid-nineteenth-centuryEngland, conditions which carried profound implications for the identities people were able to assume-or that were being assumed for them- within the culture. As the Crystal Palace of 1851 perfectly symbolized the moment in the economic history of that culture when commodities had become established as objects of wonder, the sensation novel of the 1860s perfectly exhibited the human implications of that process. Both spectacles presented themselves as 'great exhibitions' in which the values of the culture were displayed before it in a sensational form and sold back to it for its own consumption.
In 1859, the year that Wilkie Collins began writing The Woman in White, Karl Marx published A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, John Stuart Mill published An Essay on Liberty, and Charles -505- Charles published The Origin of Species. Like Collins's novel, each of these texts mounts an elaborate investigation into the past that produces a radical reinterpretation of the present. Also like a sensation novel, each of them makes a claim about the nature of human identity and its relation to some wider context or determining set of fundamental forces. Marx's investigation of 'material history' as a function of the economic conditions of production sees the individual as subject to a larger plot of class struggle: 'It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.' Mill's reconstruction of human history from a political perspective traces the evolution of governmental forms and the final emergence of modern democracy and liberal individualism. Directly engaging the problem of 'how to make the fitting adjustment between individual independence and social control,' Mill portrayed the full realization of individual autonomy as necessarily responsive to certain collective moral and political obligations, to the «debt» of liberty that exists between citizens. Darwin saw the entire human historical record as itself subject to a grander 'natural history,' which was governed by biological imperatives for species survival and the supporting 'natural laws' of selection, struggle, and inheritance. Sensation novels may be seen as domesticating and integrating all these historical investigations-of social class, of political legislation, of biological inheritance-and the reconsiderations of personal destiny they required. These novels, consistently obsessed with some historical threat, repeatedly manifest an anxiety about some dangerous secret from the past, something volatile and destructive to the present that has been repressed and will certainly burst forth with violence into the present. By so doing, they narrate and resolve the very historical anxieties that were manifested in the emerging economic, political, and scientific theories with which this literature was contemporary. We might think of the invention of this immensely popular novelistic form as both symptom of and response to the array of radical new conceptions about the past that were coming into the consciousness of the culture at this critical moment, presenting their revolutionary implications and obligations in a form that incited as much pleasure as it did shock.
