The Victorian Era

What Is the Sensation Novel?

Article · Literature & Theatre · The Victorian Era, 1837–1901

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The sensation novel was a distinctive genre of mid-Victorian fiction that flourished in the 1860s and 1870s, marked by crime, bigamy, adultery, murder, concealed identity, broken marriages, and the suspenseful revelation of guilty secrets hidden under the surface of respectable middle-class domestic life. Its principal works were Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859-60) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), and the genre was the subject of the most vigorous critical debate of the period. The wider history of the Victorian novel is examined in The Victorian Novel, and the literary context of the period is set out in Victorian Literature, Theatre, and the Written Word.

Origins

The sensation novel grew out of the Gothic novel of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries — Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797), Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), William Beckford’s Vathek (1786), and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) — but it moved the suspense and the violence out of the medieval castle and into the contemporary vicarage, the suburban villa, and the London boarding house. The settings of the sensation novel were the places in which its readers actually lived: the railway carriage, the country house, the inquest at the local magistrates’ court, the seaside resort, and the office of the family solicitor.

The genre also drew on the melodrama of the minor theatres, on the “Newgate novel” of the 1830s and 1840s — Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford (1830) and Eugene Aram (1832), William Harrison Ainsworth’s Rookwood (1834) and Jack Sheppard (1839) — and on the growing readership of the newspaper reports of murder, embezzlement, and divorce that were the staple of the 1860s press.

The Major Sensation Novelists and Their Works

The principal sensation novelists were Wilkie Collins (1824-1889), Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835-1915), Mrs Henry Wood (Ellen Wood, 1814-1887), Charles Reade (1814-1884), and Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873).

Collins’s principal sensation novels were The Woman in White (1859-60), serialised in Dickens’s All the Year Round; No Name (1862-63); Armadale (1864-66); and The Moonstone (1868), often called the first detective novel in English. Braddon’s were The Trail of the Serpent (1860, also published as Three Times Dead), Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), Aurora Floyd (1863), and Henry Dunbar (1864). Mrs Henry Wood’s were East Lynne (1860-61), Mrs Halliburton’s Troubles (1862), and Verner’s Pride (1863). Reade’s were Hard Cash (1863), Griffith Gaunt (1866), and Put Yourself in His Place (1870). Le Fanu’s were Uncle Silas (1864), set in a country house haunted by its patriarch, and the stories collected in In a Glass Darkly (1872), including the celebrated vampire story “Carmilla”.

The Characteristics of the Genre

The sensation novel was characterised by a number of distinctive features. The first was the use of contemporary settings, characters, and themes, and a deliberate refusal of the historical distance that had protected the Gothic novel from charges of impropriety. The second was the use of multiple narrators, frequently of different social positions, who told the story from different points of view and so forced the reader to weigh evidence, motive, and reliability. The third was the central place of a secret — a murder, a bigamy, an imposture, a forged will, a hidden marriage — that was withheld from the reader for as long as possible, and that structured the entire novel.

The sensation novelists were also notable for their use of new professional classes. The solicitor, the detective, the police constable, the medical man, the photographer, and the chemist became central figures of the fiction in a way that they had not been in the novel of manners; the genre is in part the novel of the rise of the middle class, and it is in part the novel of the professional knowledge that the middle class brought with it.

The Critical Debate

The sensation novel was the subject of the most sustained critical debate of the mid-Victorian period. The attack was led by Henry Longueville Mansel in the Quarterly Review of April 1863, in a long article on “Sensation Novels” that deplored the genre as a corruption of the domestic novel and a return to the Gothic of the 1790s. The defence was taken up by Margaret Oliphant in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, in a series of articles that ran from May 1862 to 1895, and that defended the genre as a faithful reflection of the realities of modern life, and as a healthy sign of the vigour of the English novel.

A second critical debate, on the same texts, opened in the periodical press on the question of whether the sensation novel was fit reading for women. The women novelists of the period, including George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Geraldine Jewsbury, were divided on the question, and the contemporary reviews of Lady Audley’s Secret and East Lynne were the subject of some of the most searching Victorian discussions of the relationship between the novel and its female readership.

The Sensation Novel and the Detective Novel

The sensation novel of the 1860s is the parent form of the English detective novel. Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), the story of the theft of an Indian diamond from a country house, is usually taken to be the first detective novel in the language, and it introduced Sergeant Cuff, the prototype of the English detective. The conventions of the detective novel — the country-house crime, the limited circle of suspects, the careful examination of evidence, the slow revelation of the murderer — are first worked out in the sensation novel, and the genre’s later history, from the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle to the novels of Agatha Christie, has been a working-out of what the sensation novelists began.

The Legacy of the Sensation Novel

The sensation novel left a permanent mark on the English novel. Its techniques — the multiple narrator, the withheld secret, the slow revelation, the careful manipulation of evidence — are now the standard repertoire of the thriller, the mystery, the spy novel, the psychological suspense novel, and the historical detective novel. The form is also the direct ancestor of the cinema and television serial, and the genre’s influence on the modern serialised drama, from the BBC’s Sunday-night costume drama to the American network serial, has been the subject of considerable study. The wider history of the novel of the period is examined in The Victorian Novel.