In Our Time - Sensation

Episode Date: November 6, 2003

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss sensation, a Victorian literary phenomenon. The Archbishop of York fulminated against them in his sermons, they spread panic through the pages of The Times and in a famous review the Oxford Professor of Philosophy, Henry Mansel, called them “unspeakably disgusting” with a “ravenous appetite for carrion”: in the 1860s the novels of Sensation took the Victorian world by storm.Bigamy. Secrecy. Murder and Madness. Detectives and surprise plot twists - all in a genteel domestic setting. It was a compelling concoction that propelled sales of the genre into millions, and for the first time ever got those above stairs reading the same stories as their servants.How did Sensation achieve such an incredible popularity so fast? What did the ensuing moral panic reveal about the society in which the novels were set? And in terms of its literary reputation, does this racy genre deserve to languish so far behind Victorian Realism, its rather steadier cousin?With John Mullan, Senior Lecturer in English at University College London; Lyn Pykett, Professor of English and Pro-Vice Chancellor at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth; Dinah Birch, Professor of English at the University of Liverpool.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, the Archbishop of York fulminated against them in his sermons. They spread panic through the pages of the times.

And in a famous review, the Oxford Professor of Philosophy, Henry Mansell, called them unspeakably disgusting, with a ravenous appetite for Carion. In the 1860s, the novels of sensation took the Victorian world by the throat. Bigamy, secrecy, murder and madness, detectives and surprise plot twists,

all in a genteel domestic setting. It proved a compelling concoction that propelled the sales of the genre into millions and probably, for the first time, got those above stairs reading the same stories as their servants. How did sensation novels achieve such popularity so quickly? What did the ensuing moral panaceous?

reveal about the society in which they were set, and in terms of its literary reputation, does this racist genre deserve to languish so far behind the Victorian realism, its more respectable and steadier cousin? With me to discuss sensation novels, John Mullen, senior lecture in English at University of College London,

Lynne Piquet, Professor of English at the University of Aberystwyth, and Dinah Birch, Professor of English at Liverpool University. John Mullen, who were the writers who, who were the group of writers who wrote these sensation novels? Just give us the two or three most important novels.

Well, I mean, it really starts in 1860 with Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White. And rather, as what you've just said has implied, the interesting thing in a way about sensation novels is that it's not a sort of category we've invented later on as we've looked back. It's a term used by, initially by critics at the time, but then increasingly by readers and some of the writers themselves. But what they think is a sort of, startling new phenomenon. And it starts, as far as they're concerned, with the woman in white.

And then some of the other famous names are Mary Braddon, who writes novels. Probably the most famous one is Lady Audley's Secret. Mrs. Henry Wood with East Lynn. And then one or two that perhaps we know less well now, like Charles Reed. And these novels are thought of as sensational, partly because they're thrillers. they're very exciting, but also because they've got sensational subject matter in them. So what was the real, what did Wilkie Collins and Mrs. Mrs. Wood? What were they doing that was shaking people so much?

Well, I think that they were sort of, they were combining two things, really. First of all, yes, some exciting and perhaps scandalous or controversial subject matter, in particular to do with, I suppose, things which quite often excites students and, and, literary researchers now to do with adultery, unhappy marriages, people cheating on each other, some sort of quite often implicitly sexual subject matter, but also that, I mean, the form of it which people found, people criticised or relished for being peculiarly exciting and stimulating. I mean, most of these novels, almost all of these novels, were published in installments, often in magazines, some of them weekly, some of them monthly.

And Collins took the necessity of exciting, and he often said, make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait. And these curtain scenes, he turned into an extraordinary kind of art form, really. People remember probably most of all the very first section of the woman in white where the narrator encounters this mysterious woman on the high road at midnight, probably somewhere around where Swiss Cottage now is, in North London. And he feels a little tap on his shoulder. And there's this woman, distracted, mysterious, she doesn't know her way,

and he sort of helps direct her. And strangely, she mentions to him, in the course of their brief conversation, that she has some knowledge of his place in Cumberland where he is shortly to go as an art teacher. And then she disappears, he knows not where, and a coach. And two men follow her. And he overhears them asking a policeman

if they've seen a woman in white who's just escaped from an asylum, and then bang, that's it. And you wait for a week, and it's that waiting which Collins developed into a sort of extraordinarily exciting art form. Very exciting that she was going to come. of course, as it proved. Lynn Pike, the best-selling sensation novel.

Wilkie Collins seems to have kicked it off, as John has said. But the novel which outsold every novel in 19th century, as we understand, and I was a sensational novel, Eastland by Mrs. Henry Wood, the stage version of which gave us the line, dead and never called me mother. Can you tell us a bit about Eastlin and why it had such impact in this sensational genre? Well, Eastlin had a sensational impact because whereas most sensation novels were concerned with bigamy when they were dealing with marriage plots,

Eastlin was actually concerned with adultery. And Eastlin is a novel about a young girl who marries, a lawyer, becomes a mother. And for various reasons, she's bored, she's frustrated. in her household. Her husband doesn't pay enough attention. The household is run by her husband's sister. She's isolated from her

children at one point because of illness. She's sent away to convales. She is, as so many Victorian heroines, are infantilized in marriage. She meets a rather dashing young man called Levinson and she becomes

involved with him and eventually runs away with him and bears his child. This is extraordinary scandalous behaviour, particularly for a woman of aristocratic birth. And this being a Victorian novel, she is, of course, punished for her strain. She suffers for it, yes, quite badly. For the rest of the number, for the rest of her life. Well, a rail crash and disfigurement. Not just the start of it.

Yes. And then, of course, we have this. So this is the scandal. And one of the interesting things, I mean, because I go back to John's point about moral panic. I mean, one of the sources of moral panic related to this novel was, of course, that the readers sympathize with this woman in her plight. So here the novel positions them so that they sympathize with her.

They are taken into her feelings, particularly when she goes back to her former marital home disguised by her disfigurement and amazingly by some green goggles so that her husband can't read. recognize her. Her husband has married again. Her husband is married again and she is forced to, she becomes the nurse of her own children and she's forced to watch her children growing up, but as your quotation indicated, she's not allowed to profess her relationship to them.

So the reader is positioned sympathising with this woman longing for her children and they're sympathising with a woman whom conventional morality says that they should, they should have no sympathy for whatsoever. This is a fallen woman. So this is a deeply conservative book in terms of morality, but it's appealing to a subversive element in the reader? I think it is conservative in terms of morality, and it's often very overtly conservative in the sense that there are various points

at which the narrator of the novel addresses the reader directly and addresses careless wives and suggested them to wives that they must think very carefully about their discontents, and they really should put up with things, because otherwise dreadful things will be for them. Their faces will be scarred and they will lose their children. Absolutely. But then on the other hand, it is subversive in the sense that readers are meant to see how Isabel got there,

how Isabel Vane got to where she got. They see her discontents in the marriage. They're allowed to indulge in their own feelings of discontent about marriage. So it does undermine the certainties to some extent. Well, we looked at the background, looked at women in white, we've looked at the bestseller of all. Finally, before we, there's a final sort of plank in the platform, Dina Birch. Can we talk about Lady Audley's Secret?

What is her secret? And why is the notion of the secret very important of the sensation novels? Well, the question of what Lady Audley's Secret was is, in fact, rather complicated. This is a bigamy novel, so that you assume, throughout most of the novel, is that her secret is that though she is respectfully married to a wealthy landowner, she has in fact a first husband whom she has pushed down a well and assumes to be dead. Given the nature of the plotting in this novel, which is very lurid, no surprise that he is not dead and returned rather inconveniently.

So this apparently is her secret. But in fact, as this plot unfolds, it emerges that this is not, after all, her secret. Her secret is that all her nefarious behaviour throughout the novel is caused by what she claims to be her madness. There's a great climactic scene where she says, oh yes, you have defeated me, but you haven't defeated someone in her right mind. I am mad in capital letters, she says. But there's no evidence in the novel that she is mad. She did push her husband down the world. Well, she had good reason. Also, she felt at the time. I've heard that before. She's then packed off to a lunatic asylum. This is one of the many novels that revolve around incarceration

in various lunatic asylums. But the reader then and since has never been quite convinced of her madness so that one might say, and indeed critics have said, well, her secret is that she is not mad, She is perfectly saying, like Isabel Vane, she conspired disastrously against the constraints of her social situation. Like Isabel, she is punished. Like Isabel, she ends the novel dead.

She doesn't long survive in her lunatic asylum. She is as vicious and wicked as Isabel is in some ways, despite her bad behaviour, virtuous and innocent. But one can see parallels, I think, in the way those plots are resolved. We've had the, we've talked about, sort of set it up a little bit there, but just finally, for this section, I still would like listeners to know what the real distinction. We've had got Gothic novels, we've had Newgate novels, we've had Jane Eyre, which has had bigamy, madness, incarceration, lies and so and so. But then we get this thing, just finally so, we really hit it, bursting onto the scene, sensation novels, 1860, this is new, this is different, and it contains one. very good novelists, of course, Wilkie Collins. But it's almost complicated this year, doesn't it really?

I think what's really new about sensation fiction is that it took those features from the Gothic, from Penny Dreadfuls, from Newgate novels, the crime, the mysteries, the suspense. It took those issues and brought them home. It's one thing to read about... Literally brought them home. Yes, exactly. It's one thing to read about villains in crumbling castles

and deserted monasteries, or indeed, in thieves' kitchens in London. One might think here of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, which is in a way the strongest example of the Newgut novel from that point of view and shares many of the features of sensation novels. But to read about those things, not in a thieves' kitchen, but in your own kitchen,

that is in the lives of suburban villas, in respectable middle-class lives, that was new. And I think that that's what made the sensation novel. For those who were first reading them in the early 18th, So exciting, so disturbing and so useful to them as a way of exploring anxieties, preoccupations that were shaping their own lives. John Mullen, they were also known as newspaper novels, and we had a surgeon readership of newspapers at the time,

because of stamp duty and something, and also a surging novel readership and cross-class novel readership. The novels drew on newspapers and fed into newspapers, didn't they? They drew on stories from newspapers and they fed back into newspapers are too many women being put in asylum simply because their husbands don't want them and that sort of thing. Could you? Yes, well, and there's also, I mean, there's always crime in newspapers. As Violet Elizabeth Bot says in Just William, no newspaper without crime.

But also there's some sort of quite racy, juicy new material in newspapers because in 1857 there's a reform of the divorce law. which means that although by our standard is still very difficult, it's a lot easier than it used to be to get divorces. And some of the preceding, some of the cases are getting into the newspapers and very titillating details. And there are cases also, I mean, the bigamy thing is a convenience of the plot for some of these novelists, but there's one or two famous cases where there's one

famous case in 1860 where a man called Major Yelverton is a, is had up for bigamy. And all the details of this, which are not unlike in some ways, a sensation novelist spread out there for everybody to read. And the novelists are reading these things too. And indeed, one of the critics of sensation novels calls them, newspaper novels,

as if the novelists are kind of pandering to a sort of salacious and vulgar appetite amongst the readers. But Lynne Prykitt, they're feeding into them. newspapers these novels as well, aren't there? I just touched on the idea of madness and and asylums being in the novels, but then the newspapers take up this idea. Well, it's a question of who takes up from what. I suppose, I mean, stylistically, I think, this crossover, that the sensational reporting influences the way in which sensation novels are written, not just their content, but the way they're written. And then

the way that sensation novels are written feeds back into the way that journalists tell stories. about the crimes they're reporting or the divorce cases they're reporting. But sorry, I've forgotten the end of your question. Reading the newspaper is actually quite an important thing in the plots of lots of these. And there's a great, I mean, people discover about deaths,

often deaths which haven't really taken place because people coming back from the dead is one of the great sort of tropes of these novels by reading newspapers. But also, you know, as Count Fosco says, in the woman in white, when Marian Hulcombe says that these people who commit terrible crimes will get found out

because they're the kind of people who will necessarily make mistakes and Count Fosker says not at all. You know, read your newspapers, he says. It's full of murders which don't get solved. Wise people commit crimes which don't ever get solved. It seems to me, just to pick up, getting at the sort of these almost two horses running together, pulling the same carriage at that time.

which is very interesting. The newspaper reporting, lengthy, lurid, often written with great dash and verve, and most of these novels, lengthy, lurid, written with great dash and verve. And the same subjects. The same subjects. And also not just newspapers, but periodicals. I think that's very important that most many of these novels first saw the light, as John indicated earlier, in the pages of magazines weekly or monthly. And very often, I mean, take. for example, the woman in white, which appeared in all the year round, Dickens's magazine. It's commissioned by Dickens, really, in order to sell the magazine. He's just launched the magazine. And that's something that we ought to look at, the sensation as a kind of marketing label.

But also, all the year round was running stories on lunatic asylums and the wrongful imprisonment of women. So the reader of the woman in white would be reading. the weekly installment of that novel alongside articles on wrongful

incarceration of women in lunatic asylums alongside articles fulminating against asylum abuses of all kinds so that the first reader of these novels the readers who read them

hot off the press and very hot off the press some critics would say were actually very sensitive to issues more sensitive to certain issues in the novels, I suspect, than the 20th century reader

who comes back and starts reading them cold. There were lots of messages in the novels that they were picking up from elsewhere. And it's worth remembering what a difference that makes to the way these novels are put together. And we almost always now read these novels in modern paperback reprints with footnotes and introductions, and they are presented to us as coherent and completed and polished holes.

That's not how the first reader experienced them at all. The thing was shaped as it went along and the editor always had his eye on sales figures and readership figures, how it was going, whether people were buying these periodicals in order to follow the story or whether on the other hand they weren't because not every sensation novel was a roaring success. One or two of them failed to hit the button. Charles Reeds, hard cash for instance, which is a spectacular example of the sensation novel didn't work in terms of the sales figures and sales fell while he was putting that novel out, though you might think it has all the ingredients. Talking about the readership,

though, is it true, as I asserted in the opening of this programme, that these novels could be called the first read by upstairs and downstairs at the same time? Yes, I think that is true. And what does that signify? What's the point? Why is that important to... Well, I think that it's one of the things that people found unsettling. at the time, that the different social classes, which had seemed very settled, almost fixed in their boundaries, started to seem much less settled, that those people in the upper middle class,

indeed the aristocracy, famously the Prince of Wales, was a huge fan of East Lynn, had, yes, Gladstone, indeed, had the same interests, the same appetites as those who were perhaps first-generation readers and were preparing the dinners of the Prince of Wales. I think there's maybe a sort of reverse, I think one of the reasons critics were taken aback by this,

was it's as if the whole history of the novel's gone into reverse. I mean, if you take a sort of a long view of it, and you start off with Defoe, who exactly made, I mean, somebody said about Bradden, she's made the reading of the kitchen into the reading of the drawing room, and they meant that as a criticism. And actually, people said about Mold Flanders, this is stuff which belongs in the kitchen.

and it was as if novels have struggled for over a century to make themselves respectable. And now they've kind of gone into reverse. The most sensational thing of all, I suppose, are one of them, was bigamy, which you have written came about, when theme grows out of the instability, I'm quoting you, theme grows out of the instability social and geographical of the period.

And was that in itself shocking, or was that in itself, or some people thought, well, this might be a way through, or was that the nadir of the idea of marriage? Yes, well it wasn't a brand new theme, of course. You'll remember that Jane Eyre has a narrow escape from Bigamay, but it does become astonishingly dominant in sensation fiction, the early 1860s. And I think it does reflect this question of things not being what they seem.

You can't trust appearances. You're marrying a man, a woman, he seems, she seems unmarried, but you might not know. And I think this does reflect anxiety about uncertainties within social structures. And it goes with something else that's so dominant within the fiction of the period. People moving up and down through social classes. And also the period, people moving up and down the country on trains. And it's not an accident that East Lynn is very successful. Although trains do provide a lot of interesting accidents.

Yes, absolutely. There are a lot of train accidents. I mean, that famous one in East Lynn is, one of the things that people remember from the novel. You can't count on security, either within the social system or indeed within your emotional life. I mean, I think it's very revealing that the two probably the most popular sensation novels, Lady Ordly's Secret and East Lynn, both have spectacular moves within the class system in that Isabel Vane begins the novel as a governess, in fact.

Lucy Graham, the governess then turns into Lady Audley. whereas in East Lynn you have exactly the same thing happening. In reverse, that is, the lady turns into the governess. You can't count on what had seemed fixed, remaining settled throughout the course of the narrative or throughout the course of a human life. And I think that's one of the reasons why bigamy is so important. The three of you are very well-established literary academics. Do you think you are taking them much more seriously now

than they would have been taken there in John Mullen? And if you're why? No, I don't think so. I think that, I think that, well, let's see. I think you are from what I'm at a touch. I think Collins is taken quite seriously in that. It's interesting, why you are? I think he is seen as a kind of literary artist

and some by some who's sort of put his talents to ill uses. I do think that with Braddon in particular, there are reasons why she has, become a novelist that now gets taught in seminars and students study and there are all sorts of world's classics editions of her novels, which I think might have surprised people, I think almost, you know, before about the 1970s actually. And that there are ways in which we find exactly what was supposedly scandalous or transgressive about these novels when they first appeared.

now makes us, as it were, value them, as if we're discovering something about the Victorians which sort of surprises us. And I think that sometimes that's merely a reflection on our own preconceptions, our own false preconceptions. So we think they're all terribly straight-laced and they sort of, you know, and they couldn't talk about sex,

and they were terribly pious and sentimental about marriage. But, gosh, the things they most enjoyed reading are these things all about adultery, and bigamy. So how interesting that must be. Lynne. Well, one might feel that these novels tell us as much about the political unconscious of the Victorian age. Well, that's very interesting. What do they tell you about the political consciousness? Well, really, I mean, some of the things that Dinah was saying,

that they register all sorts of anxieties about social and cultural change, about social mobility, about changes in gender roles that are going on. I mean, there are a lot of discontented women, women that don't fit into conventional marriage terribly easily. There's a lot about young men who don't seem to know what their proper social role is, and the plot of the novel is often works to kind of embed the young man more securely in middle-class society by the end. I mean, these young men who turn detective, what they detect very often is what their role in society should be, and they end up being the sort of stable father of a family. And also, again, the point that was made earlier,

there is a lot going on around marriage and the family at this time. There's a lot of agitation. Of course, we have to remember in the 1850s, a lot of feminist agitation about marriage laws, about women's rights within marriage, about the rights of women in relation to their... to the custody of their children, and a lot of the plots of these novels deal with those situations. And there's also, of course, very marked interest in money, something we haven't mentioned.

Many of these plots are not really driven by sex, though sex has an important part to play. They're driven by financial fraud, embezzlement, and defrauded inheritances. That crops up all the time in these novels. And I often think that the major 19th century thinker that we ought to be considering here is Marx. And the question of the power of social class inherited money, who has that power, who is using it, who is abusing it, and what the roots of that power might really be. And I think that that was something that was consciously or unconsciously

recognised at the time. Money and sex, sex and money do go together in these novels, but it's often money that has the prior plays. John Mullen, one of the one legacy of the sensational novels was the detective novel. Could you develop that a little for us? Well, I mean, all these novels involve detection, because there's a secret.

There's always a secret. And often the person or people who work out the secret aren't actually professional detectives. And indeed, rather brilliantly, in what's often thought of as the first detective novel, certainly the first great detective novel, The Moonstone, the detective who's brought in is a brilliant detective,

but doesn't actually solve it. And so this kind of, away. Sorry? He's giving it away. People are rushing to buy. He does. He's brought back later.

He goes off to grow roses and doorking, you know, and then... You can't get out of it now. So there's a process of detection, and this is a process that the reader is drawn into. So this sense that detection is something that's gripping, intellectually engaging, but also you're going to find out something rather hot. horrible, rather appalling.

And the person who does that is actually a bit of a monster. I don't know, a bit of a monster, really. I mean, this is a Sherlock Holmes thing, of course. You know, that's what we think of chronologically as kind of the next great achievement in English of detective fiction. And it's also about the pleasure of reading. Sorry to interrupt, but somebody else wants to get on the air, so we better push off.

Thank you all very much. There's a website. Next week I'll be discussing duty. Thanks to... Thanks to you for listening. We just got out. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy

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