Sensation Stories: the Life of British Short Fiction in the Age of Victorian Sensation

SENSATION STORIES: THE LIFE OF BRITISH SHORT FICTION IN THE AGE OF VICTORIAN SENSATION

BRITTANY ROBERTS

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2016

2 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The many years it has taken to see this project through to completion means many people to thank for their support and contributions along the way. First, I thank my mentor and committee chair Pamela Gilbert for defying every stereotype of the absent, unresponsive advisor.

Her insightful feedback, quick replies, and unwavering encouragement has had a huge hand in shaping this project, and I am so grateful to her for making herself available in so many essential ways. I am also deeply appreciative of Judy Page, Chris Snodgrass, and Eric Kligerman for not only their service on the committee but for their ideas and advice as this project has developed.

Too, I thank the members of the dissertation writing group at the University of Florida for the insight they provided in the early stages of the drafting process, and in particular, I thank my writing partner John Wiehl for the accountability he provided at every stage of writing, as well as for his ongoing reassurance and enthusiasm.

I would be remiss not to acknowledge the outpouring of support I have received from my colleagues at Broward College. In particular, John Glenn and Jamie Martin have done due diligence to talk me down from the ledge on a number of occasions as I imperfectly learned to navigate an intense full-time teaching load with researching and writing. In addition, the support from the entire department of English on South Campus and from so many other friends truly inspired me to work hard and complete this project. I am humbled by their persistent belief in me. Lastly, I thank my family: my parents for helping me prioritize learning and insisting that I be the first in my family to graduate from college, my children, Adrian and Ethan, for teaching me patience and resiliency, and most significantly, my partner in marriage and life, Kyle, without whose love and support I would never be writing these words. I am so lucky to be surrounded by such patience, intelligence, and compassion. Cheers to the next chapter.

3 TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 3

ABSTRACT ...... 6

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 8

2 SHORT FICTION IN THE AGE OF VICTORIAN SENSATION ...... 24

The Rise of the British Short Story...... 31 Spectacular Fiction ...... 36 Mary Elizabeth Braddon ...... 42 Freedom to Experiment ...... 46 “Ralph the Bailiff” ...... 49 The Subversive Supernatural ...... 55 “The Cold Embrace” ...... 57 “The Shadow in the Corner” ...... 59 “Her Last Appearance” ...... 62 The Less Sensational Braddon...... 66

3 THE PERIODICAL WITH A SECRET: INTERTEXTUAL EDITING AND GOTHIC PARADIGMS IN THE CULTURE OF SENSATION ...... 78

Overview of All the Year Round Editing History ...... 85 No Name ...... 89 Home...... 99 Leaving Home ...... 106 “Out of the House of Bondage” ...... 113 Returning Home...... 119

4 “EXTRAORDINARY APPARITIONS”: GHOST STORIES, SENSATION, AND THE WOMAN IN WHITE ...... 124

5 COMPARING LONG AND SHORT SENSATION FICTION: AFFECT, INTUITION, AND APPEAL...... 162

Differentiating Short and Long Sensation Fiction ...... 168 Tracing Themes in Wilkie Collins’s Short and Long Sensation Fiction ...... 172 Impressions, Suspicions, and Identity in Sensational Short Fiction ...... 183 From “St. Martin’s Eve” to St. Martin’s Eve ...... 190 From “The Murdered Cousin” to Uncle Silas ...... 195 The Appeal and Danger of Short and Long Sensation Fiction ...... 201

4 6 CONCLUSION...... 208

WORKS CITED ...... 213

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 231

5 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

SENSATION STORIES: THE LIFE OF BRITISH SHORT FICTION IN THE AGE OF VICTORIAN SENSATION

Brittany Roberts

May 2016

Chair: Pamela K. Gilbert Major: English

This dissertation interrogates the neglect of short fiction in studies of Victorian sensation, arguing that the form not only offered important contributions to the genre that have been overlooked, but indeed, that the sensational market culture that created new standards for defining literary merit likewise provided the conditions for the British short story to grow and flourish in the mid-nineteenth century. Considering the role of short fiction in sensational discourse from several angles—market conditions, readership and reception, theme, and form—I argue that short periodical works are necessary to understanding the nexus of consumerism, mass marketing, social anxiety, and literary production that first peaked in the 1860s, those things that have largely come to organize our understanding of what was so “sensational” about this historical moment. Not unlike the sensation novel that privileged exciting narrative over character development while stressing the superficial and unstable nature of middle-class life, short fiction as a marginal periodical form at mid-century centered on entertainment for a moment over lasting artistic impression while also offering an opportunity for marginalized voices to participate in and even direct conversations about social and political injustice. Writers of short stories could take up sensational themes in their work that one might expect from a

6 Braddon or Collins novel—mistaken identity, excessive passion, family secrets, shocking revelations, and so forth—without the labyrinthine plotting, but the extraordinary conditions surrounding the publication, transmission, and reception of these works make it a sensational form regardless of whether the content is shocking or dull. The life of the British short story was, in ways that extend beyond just narrative or theme, emphatically sensational.

7 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

These unfortunate masses! . . . [T]heir leisure, brief and rapid, and sharpened with the day’s fatigue, loves, above all things, a story, and finds in that just the amount of mental excitation which makes it somehow a semi-intellectual pleasure. For it is a story for the story’s sake; not a story because it is a good story—a work of genius—a revelation of nature. . . . Merit is quite a secondary consideration; it is the narrative which is the thing . . . It is the tale which is wanted.

– Margaret Oliphant “The Byways of Literature: Reading for the Million”

Margaret Oliphant, one of the most vocal and vicious opponents of sensation fiction in nineteenth-century Britain, uses her 1858 article “The Byways of Literature: Reading for the

Million” to respond to what she perceives as a new, disturbing phenomenon in literature: a

“mushroom growth” of penny magazines “aimed at no class improvement” spawned by a new class of readers only recently made literate (203). She characterizes the reading of the

“unfortunate masses” as a “byway”—a regrettable deviation from the more known “straight and narrow” path of proper middle-class reading—where exciting narrative trumps the more cerebral pleasures of morality, philosophy, and intellectual improvement in the game of magazine sales.

While this article anticipates similar criticism Oliphant will later dole out to middle-class readers of sensation novels only a few years later (a genre lamented for its preoccupation with “low brow” themes of crime, murder, and adultery amid a middle-class backdrop of respectability), it is unique in that it underscores a type of fiction that has for too long remained tangential in conversations about British literature in the mid-nineteenth century and in those of sensation fiction in particular: the story.

In Britain, the term “short story” was not used with any unified understanding of what actually defined the form before the late-nineteenth century,1 and Oliphant’s use of the terms

1 Terms like tale, sketch, story, and so forth were used fairly interchangeably for much of the nineteenth century, and as I elaborate in Chapter 2, scholars have begun to recognize that the distinctions between these forms are much

8 “story” and “tale” serve in part to emphasize how the “art of storytelling” became not only, in her point of view, an unfortunate literary ends in itself but also the most “practicable mental agent upon the masses” (206).2 These stories presented a unique problem for Oliphant. Not only did such texts trumpet a contradiction in the narrative of progress—“We print a great deal better than we used to do, but the matter to be printed shows by no means a corresponding improvement” (Oliphant “The Byways of Literature” 202)—but they also marked the instabilities of a changing market in a changing world, and such mindless ephemera would ultimately pose as much of a problem for the middle class as it did the working class. The repeal of the newspaper tax in 1855, improvements in paper-making and print technology, and increasing literacy rates all helped bolster the success of periodicals, which in turn helped decentralize the way information was dispensed while effectively creating new definitions of literary “success.” While Oliphant would reserve her most potent venom for sensation novels, the short story’s status a marginal form, one often written by marginalized members of society and primarily for these magazines that were changing the way knowledge was shaped and

more of a concern for scholars today than they were for the people who were writing and reading them at the time (Orel 3). In terms of definition by length, there is no magic number of pages that would (dis)qualify a work as a “short” story, though the issue of size is one consistently raised by scholars of the genre. Because there is no concrete threshold at which a story becomes a novel, scholarship continues in its dizzying effort to avoid the most simple but circular definition—a short story is a story that is short—and thus, in the persistence of inquiry, avows that “size, apparently, matters” without offering a clear sense of how to measure it (Liggins, Maunder, and Robbins 1). For this project that deals specifically with mid-century fiction, I have adopted Dickens’s own definition of “short,” which includes any story published in four or fewer parts (Thomas 3).

2 Oliphant characterized the intellect of the working classes as a “superficial intelligence” (206), meaning that while they possessed basic literacy, she did not think them capable of the kind of higher-order thinking that could discern artistic and intellectual value. She rationalized their attraction to strong narratives because they lived “a life outside of themselves—not of contemplation, but of activity” (205); subtlety, she insisted, would be lost on laborers. Logically, then, Oliphant identified storytelling as a way through which the working classes could be improved, that if used correctly, it could be deployed as a mechanism of control. However, she warns that the lower classes are a suspicious group who would balk at anyone who might attempt to choose their reading materials for them—“our friends are touchy—as ready to take offence as any knight of the middle ages, and might suspect a covert imputation upon their knowledge and discrimination, if someone offered to read to them a book which they could read for themselves” (206)—so she thus encourages the middle-class to use oral narratives to rouse the interest of their lower-class “friends” as they attempt to improve their minds: “give the people stories if you love them—narratives fresh, original, and unprinted—and the people will listen once more” (206, my emphasis).

9 disseminated,3 makes its contributions to Victorian sensation worthy of closer examination than it has yet received.

The “sensational sixties” is a well-known catchphrase used by scholars of Victorian literature and culture that alludes to the clear, recognizable changes in publishing, literacy, market trends, and commodity culture that occurred in the 1860s. Central to characterizing these shifts was the emergence of the sensation novel, of which Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White

(1859-1860) is often heralded as the first obvious example. The ensuing publication of Mrs.

Henry Wood’s East Lynne (1861) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) cemented the public’s infatuation with shocking secrets, domestic deviance, familial discord, and the thrill of unchecked passion. This infatuation resonated across classes, as improvements in literacy coupled with more cost-effective publishing practices offered access to novels to those who previously would not have had it. Indeed, it is precisely this new access to goods—and with it, shifting class paradigms—that served to characterize the decade as one of anxious consumerism. In other words, what was so sensational about this period in Britain has as much to do with what Thomas Richards terms an “outburst of the phantasmagoria of commodity culture” as it does the exciting and often scandalous literature produced in it (18).

While the popularity and cultural currency of novels were undoubtedly tied to the market changes that were occurring at the time, short stories were perhaps even more dependent on them. As Harold Orel points out, short fiction published before the 1880s, was looked upon by

3 In Gender and the Victorian Periodical, Hilary Fraser, Stephanie Green, and Judith Johnston argue that the British periodical press in the nineteenth century emerged during “unstable and transitional times,” when the “old absolutist certainties were giving way to a more relativist culture which encouraged the proliferation and diversification of perspectives on the modern world” (3). It thus offered a new articulation of the power of discourse as a site where both collaboration and contestation was possible in ways never before seen. As Laurel Brake and Julie F. Codell write in Encounters in the Victorian Press, the “multi-vocal discourse” of the periodical text created dialogue “among diverse emerging publics from differing classes [and] genders” (2), and decidedly changed the way social, political, and cultural exchanges occurred.

10 Victorian readers and magazine editors alike as mere “by-product,” or “filler material” to the

“central commodity” of the novel (2). Because short fiction at mid-century in Britain was mostly being produced to be packaged with serialized novels in periodicals, there was a sense that these stories were unimportant and often artistically flawed, that their value lay mostly in the entertainment they could provide in a moment of leisure.4 Although collections of short stories by well-known authors were sometimes marketed in their own right, these were financially

“chancy undertakings” (Orel 2), and both authors and publishers knew that money could be better found in novel writing.5 However, as Emma Liggins, Andrew Maunder, and Ruth Robbins point out in their important work mapping the critical tradition of the genre, The British Short

Story, short stories served often as a “cheap literary snack, quickly produced and consumed”

(26), one that provided the satisfaction of “instant gratification” that longer, serialized works necessarily delayed (27). Like sensation novels then, British short fiction had a shared responsibility to excite, entertain, and importantly, gratify cravings that were not altogether pure or wholesome. The short story could pleasure readers through its promise of immediacy and satisfaction; it offered a more bodily fulfillment than the mind’s business of moral refinement and philosophical rumination, which results from patience and fortitude. Unlike sensation novels, however, short stories—even those with very sensational plots—largely evaded censure; to be

4 These assumptions about short fiction, of course, echo the criticism so often leveled at sensation novels. Victorian critics frequently bemoaned these novels’ heavily-plotted narratives that sought above all to excite rather than improve, with some critics going as far as to call them “mere trash,” “excitement . . . purchased too dearly” (Mansel 488-89). The conditions of publication (and perhaps particularly the fact that they were often penned by women) contributed to the stigmatization of sensation novels and short stories alike.

5 Single-authored anthologies of short stories were not popular but were sometimes produced if an author had already established a large readership; these stories were often culled from the author’s existing periodical contributions. Anthologies were generally published not because publishers thought they would bring much revenue but because doing so would please the author and keep him or her loyal to their house. While some authors did receive sizable sums for short-story contributions (Gaskell, Trollope, and Hardy were among these), more often, the sums were quite small. Ellen Wood’s family, for example, claimed she did not receive any money for the stories she published in the 1850s before she became a best-selling author (Liggins, Maunder, and Robbins 25-26).

11 sure, despite their wide circulation, they received little attention at all. If novels were indeed the

“central commodity,” short stories were the mere “stuff” of thoughtless consumption in a decade defined by anxiety about mass production, automation, immediacy, and the permeation of the shop into the most sacred areas of life.

Despite a rich and growing body of scholarship on sensation fiction and commodity culture in the 1860s, short fiction has received very little attention. In fact, the term “Sensation

Fiction” has been fairly misleading the past thirty or so years in criticism of the genre, as studies that have claimed to advance our understanding of the sensational fiction of the 1860s (and beyond) have done so in the vast majority of cases at the expense of any fiction that is not the novel. Early scholars who first sought to invite sensation into our conversations of Victorian literature and culture set the stage for these omissions, defining the genre by that now unshakable catchphrase, the “novel with a secret.” Perhaps taking their cue from Margaret Oliphant’s and

Henry Mansel’s famous tirades against sensation novels in the nineteenth century, writers of many of our now landmark studies of the genre were not misleading about their intentions—their objective was to trace the rise of a particular kind of novel and with it a particular kind of cultural phenomenon.6 While there have been some recent attempts to expand what kinds of works

“qualify” as sensation fiction and how those works might complicate our understanding of this historical moment of intense and rapid change, such efforts have been sporadic and inconsistent.

Edited collections of criticism like Kimberly Harrison and Richard Fantina’s Victorian

Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre (2006), Pamela Gilbert’s Blackwell Companion to

6 Kathleen Tillotson coined the term “novel with a secret” as a way of organizing the body of work that comprised the “lighter reading of the eighteen-sixties” in her introductory remarks to Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White in 1969 (xv). Later, in The Maniac in the Cellar (1980), Winifred Hughes identifies “the sensation novel” as a unique and recognizable genre that “exploded on the literary scene” in the early 1860s and contributed to the “national state of mind known as ‘Sensation Mania’” (5). By the time of Patrick Brantlinger’s 1982 article, “What is ‘Sensational’ about the ‘Sensation Novel’?” the strong association of sensation fiction with the novel was becoming unbreakable.

12 Sensation Fiction (2011), and Andrew Mangham’s The Cambridge Companion to Sensation

Fiction (2013) emphasize a need to expand the genre parameters and timeline of sensation fiction, and each collection includes contributions that make an effort to do so,7 but to date, there is still a real need for a comprehensive study of how short fiction functioned—as a primarily ephemeral form—in an age marked and consumed by fears of “meaningless” consumption driven by bodily desire.

To push our thinking about the sensation genre beyond the novel is necessary when we consider how much of the reading done in this sensational moment in history was of these

“filler” stories that were appearing in popular periodicals. The number of these periodicals published between 1824 and 1900 exceeds fifty thousand (Orel 3), and it is there that the vast majority of short stories appeared. Dennis Denisoff suggests that “short fiction was being consumed by millions from all classes, age groups, and literacy levels,” which “made it so common as to be invisible, and so popular as to be seen as unworthy of the exclusiveness associated with scholarly recognition” (17), and his observation is particularly true for short fiction written before the last two decades of the century, before, as Andrew Maunder writes, it

“came into its own” as a genre (viii). As Liggins, Maunder, and Robbins rightly point out, anthologies—the most common way modern readers can currently access Victorian short

7 In Victorian Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre, Harrison and Fantina contend that a key purpose of their collection is to “expand the limits of the sensation genre” (xi), but only one essay actually engages a work that is not a novel: Nancy Welter’s article “Women Alone: Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’ and Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market.’” Five years later, the Blackwell Companion to Sensation Fiction made a stronger attempt to posit forms outside of the novel as important to the genre. Indeed, as one reviewer of the collection writes, it is “particularly pleasing to see illustration . . . poetry, and short fiction [represented]; these are significant areas of research that are not readily associated with sensation fiction, a genre still very much linked to the novel” (O’ Brien Hill). In The Cambridge Companion to Sensation Fiction, Anne-Marie Beller’s article “Sensation fiction of the 1850s” does a notable job of not only expanding sensation beyond the ‘60s but of revealing how novels written by popular sensation authors in the ‘60s were sometimes derived from short stories these authors had developed in the ‘50s. Still, even with these attempts at inclusivity, the Blackwell Companion as well as the Cambridge Companion that appeared two years later are necessarily limited in how much space they can logically devote to forms outside of the novel in collections that seek to explore Victorian sensation broadly.

13 stories—make it “extremely difficult to reconstruct the impact the story might have had when first read by its original audience among the adverts and serial fiction and editorial matter of a nineteenth-century periodical” (17). With digitization comes increased availability of periodicals, which means greater access to contextualized stories and better opportunities for identifying the larger impact short fiction had on shaping nineteenth-century thought.

In light of new access, recent studies of British fiction in the periodical press, though still few in number, increasingly highlight the fact that, as Denisoff contends, short works “hid in plain sight.” Jochen Achilles and Ina Bergmann, for example, hint at this paradox of in their recent book Liminality and the Short Story: Boundary Crossings in American, Canadian, and

British Writing (2015) when they discuss the piratical impulse in British periodical publishing to take and rework (and more often, flagrantly plagiarize) short stories. Certain narratives, they argue, could become known and easily recognized without having any discernable origin (stories could even appear on different continents under different names); they could be everywhere and yet nowhere in particular, present but not “standing out.” Kate Krueger, on the other hand, sees this (in)visibility differently, arguing in British Women Writers and the Short Story, 1850-1930

(2014) that the invisibility of short stories aligns with women’s invisibility as important producers of cultural knowledge, even though both the stories and the women who produced them were not difficult to find. Indeed, it is well-documented that women contributed substantially to the body of short fiction published in the nineteenth century, and Krueger’s position that short fiction could offer female writers a “venue in which to represent their alienation from dominant ideologies” is echoed particularly in feminist projects of Victorian

14 ghost stories (3-4).8 In attempt to pull short fiction out of the proverbial shadow, works like

Liggins, Maunder, and Robbins’s The British Short Story, Amanpal Garcha’s From Sketch to

Novel: The Development of Fiction, and even Brigham Young University’s Victorian Short Story

Project9 testify to a growing interest in British short fiction produced before the final decades of the century; however, none of have considered with any depth how the form evolved amid and contributed to “Sensation Mania,” a time when the “appearance of things” most inspired skepticism. And yet the evidence of an important connection between short fiction and sensation is, as all-star detective Sergeant Cuff tells his bewildered companion in The Moonstone, “as plain as the nose on your face” (181). Though the novel has played an important role in organizing our understanding of sensation fiction and the literary market in the nineteenth-century, it has subsequently hidden the short story from view.

This dissertation interrogates the neglect of short fiction in studies of Victorian sensation while arguing that the form not only offered important contributions to the genre that have been overlooked, but indeed, that the sensational market culture that created new standards for defining literary merit likewise provided the conditions for the British short story to grow and flourish. Considering the role of short fiction in sensational discourse from several angles— market conditions, readership and reception, theme, and form—I argue that short periodical works are necessary to understanding the nexus of consumerism, mass marketing, social anxiety,

8 Examples include Vanessa D. Dickerson’s Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural (1996), Diana Wallace’s “Uncanny Stories: The Ghost Story as Female Gothic” (2004), and Melissa Edmundson Makala’s Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2013).

9 The Victorian Short Story Project is a collaborative digital archiving venture designed by the students and faculty at Brigham Young University. Stories published throughout Victoria’s reign are hosted for easy access in an effort to offer a broader sense of what the Victorians were consuming in their “everyday reading” and encourage “study of the nineteenth-century short story” (“Main Page”). The stories vary widely in theme and intended audience, but all fall under fifty pages in length. Leslee Thorne-Murphy and Michael C. Johnson write about their experience developing the project in their article, “The Victorian Short Fiction Project: A Web-Based Undergraduate Research Assignment,” which appears in The Journal of Victorian Culture (2011).

15 and literary production that first peaked in the 1860s, those things that have largely come to organize our understanding of what was so “sensational” about this historical moment. Not unlike the sensation novel that privileged exciting narrative over character development while stressing the superficial and unstable nature of middle-class life, short fiction as a marginal periodical form at mid-century centered on entertainment for a moment over lasting artistic impression while also offering an opportunity for marginalized voices to participate in and even direct conversations about social and political injustice. Writers of short stories could take up sensational themes in their work that one might expect from a Braddon or Collins novel— mistaken identity, excessive passion, family secrets, shocking revelations, and so forth—without the labyrinthine plotting, but the extraordinary conditions surrounding the publication, transmission, and reception of these works make it a sensational form regardless of whether the content is shocking or dull. The life of the British short story was, in ways that extend beyond just narrative or theme, emphatically sensational.

I use the term sensation stories in this dissertation not simply to draw attention to a particular genre of story (although I do explore at some length a subset of the form that most closely resembles the novels of the same name) but to signal the short story’s implied relationship to industrial print culture and the market economy. The stories included in the study vary in several respects; they include crime stories that flourished in the 1850s, periodical short fiction—thrilling or not—written by well-known sensation authors, ghost stories,10 and tales published at the height of the sensation craze in the 1860s that padded and accentuated the serial

10 Ghost stories are generally distinguished from sensation fiction simply because of their supernatural dimension; however, as I argue in Chapter 4, the supernatural, ironically, was alive and well in sensation novels, with virtually all “canonical” works employing supernatural elements in varying degrees. Too, as Bown, Burdett, and Thurschwell write, “the language the Victorians used to represent themselves and their world was saturated with the metaphors of the supernatural” (2), and the way that texts were being produced and consumed using new, remarkable techniques and methods invites such metaphors. Even the term ephemera has a supernatural quality to it as a text that appears only briefly before it disappears into nothingness.

16 installments of popular sensation novels while creating new “intertextual” narratives. It is now widely accepted among Victorian scholars that “sensation” was as much a buzz word that encapsulated middle-class anxieties about a changing nation as it was a distinct literary genre, and this project acts according to that spirit. Ultimately, short fiction could do things that the novel could not, and these differences matter in the context of anxious consumerism: for one, no one bought a short story. Novels could be sought and selected in lending libraries and elsewhere, and they drove magazine sales; they testify to some level of consumer agency despite critics’ fears that consumption was mindless. The vast majority of stories, in contrast, were packaged along with other kinds of writings (particularly novels), and thus testify to a lack of consumer agency in matters of literary consumption. Two, because novels were so visible, they were subject to disciplinary mechanisms that short stories were not. A story like Ellen Wood’s “St.

Martin’s Eve” (1853) for example, could feature a mother who kills her step-son by fire and yet fully sidestep public criticism, which it did until it was developed into the novel by the same name in 1866.11 A lack of visibility means a different kind of opportunity for social commentary, a greater freedom to express ideas that might otherwise subject authors—particularly female authors—to venomous public scrutiny. The goal of this project is to draw attention to these and other functions of short fiction in the sensational literary market, and the following four chapters approach this goal in unique ways.

In Chapter 2, I trace the development of British short fiction in the nineteenth century and explore at greater length how the invisibility of these stories at mid-century (despite the growing

11 For example, one reviewer in The Spectator decries the fact that Wood, “in want of a strongly sensational machinery,” would use insanity to justify otherwise “unnatural” impulses in a wife and mother: “If any ordinary novelist made an ordinary woman do what Charlotte Norris does in St. Martin’s Eve,—fascinate the man she loves, then hate his child, and then either burn to death the poor infant of four years old who loves her, or seeing him on fire leave him to burn, we should condemn her as ignorant of the first truths of the human heart . . . but then Charlotte Norris is mad” (“Madness in Novels” 135).

17 number of magazines that featured them) created opportunities for marginalized voices to express powerful critique of dominant ideologies. I focus on new models of publishing and consumption to show in this chapter how the British short story (sometimes sensational in plot and sometimes not) not only benefited from the same social and economic circumstances that produced the conditions for sensation novels to flourish, but also how the short story’s cultural status was one that validated the growing concern about compromising aesthetics amid economic pressures that sensation novels had been generating. As short fiction proliferated in this new age of magazine culture, increasing pressure to provide more and more stories created new problems for the form’s aesthetic credibility, as accelerated writing and publishing timelines, rampant plagiarism, and overt sensationalism relegated it to the unimpressive ranks of the “popular.” Still, they flourished all the same. This growing body of fiction testifies to a new economy of reading where entertainment for a moment was more highly valued than originality or “serious” literary achievement. Thus, if fears about sensation novels were really indicative of larger fears about tradition and spirituality being displaced by ephemerality and materialism, short fiction as a burgeoning magazine form in Britain further supported the sense that a new market culture was effecting a shift in values that was radically changing the terms of “important” literature. To illustrate this concept, I focus in the chapter on Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s extensive oeuvre of short fiction not only to highlight how short stories served as the largely “invisible” machinery of a new reading economy but also to show how the form taken with its market conditions could create a space where prevailing ideologies could be challenged, often more directly than in novels, which were subject to more critical scrutiny.

Chapter 3 explores the influence of short fiction in the context of the intertextual and dialogic reading practices that mid-nineteenth century periodicals fashioned. Although individual

18 short stories could effectively sidestep the public disciplinary mechanisms sensation novels could not avoid, in their original periodical context, these stories helped shape readers’ experience with these novels in significant ways. A skillful editor could ensure a stronger impact of a featured serial by supplementing with content that would invite connections between works, highlight particular themes, and extend the social commentary of the novel. One of the defining features of sensation fiction is its “domestication of gothic,” its insistence that the most horrible of mysteries is waiting right outside one’s door on the domestic hearth, and how these works were serialized—though it has not yet been addressed—played a role in influencing how readers would interpret the threat to “home” articulated in these novels. Building upon Deborah Wynne’s work on interpellation and intertextual editing in Victorian family magazines, I argue that the short stories and supplemental works that accompanied the novel could also “place” the novel.

Here, by “placing,” I refer to the practice of “homing” parts of a novel into an issue of a periodical (turning fragments into a new whole), as well as situating the sensational plot as imperiled domestic space. Using Wilkie Collins’s No Name as a case study, I show how an overwhelming number of stories, articles, histories, and biographies that were published alongside the novel in Charles Dickens’s All the Year Round emphasize foreign adventures, bizarre rituals, cruel pasts, and uncanny occurrences. Dickens, whose conscientious editing process is well-documented, chose stories he felt would pair well with key parts of the novel without necessarily wanting to replicate theme, which is what Wynne suggests he does, because he feared it would not maintain readers’ interests. An intertextual reading of No Name in its original periodical context reveals how readers would be encouraged see what Winifred Hughes terms the “civilized,” “modernized,” and “domesticated” events of the sensation novel, always in

19 relation to the subversive, foreign, and strange because of the way the installments tended to be pieced together.

While Chapter 3 focuses on how periodicals structured meaningful dialogic reading encounters between the sensational serial and short works published in the issue, Chapter 4 examines how the ghost story genre of short fiction in particular had a great impact in shaping how sensation novels more broadly posed and addressed questions about appearance(s) and identity. By the mid-nineteenth century, ghost stories had already taken the British home as the place best suited for haunting by otherworldly menaces, and in doing so, they created a paradigm that sensation novelists would turn on its head with great success: good, middle-class Victorian homes haunted by evil people rather than evil spirits. Even though sensation novels were primarily realist texts that offered plausible rationales for even the most sensational of circumstances, these novels are punctuated with ghost sightings, intuition, and imperfect

“seeing,” although the ghosts of sensation fiction generally turn out to be regular, corporeal individuals caught up in extraordinary situations. Like ghost stories, though, sensation novels tend to caution against believing too readily in the “reality” of what one appears to see–though if something feels off, it probably is. While the process of detection in sensation novels underscores the possibility of restoring order and getting at “the Truth,” which is a departure from the ghost story paradigm, markers of identity and status in these works frequently obscure more than they make legible, which accentuates the fact that identity can be frighteningly inexplicable and social certainties curiously uncertain.

Using The Woman in White as an example, I show how important these elements of the ghost story are to Collins’s sensational exploration of identity. In the novel, the mysterious woman in white is first introduced as an “extraordinary apparition” wandering about in the

20 moonlight (20), and as the title implies, the novel will revolve around this nameless phantom, with Walter Hartright—who first encounters her all alone on the high-road at night—leading the investigative effort to find out who exactly she is. Collins ultimately departs from the ghost story tradition by refusing to leave this specter-woman in other-worldly anonymity, refusing to let the reader decide whether she is merely a figure of Hartright’s overworked imagination or a real ghost; instead, over many weeks of serial installments, he opts for the more “sensational” approach of exploring who she is, where she comes from, and why she is out on the open road in the middle of the night. In the end, these questions can be answered—the woman in white is not really an extraordinary apparition but Anne Catherick, a wronged woman—and thus the novel suggests that the people whom one meets in ordinary life may be far more frightening than an encounter with the paranormal.

Lastly, Chapter 5 focuses on sensation stories that thematically most resemble those works of middle-class crime and deviance we have come to associate with the genre. To challenge the long-held practice of treating the sensation genre as one comprised only of novels,

I offer several examples of shorter varieties of the genre but argue that because, as Susan Lohafer has suggested, “short fiction . . . is the most ‘end conscious’ of forms [and] readers of short fiction are the most ‘end-conscious’ of readers” (94), formal considerations encourage greater use of impressions and feelings as opposed to events and exposition to resolve the narrative in a limited space. The result is a plot that is often activated by a character’s (often the narrator’s) intense feelings of mistrust or dread toward another character or situation, and whose emotional reactions then imbue otherwise ordinary circumstances with meaning. In suggesting deviance is best discerned through the body rather than the mind, these sensational stories create a path to pleasurable revelation where trusting one’s gut offers the most effective form of policing, which

21 could in turn promote suspicion and distrust capable of damaging real-life bonds and relationships. Pulling from works by Collins, Dickens, Braddon, Wood, and Le Fanu, I show how crime and violent passions are a hallmark of these stories, but how even those stories that are very explicit in their handling of violence and depravity (oftentimes even more explicit than novels) present a threat that is ultimately less menacing than that of novels because of the different appeal they had for readers. If sensation novels had an addictive quality to them that incited cravings for more and more reading, stories, as I show, instead promised fulfillment.

Where one “satisfied readers” (Chan 8) and offered “instant—or almost instant—gratification”

(Liggins, Maunder, and Robbins 27), the other threatened to ensnare readers in a cycle of consumption capable of destroying Britain’s reputation of intellectual and moral superiority.12

Thus, comparing sensational short stories and novels provides new insight about what was actually so dangerous about those thrilling works of bigamy, crime, and murder: not that middle- class immorality was being depicted in print, but that middle-class immorality was desired intensely, and with this new market culture, there could be no foreseeable end to it in sight.

Ultimately, this project insists that critics of “short” fiction should not stipulate that the form was “lesser than” the novel, and that while the novel has persisted in defining the genre of sensation fiction, allowing it to do so is a needlessly restrictive trend—particularly when we acknowledge that much of the fiction reading Victorians did involved works that were not novels. I have chosen to situate the story within several different contexts as an attempt not only to show how sensational content extended beyond the novel but also to draw attention to and begin conversations about the many ways short fiction informed Victorian consumers’ experience as readers as well as their understanding of the world that was changing before their

12 Not only did serialization ensure recurrent purchasing of a magazine during a novel’s run, but the serial could then also become a three-volume novel with a whole new afterlife of ongoing circulation.

22 eyes during this very sensational moment in time. Although Victorians did not give as much critical attention to short stories as they did novels, stories flourished all the same and validated—in a different way than novels did—their fears about a society bred on unthinking consumption. But finally, while the reasons for studying the life of British short fiction in the age of sensation are many, perhaps Oliphant was right in a way, and we should take our cue from the

Victorians themselves: sometimes “a story for a story’s sake” is reason enough.

23 CHAPTER 2 SHORT FICTION IN THE AGE OF VICTORIAN SENSATION

Much has been done to complicate Patrick Brantlinger’s 1982 claim that sensation fiction was merely a “minor subgenre of British fiction that flourished in the 1860s only to die out a decade or two later” (“What is so ‘Sensational’ about the ‘Sensation Novel’?” 1). It is now generally recognized that “sensation” was a ubiquitous term that emerged at this moment in history, one that not only alerted readers to a particular kind of literary plot but also one that testified to a new current of commodity culture that was wreaking havoc on Victorian life at the time. The commodity culture that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century did so as a result of a new kind of mass-market production of commodities, unprecedented levels of discourse about these commodities, and the cultural impact wrought by them (Harrison 528). Products that were once out of reach financially for the masses became increasingly affordable, and thus, the

“status” of owning such goods could no longer be held as an exclusive privilege of the well-born and well-off. Producing, purchasing, and consuming could now be done at record speed and record low prices, which while offering exciting new possibilities for a new crop of buyers, also increased anxiety about the moral and intellectual ramifications of thoughtless purchasing.

The literary marketplace, of course was no exception. Consumers’ desire to acquire, coupled with their newfound ability to do it, implicated art in this new commercialized market— the value of a work could now be measured by its sales and no longer tied exclusively to its so- called aesthetic or moral significance. Sensation fiction, as Lyn Pykett suggests, emerged as both a “product and symptom” of changes in the fiction market (The Nineteenth-Century Sensation

Novel 13). Indeed, the immense popularity of sensation novels—with their emphasis on exciting narratives, mysteries, and crime—testify to this shift, and literary reviewers and moral crusaders alike were extremely vocal about the intellectual and spiritual ramifications of reading a “story

24 for a story’s sake” (Oliphant “The Byways of Literature” 205). Henry Mansel, a political conservative and professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford University, for example, argues in his 1863 article that sensation novels are merely the product of “the market law of demand and supply,” asserting that “A commercial atmosphere floats around works of this class, redolent of the manufactory and the shop. The public wants novels, and novels must be made—so many yards of printed stuff, sensation pattern, to be ready by the beginning of the season” (483). By likening sensation novels to “pattern[ed] . . . yards of printed stuff,” Mansel shows how the creative and intellectual workmanship of quality writing was being reduced, in his view, to common stock. Whether or not we agree with Mansel’s opinion that sensation novels be “mere trash or something worse” (488), his suggestion that this new economy of reading was not only changing how works were consumed, but also what kinds of works were desired and produced, is important for understanding how short fiction—as well as “sensational” narratives—became a part of quotidian Victorian life.1

Of course, much has already been written on sensation novels’ status as mass cultural commodities,2 especially in light of the fact that they were published, according to Kimberley

Harrison, alongside an “increasing commodification of Victorian life” (529); however, short fiction too played an important role in the literary marketplace and in the reading experience of

Victorian consumers, although it has remained largely outside of our discussions when exploring

1 Beth Palmer’s suggestion that sensation fiction is “rooted in the press” is equally true for British short fiction (1), as the rapid growth of cheap periodicals at mid-century allowed both sensation fiction and short stories to proliferate. Andrew Maunder has testified to this “parallel development,” arguing that the increase in the number and circulation of short stories arose synchronously as interest in “sensational” stories of crime and deviance escalated (“Introduction” ix).

2 Ann Cvetkovich notes that sensation novels acquired their name not only because of their “melodramatic focus on crime and sex,” but also because of their “enormous popularity” (14). She explains that critics were forced to discuss them whether they wanted to or not because “sensation novels were everywhere, produced and consumed in such vast numbers that their appeal demanded explanation” (14).

25 this culture of sensation. In The British Short Story, Emma Liggins, Andrew Maunder, and Ruth

Robbins explain how short fiction at mid-century was popular with publishers primarily as a magazine and newspaper form, as opposed to be being bound together in anthologies (26).

Although short fiction, at least through the seventies, was looked upon by Victorian readers and magazine editors as mere “by-product,” or “filler material” to the “central commodity” of the novel (Orel 2), Liggins, Maunder, and Robbins contend that these stories served many important functions, including setting the tone for the magazine, serving as “bait” by enticing readers with new material from popular writers, and satisfying readers’ needs for plots with complete resolutions (26-27). Thus, not unlike the serialized sensation novels that they were produced alongside, short stories of the mid-century were very much a market commodity that could fulfill the unique needs of readers, editors, and authors alike.

Short fiction’s widespread availability, however, did not translate into the same kind of widespread popularity—or notoriety—as sensation novels’ did. In his introduction to the

Broadview Anthology of Short Stories, Dennis Denisoff reveals that “short fiction was being consumed by millions from all classes, age groups, and literacy levels,” which he argues “made it so common as to be invisible, and so popular as to be seen as unworthy of the exclusiveness associated with scholarly recognition” (17). Denisoff’s observation is true particularly for those short stories written before the last two decades of the century, which is the historical point at which critics have typically identified the British short story as “c[oming] into its own” as a genre (Maunder “Introduction” viii). At mid-century, despite being brought to the public under similar economic circumstances as sensation novels, frequently being produced by well-known sensation authors, and sharing the same magazine space as popular sensation novels, short fiction received very little critical attention and prompted very little debate.

26 This “invisibility” (despite being everywhere) is extremely important in conversations about Victorian sensationalism because it offers a new context for understanding fears about unthinking consumption at a time when literature was becoming increasingly cheap, ephemeral, and formulaic. Victorian literary critics feared above all the intellectual and moral ramifications of works that, without any attempt to improve the values or refine the taste of readers, would seek to entertain at all costs, works as easily forgotten as read. Looking at trends in publishing and consumption, I show in this chapter how the British short story (sensational in plot or not) not only benefited from the same social and economic circumstances that conditioned sensation novels, but also how its cultural status was one that validated the concerns about compromising aesthetics amid economic pressures that were being generated by sensation novels. Indeed, the proliferation of short stories at the time—well-known stories worked and reworked, plagiarized and revised, consumed and forgotten and learned anew—testify to a changing landscape in print publishing born from periodicals, one in which entertainment for a moment triumphs over originality or serious literary achievement. Thus, if fears about sensation novels were really indicative of larger fears about tradition and spirituality being displaced by ephemerality and materialism in a broader sense, short fiction as a burgeoning magazine form in Britain further supported the sense that a new market culture was effecting a shift in values that was radically changing the terms of “important” literature.

Furthermore, I argue that the short story’s invisibility creates the conditions for powerful critique of dominant ideologies, where what Michael Basseler calls “culturally repressed forms of knowledge” can find a voice (82). To implicate the conditions of publication in the epistemic project of the genre offers an important revision of Clare Hanson’s claim that it is merely the

“formal” properties of short fiction—its “disjunction, inconclusiveness, obliquity”—that connect

27 with its “ideological marginality” and invite expression of “something suppressed/repressed in mainstream literature” (6). The sensation novel, too, frequently participates in cultural critique, using tropes of disguise, doubles, and mistaken identity among others to bring to light and create anxiety about social problems of all kinds. However, the incredible visibility of sensation novels—indeed, what we might call their spectacular visibility—beginning in the middle decades of the nineteenth century made them subject to public disciplinary mechanisms that the short story as a “minor” form could largely avoid.3

The sensation novel’s preoccupation with “exposing” secrets and, as Marlene Tromp rightly asserts, “making the private public” (99), made it a spectacle for public disapprobation in a way that the short story was not. If monstrous women, monstrous deeds, and monstrous excesses defined sensation fiction, the popularity of the genre offered its own version of gothic monstrosity. As Judith Halberstam has argued in a different context, monstrosity is a gothic construction that depends on “visual codes” (39), and I would argue that the sensation novel’s unshakable position as the literary “monster” of mid-century commodity culture testifies to its status as a “deviant form” that “announces itself (de-monstrates) as the place of corruption” (2).

While, in its visibility, the monster is always the “primary focus of interpretation” (Halberstam

2), that doesn’t mean stories are meaning-less. On the contrary, for a form that was at once highly visible and equally hidden, the British short story offers a remarkable study in the liminal spaces opened up by commodity exchange and the room for marginalized voices that such an exchange can make possible—particularly for women who frequently wrote and published short works. While the monstrously visible sensation novel dominated the periodical as well as the

3 The lack of scholarship on British short fiction offers another example of how the short story is able to subvert what Anna Maria Jones calls “productive discipline,” as she argues in Problem Novels that scholars too “participate in a kind of invisible disciplining” of that which they study (8).

28 panicked conversations, short stories, as perhaps the most widely consumed literature that few ever actually sought out to buy, could offer important critique without the same fear of reproach.

Thus, as a “throw away” form, short stories, not unlike sensation novels, ironically appropriated the popular to express potentially “unpopular” views that could challenge establishment appraisals of moral and intellectual “worthiness.”

To illustrate, I focus on Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s extensive collection of short fiction not only to highlight how short stories served as the largely “invisible” machinery of a new reading economy but also to show how the form taken with its market conditions could create a space where prevailing ideologies could be interrogated and challenged. Braddon’s reputation, of course, precedes her. Sensation novels like Lady Audley’s Secret and Aurora Floyd catapulted her to fame in the 1860s, and she has still yet to shake them as the defining works of her prolific writing career. The result has been a Braddon whose chief interests, for the purposes of much modern scholarship, lie in sensational devices of murder, bigamy, and violent passions—a woman whose own “untraditional” lifestyle perhaps helped her conceive of defiant female characters who could effectively manipulate social systems for their own benefit, but to the dismay of feminist recovery scholars, who also tend to suffer sorely for their misdeeds by novel’s end. Braddon’s short stories challenge this image in significant ways. For one, although

Braddon’s most famous sensation novels tend to punish deviant femininity by their endings, her short stories that lean more toward the sensational in content often resist the conservative impulse to serve errant women a well-deserved comeuppance, instead highlighting the way in which women who take extreme actions are actually victims of systemic inequality rather than mere evil (or insane) perpetrators of unreasonable crimes against “good people.” Although suicide is common in these stories, the women who take their own lives often do so to because of

29 the power they gain in the afterlife; indeed, Braddon frequently relies on the supernatural to facilitate her heroines’ revenge or to haunt those who have been complicit in wrongdoing with a reminder of their responsibility. These stories frequently characterize the sins against these women as problems that cannot simply be erased, or to use the phrasing of Lady Audley’s Secret,

“buried alive,” and they point to the way that short fiction could provide a safer space for greater risk-taking even for authors otherwise subject to intense public scrutiny because of their celebrity status.

Lastly, as I show in the final section of the chapter, surveying Braddon’s stories published at the height of the sensation craze means acknowledging that much of her work bears little resemblance to the more sensational works with which we have come to associate her, though they are indeed representative of the body of short fiction then circulating in middle-class periodicals at the time. With stories that often feature traditional family and courtship arrangements as well as women who sacrifice their own desires and their own happiness for the good of others, many of these works at first read do not seem especially “risky,” particularly in light of Braddon’s more sensational narratives. Still, even with their simplicity and nod toward convention, Braddon frequently relies on comedy and sentimentalism—common tropes of mid- nineteenth century stories—to underscore how women fail to benefit from these more traditional social arrangements. Writing of the comic story, for example, Michael Billing argues that

“laughter represents a rebellion against order—a temptation to a dangerous moment of anarchy against the severe demands of social constraint” (98); Braddon’s stories are indeed effective at reducing convention to ridiculousness, which in turn creates a reading encounter that in itself threatens to become a “dangerous moment of anarchy.” Sentimentality, on the other hand, invites readers to indulge momentarily in excessive feelings, particularly in response to women who

30 suffer in social arrangements over which they have no control. Pamela Gilbert cites the “general evolution of women’s rights” as having had something to do with “a large audience ‘feeling right’ about the suffering of women who were powerless either in marriage, or against men who exploited their affections, even though no solution is proposed in these texts” (“Genre Fiction and the Sensational” 147). So while many of Braddon’s short stories are free from shocking secrets and unlawful marriages, they point to the ways that simple plotting within in a single narrative mode can elicit certain kinds of affective response that are both indicative of shifting social attitudes and effective in producing them. Though Braddon may have owed much of her success and notoriety to her sensational villainesses, her short fiction—less conspicuous in the glut of magazine ephemera—helped circulate among a new mass readership the problem of women’s dependence and the variety of forms it so frequently takes.

The Rise of the British Short Story

The British short story developed in the nineteenth century on a distinct trajectory from its better-known and more widely studied American counterpart, and recognizing this difference is important to get a sense of how the genre participated in an increasingly fast-paced culture of

“sensation” while owing its own growth to the “violent stimulant” of serial publication of novels

(Oliphant 569). While the impulse to compare the development of the British short story to the

American one is understandable, especially given that it was a recognizable “national genre” in

America long before it became an “important” form in British literary circles, the comparison may be a short-sighted one. As Henry Orel makes clear, the British were much more concerned with the workings of the novel, and in fact, that Poe’s “no-nonsense views on what a short story should do were not much discussed, and certainly not subscribed to, by the Victorian authors for most of the century” (3). So even though the American short story is often positioned as the model for the genre, it actually makes more sense to think about British short fiction as a discrete

31 emerging genre in relation to changes in print culture, readership, and particularly the serialized novel, which dominated British cultural consciousness at the time. After all, as historian Peter

Keating points out, it is not likely that the short story would have developed much at all in the nineteenth century if “the market had not been so desperate to fill periodicals’ columns with fiction” (40).

Although short works of fiction appeared throughout the century, the consensus has largely been that the British short story was “born” late in the nineteenth century.4 James Eli

Adams,5 Roger Luckhurst,6 and others cite 1884 as the year in which the first recorded use of the term “short story” occurs in Britain, when Brander Matthews, a Cornell professor of dramatic literature, adopts the term in the London-based Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science, and Art. An American scholar, Matthews makes the first attempt to theorize the British short story, and he does so in part by considering how it departs from Poe’s conception of the short prose tale. In Poe’s now famous philosophical rumination on the form in his review of Nathaniel

Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales (1842), he unites traditions of oral storytelling (the tale) with writerly considerations (prose). Matthews suggests that the British short story, by the end of the nineteenth century, takes a conscientious break from the oral tradition implied by Poe’s use of the word “tale.” The “Short-story,”7 he suggests, is a form developed under the express

4 Joseph M. Flora, for example, purposes his edited collection The English Short Story: 1880-1945 to “celebrat[e] both the birth of the short story in England and its richest period there” (xii). His rhetoric echoes Helmut E. Gerber’s earlier rationale in his introduction to The English Short Story in Transition 1880-1920, a period which he describes as “not only the kindergarten of the short story but its university” (xi). Liggins, Robbins, and Maunder discuss this prevailing impulse to stage the British short story as a late-nineteenth century production in their introduction to The British Short Story (6-7).

5 In A History of Victorian Literature (294)

6 In Science Fiction (17)

7 Matthews capitalizes and hyphenates the term “Short-story” throughout The Philosophy of the Short-Story; however, he does not hyphenate it in his initial Saturday Review article.

32 conditions that it should be read.8 Matthews later develops The Philosophy of the Short-Story

(1901) from portions of this Saturday Review article and a later, more developed version of that article that appeared in Lippincott’s in 1885, wherein, he further attempts to articulate a

“philosophy” of the form that takes into account its writerly dimensions by comparing it to and distinguishing it from the novel. His work is the first book-length project of its kind to consider the British short story as a genre unique from the novel in terms other than mere length.9

Despite the so-called “birth” of the British short story in the final decades of the nineteenth century, we find countless examples of different kinds of short stories throughout the century, some that bear resemblance to the modern short story of the late-nineteenth century in their adherence to the “single narrative” form that populated the marketplace in later years, and others that offered alternative versions that were often plotless and notable for their fragmentation and stasis. The terminology used to describe these widely divergent forms –“tale,”

“sketch,” “fable,” “short tale,” etc.—testifies to the lack of a unified understanding of what the genre was or could be. A sketch, as Amanpal Garcha has written at length in his important study of the form From Sketch to Novel, was generally a plotless, atemporal variety of fiction that engaged in “fantasies of escape from time’s movement” (4). Something like tale or fable would usually imply a plotted narrative while evoking traditions of oral storytelling. However, Harold

8 The term “short story” was actually used sporadically in the mid-nineteenth century before Matthews “coined” it; however, in its earlier usage it was actually tied to a notion of “story telling,” that is, a story communicated orally to a listener or group of listeners. These short stories, especially for Dickens, were written with this oral dimension in mind. For example, in October of 1852, Dickens writes to the Reverend James White about the Christmas number of Household Words, revealing that it will consist “entirely of short stories,” as if “told by a family sitting round the fire,” and indeed, with titles like “The Poor Relation’s Story,” “The Child’s Story,” “The Old Nurse’s Story,” etc., it is clear that he accomplishes his goal. For more information on Dickens and orality in short stories, see Deborah A. Thomas’s Dickens and the Short Story.

9 In language that seems to echo Poe, Matthews writes in The Philosophy of the Short-Story that “the difference between a Novel and a Short-story is something other and something more than a mere story which is short. A true Short-story differs from the Novel chiefly in its essential unity of impression. In a far more exact and precise use of the word, a Short-story has unity as a Novel cannot have it” (15).

33 Orel has suggested that efforts to distinguish between these forms are mostly a modern undertaking by Victorian scholars, that the distinctions “mean more to us in this century than they ever did in Victorian England” (3). In a similar vein, Denis Denisoff points out that “Many people actually used terms like ‘story,’ ‘short story,’ and ‘tale,’ interchangeably” (14). The

Victorians’ incomplete understanding of what short fiction actually was likewise meant a lack of

“rules” to govern it, which suggests that the story was positioned as a site where remarkable experimentation could take place.

The lack of conscientious deliberation about “rules,” form, and narrative effect, however, is also largely to blame for the British short story’s branding as “lesser.” For example, not only did Matthews offer some of the first criticism of the British short story as a coherent and unique genre, he is also at least in part responsible for initiating what has since become a seemingly unshakable tendency to compare British and American versions of the form—and the comparison is generally not a positive one for the British story, as Matthews makes it clear that the British are inferior to the Americans in their handling of it. The “superiority” of the

American short story, he speculates, stems from a “material demand” that does not exist in

Britain, or at least not in the “same degree”:

The short-story is of very great importance to the American magazine. But in the British magazine the serial Novel is the one thing of consequence, and all else is termed ‘padding.’ . . . [W]hoever in England has the gift of story-telling is strongly tempted not to essay the difficult art of writing Short-stories, for which he will receive only an inadequate reward; and he is as strongly tempted to write a long story which may serve first as a serial and afterward as a three-volume Novel. The result of this temptation is seen in the fact that there is not a single British novelist whose reputation has been materially assisted by the Short-stories he has written. More than once in the United States a single Short-story has made a man known; but in Great Britain such an event is well-nigh impossible. (56-57)

In America, it seems, short stories were worth pursuing for artistic as well as financial and occupational reasons. The story was the star of the American periodical—the reason for

34 reading—and thus writers of the form could feel confident in their efforts because it could be a venue for establishing literary credibility. There was greater exigency then to think about the aesthetics of the form and to make a deliberate effort to define it. In Britain, however, the novel was cast in the leading role, with shorter pieces working as “extras”— supplementary, largely unnoticed, poorly paid. The material conditions of British short fiction thus profoundly impacted its status as an aesthetically inferior form that could “support” a novel without having much to offer of its own.

We might be mistakenly led to believe then that these stories are unimportant, not a

“thing of consequence” to use Matthews’s terminology.10 On the contrary, the fact that the genre flourished despite its lack of coherence suggests that it served a significant—valuable—function in the British literary marketplace. Indeed, not only could these stories enrich the experience of reading periodicals by inviting intertextual play between the serial and its supplementary parts, as I will discuss at greater length in Chapter 3, but they were also integral in creating a new world of reading, one in which reading as a form of transitory entertainment, rather than intellectual or moral improvement, is the new norm. The sketch, the tale, the fable, something else—it needn’t much matter so long as it could sustain readers’ interest, as Orel’s suggestion that we have contemporaneously heightened the distinctions between these forms does actually seem right. What was needed was, in Mansel’s terms, “many yards of printed stuff,” and like sensation novels written for quick consumption, short stories—with their indistinct form and what was thought throughout the greater part of the nineteenth century to be questionable

10 British authors did not begin to theorize the aesthetic possibilities of shortness (unique from the idea of the “condensed”) until late in the nineteenth century. As Adrian Hunter points out in the Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English, “Whereas for Dickens and Mrs. Gaskell the short story had been little more than a highly condensed novel, not governed by any aesthetic principles of its own, later Victorian authors began to think more strategically about the art of ‘writing short’” (7). Furthermore, Valerie Shaw has argued that it is “only towards the end of the nineteenth century, when in fact all branches of literature and the arts were becoming acutely self- conscious, did people begin to acknowledge that short fiction might be shaped according to its own principles” (3).

35 aesthetic value—could provide that stuff. Such a claim calls into question V.S. Pritchett’s assertion that reading practices of mid-century indulged the “ruminative and disquisitional” and thus inhibited the short story until the works of Stevenson, Kipling, and D.H. Lawrence began to make their debuts (164). That these stories thrived in spite of the predominance of the novel only provides greater evidence that the British short story, like the sensation novel itself, was a both a cause and a symptom of new kind of “sensational” market.

Spectacular Fiction

It is well known that novels like Lady Audley’s Secret, East Lynne, and The Woman in

White are “sensational,” a term that emphasizes their ability to shock the nervous system, to, as one reviewer writes, “excit[e] in the mind some deep feeling of overwrought interest by the means of some terrible passion or crime” (Rae 203), or more generally, to make the flesh creep.

But if contemporary reviews and modern scholarship offer any insight, we might also say that these novels are as spectacular as they are sensational.11 According to Richard D. Altick, before the 1860s, the term “sensation” was one mostly confined to the theater (7), and indeed, the genre’s ties to stage melodrama have been well-documented. Ann Cvetkovich, for example, has argued that “borrowing” from the theatrical melodrama, “the sensation novel achieved its effects through spectacle,” and “sensational events often turn on the rendering visible of what remains hidden or mysterious, and their affective power arises from the satisfaction or thrill of seeing”

(24). In a similar vein, Saverio Tomaiuolo cites “spectacular” melodramas as the chief progenitor of the sensation novel, which was a form that employed “complex mechanical ‘special effects’

(such as train crashes, fires and floods on stage) to produce excitement in theatre audiences” (6).

11 It is telling that the terms “spectacular” and “sensational” are sometimes used interchangeably, to denote something exciting or thrilling, but each term also pinpoints a unique function of these novels that helped make them into the public phenomenon they became: intense feelings and extraordinary visibility.

36 These melodramas, not unlike the sensation novels indebted to them, induced “intense

‘sensational’ emotions in the public,” and thus, he argues, “such a definition of sensation literature as directly indebted to ‘spectacular’ theatrical exhibitions must be interpreted with reference to the intrinsically ‘dramatic’ quality of sensation fictions, whose characters played their ‘roles’ according to what Peter Brooks has defined as the melodramatic ‘mode of excess’”

(6). This connection to the stage helped inspired charges of an “unnatural” quality to the novels among contemporary reviewers, a claim particularly and frequently levied at the works of female authors like Braddon and Wood. For instance, to emphasize Braddon’s tawdry embrace of the preposterous (and perhaps also to draw attention to and denigrate Braddon’s own personal history on the stage), one article in the Christian Remembrancer hyperbolizes a famous quote from As You Like It as a way of dismissing her literary achievement while highlighting her

“dramatic power”: “the world is essentially a stage to Miss Braddon, and all the men and women, the wives, the lovers, the villains, the sea-captains, the victims, the tragically jealous, the haters, the avengers, merely players” (236). Though the reviewer goes on to say that full pages of

Braddon’s novels could be extracted and handed out as they stand to “actors in a melodrama,”12 it is made clear that her “vehemently and outrageously unnatural” work is far from the stuff of

Shakespearean masterpiece (236), and one might be best served by looking away.

12 Rohan McWilliam argues that it would be a “mistake to view sensation fiction as something simply encountered on the printed page,” as “many of the writers we associate with the sensation novel took the stage seriously as a vehicle for storytelling” (65). From the 1860s to the end of the nineteenth century, sensation fiction frequently found a home on the stage, and indeed, at times even while novels were still being serialized. Stage productions, while necessarily unique renderings of the novels, could nevertheless do wonderful things for sales, as Ellen Wood testifies in a letter to George Bentley in 1875: “I cannot help thinking that a portion of ‘East Lynne’s’ success is owing to its being so much represented on stage. Go where I will, I mean into country places, I am sure to see the walls placarded with ‘East Lynne’” (qtd. in Maunder “I Will Not Live in Poverty and Neglect” 173).

37 Although recent criticism has worked to reframe these discussions of dramatic artificiality to emphasize the freedom granted by performativity,13 visibility has always in some way informed the sensation novel’s subversive paradigms as well as its critical reception. Indeed, in addition to “bringing to light” the sensational secrets and family skeletons of its characters, as an object of “public scrutiny” (Tromp 233), the sensation novel demanded due attention to social ills, unfair laws, and the dubious stability of class hierarchies and gender roles. Scholars have frequently commented on the extent to which these novels could “make visible” that which proper middle-class society would rather not see or have seen by others. For example, Barbara

Leckie’s Culture and Adultery points to the ways that the sensation novel helped make adultery visible in the context of censorship, readership, and nation, while Elizabeth Steere’s Kitchen

Literature highlights some of the ways that the sensation novel provided the conditions for increased visibility of servants. More generally, Marlene Tromp has discussed the sensation novel’s propensity for opening up private space as a site of public investigation, Lyn Pykett the

“spectacle” it made of femininity (The Nineteenth-Century Sensation Novel 9), and D.A. Miller the uncomfortable visibility of communities to external policing agents. Implied in the project of

“making visible” is a kind of protest, whereby social strictures become subject to deliberation and change.

Not only did sensation novels routinely demonstrate a preoccupation with reading bodies

(a process of [de]coding that in itself makes use of visual markers for meaning), even the literary market in which they thrived is frequently described as a particularly visual sphere, with perhaps one of the most well-worn phrases in sensation scholarship being that the genre (or author or

13 Beth Palmer, for instance, argues that female authors of sensation fiction saw the genre as a “series of performances” and the role of authorship in particular as a “performative activity.” For more on how women’s roles as authors and editors in the periodical press allowed them to “realize and hone their skills for sensational performance” (1), see her Women’s Authorship and Editorship in Victorian Culture (2011).

38 work within that genre) burst, erupted, or exploded on the literary scene. 14 Although there has been increasing effort to debunk the idea that sensation fiction erupted all at once in the early

‘60s with the publication of The Woman in White, Winifred Hughes’s landmark study The

Maniac in the Cellar helped create the impression that it made its debut as a public spectacle, and indeed, that it performed in a very conspicuous, remarkable way: “When the sensation novel exploded onto the literary scene at the start of the 1860s, it did so, predictably enough, in the character of a phenomenon, something in the nature of a traveling-circus exhibition—prodigious, exciting, and agreeably grotesque” (5). Here, the novel is “characterized”—it performs on a market stage while consumers both watch in awe and participate in its enterprise. Contemporary reviews also couched the sensation novel’s success in highly visual terms, with one reviewer in the Edinburgh Review noting, “Two or three years ago nobody would have known what was meant by a Sensation Novel; yet now the term has already passed through the stage of jocular use . . . and has been adopted as the regular commercial name for a particular product of industry for which there is just now a brisk demand” (Brickdale 53, my emphasis). Thomas Richards has argued that this was an “era of the spectacle,” one in which “the mode of amplification and excess” became “a mode of producing the material world” (55), and such was the case of the sensation novel—an “agreeably grotesque” form, to use Hughes’s phrasing, or a “monstrosity of fiction” to use Florence Marryat’s,15 that had the ability to control markets, bodies, and minds.

14 Examples of such characterizations abound. In distinguishing the 1860s as “the decade of sensation fiction,” for example, Richard S. Albright champions the idea that the sensation novel “burst onto the literary scene” (168), while Lyn Pykett, too, writes that the sensation novel was the “chief sensation of the ‘sensational sixties,’ that for reviewers of the “mid-Victorian literary scene,” it “burst dramatically upon an unsuspecting but eager public” (The ‘Improper Feminine’ 47). Sammantha Graves, like Winifred Hughes before her, characterizes sensation fiction as a phenomenon that “exploded on the literary scene” (1), while Ian Ward asserts that sensation novels took “the English literary scene by storm” in the 1860s.

15 Florence Marryat refers to the commonly used description of sensation as a “monstrosity of fiction” in the preface to her sensation novel Véronique (1869). In it, she concedes that her novel is of the sensation school but asks that the public view it as a work taken from the pages of real life rather than casting it aside as a literary abomination: “To

39 The sensation novel developed its status as a “monstrous” body of fiction in large part because of its extreme visibility as a genre coupled with its comparatively “invisible” impact on readers, where the grotesque form becomes the more horrible because of the imagined possibilities of what it might be capable of doing. If evidence of sensation novels was everywhere—from periodicals and lending libraries to consumer goods to placards for stage adaptations, and so forth16—the extent of the effect of these novels on readers’ (and particularly women’s) moral sentiments could really only be imagined. Ann Cvetkovich has persuasively argued that sensation novels acquired their name because of their “enormous popularity,” not simply because of their “melodramatic focus on crime and sex” (14), and she notes that critics were forced to discuss them whether they wanted to or not because “sensation novels were everywhere, produced and consumed in such vast numbers that their appeal demanded explanation” (14).17 Their spectacular visibility as artifacts of a burgeoning commodity culture thus commanded the attention of all. At the same time, with panicked rhetoric, Mansel alleges that such novels were “indications of a wide-spread corruption” (482), the tangible product (and cause) of an otherwise “invisible” disease. These novels, he suggests, “are in part both the effect and the cause [of the corruption]; called into existence to supply the cravings of a diseased appetite, and contributing themselves to foster the disease” (482-83). The “disease,” which is affirm that the story I submit to your approval is not sensational . . . would be erroneous, since it boasts no higher claim; but on the other hand, should I be accused of distorting nature in order to give birth to a ‘monstrosity of fiction,’ my answer is, that the most unlikely scenes depicted here . . . have happened, and are drawn from life” (vi).

16 Even the covers of novels signaled their sensational content; Mansel, for example, singled out novels of the railway as having particularly ostentatious covers that would attract the attention of readers who sought distraction from the dullness of travel: “The railway stall, like the circulating library, consists partly of books written expressly for its use, partly of reprints in a new phase of their existence—a phase internally that of the grub, with small print and cheap paper, externally that of the butterfly, with a tawdry cover, ornamented with a highly-coloured picture, hung out like a signboard, to give promise of the entertainment to be had within” (485).

17 The sensation not only jeopardized the morality of a staid English middle class, but it also threatened, as Cvetkovich points out, to make the opinions of important literary critics “irrelevant” (14). In that way, critics would have had a personal investment (in addition to one of “public good”) for preaching its dangers.

40 bemoaned and censured in the criticism of contemporary reviewers throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s, is a desire for excitation—emotional, bodily, without care for intellectual or moral improvement.18 Readers of these novels, as I discuss at greater length in Chapter 5, were thus characterized as willing victims who would gladly surrender the mind to the nerves, consuming whatever happened to be around to animate moments of leisure.

If “ephemeral” literature inspired “transitory interest” (Mansel 484), which in turn provided greater demand for cheap ephemera, the new economy of reading kept momentary pleasure always in circulation, and the growing number of published short stories—before they were even “born” if we follow the logic of much modern scholarship on the British short story— testifies to the scope of the change. The content of sensation novels, while regrettable for moralists and arbiters of literary taste, was made the worst because of the way it could proliferate as a cheap magazine form. The more expensive a purchase, presumably the more thought a buyer would give before making it, for as Mansel points out, “the buyer of books is generally careful to select what for his own purposes is worth buying” while the “subscriber is often content to take the good the gods provide him, glancing lazily down the library catalogue, and picking out some title which promises amusement or excitement” (484-85). While the lack of conscious deliberation, indeed the lack of any effort at all, is used here to characterize the reader of the sensation novel, it might apply better to the reader of short stories, as the supply of stories was based largely on the whims of an editor who needed to regulate length and fill the white space of each issue,19 all while readers’ “choice” to consume them stemmed mostly from the fact that they

18 See Pamela K. Gilbert’s Disease, Desire and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels for more on the ways that critical anxiety contributed to the identification of sensation fiction as a genre.

19 Editors of popular magazines frequently built issues of magazines around whatever serial was currently running, and magazines in Britain were generally bought because of those serials. That short stories were included to fill the space of the issue is not to say that they were not important or meaningful. On the contrary, as I discuss at greater

41 were the “good the gods provide[d] them.” Of all the literary forms in Britain, short fiction is perhaps the most successful one that few, for the greater part of the century, actually sought out to buy, as it grew in its role as filler to the “central commodity” of the novel in the some fifty thousand plus journals published between 1824 and 1900 (Orel 2-3). And yet, despite the fact that the explosive growth of these stories testified to a new economy of reading driven by thoughtless consumption, and indeed, notwithstanding the fact that they shared the same magazine space as those morally ambiguous sensation novels (and thus inspired dialogic readings of magazine texts), short fiction has largely flown under the critical radar and evaded criticism from even the most discerning Victorian critics—even those stories, as I discuss at greater length in Chapter 5, that were unequivocally sensational in content. Though they were around wherever one might look, these stories were seemingly invisible in contrast to the highly visible sensation novel that motivated the purchasing of a magazine. While debates about the more spectacular genre waged on, the British short story flourished while no one was really looking.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon

The fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon provides one of the best examples of how an author could be singled out and vilified for a few sensational novels while over a hundred of her short stories largely averted notice. As the so-called “Queen of the circulating libraries,”

Braddon had her pen in several genres—from melodrama to satire, from romance to naturalism—however, her association with sensation fiction and her reputation as a sensational author has been unshakeable. Braddon’s career was steeped in “excess”; with over eighty novels,

length in Chapter 3, these stories not only offered provocative content of their own but also created a dialogue with the novel installment that could change the way content was experienced or understood while enhancing the pleasure of reading.

42 more than one-hundred and fifty short stories, and several plays and articles, the idea that she simply wrote too much and too quickly to produce anything of real consequence is likely to blame for the period of her work’s long neglect in Victorian scholarship until late in the twentieth century (Tromp, Gilbert, and Haynie xvi). The enormous success of Lady Audley’s

Secret (1862) and Aurora Floyd (1863) cemented her as one of the leading sensation novelists of the time, which did little to advance her reputation as a serious artist even if it did notably good things for her financial prospects. Writing in what has been termed a “diseased, feminine genre”

(Tromp, Gilbert, and Haynie xviii), Braddon’s personal character frequently became the subject of criticism in reviews of her work, with Margaret Oliphant memorably hinting at her adulterous relationship with John Maxwell by remarking that the bigamy novel made popular by Lady

Audley’s Secret “goes against the seventh commandment, no doubt, but it does it in a legitimate sort of way, and is an invention which could only have been possible to an Englishwoman knowing the attraction of impropriety, and yet loving the shelter of the law” (“Novels” 263).

Despite support from writers like Dickens, Thackeray, and James, conservative critics insisted on condemning her work as “mere trash” (Mansel 488), insisting that only in an age where readers have little discrimination in their reading choices could someone like Miss Braddon become the

“queen” of anything.

That Braddon was indeed so successful suggested to her critics that the condition of

British taste, and indeed of British morality itself, was in a frightful state of disrepair, and the popularity of her novels offered ample evidence to these critics that people were buying to pleasure their nerves rather than to improve their heads. As one reviewer put it, it is only “By the unthinking crowd she is regarded as a woman of genius,” and that crowd must certainly have been a sizeable one, for, the reviewer continues, “The magazine to which she contribute[d] [wa]s

43 almost certain to have a large circulation, and to enrich its fortunate proprietors” (Rae 180). To combat the imprudent impulses of the “unthinking crowd,” critics thought deeply and often about these novels and their impact, but they did much less so about the flood of short stories then inundating the press. Braddon herself recognized that much of her work evaded notice given its publication in penny dreadfuls, writing to Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1862, “I do an immense deal of work which nobody ever hears of, for Half penny & penny journals. This work is the most piratical stuff, & would make your hair stand on end, if you were to see it” (qtd. in Carnell 200).

Braddon’s letter points to the fact that work produced outside of middle-class magazines could go relatively unnoticed by discerning literary critics, so much so that the “piratical stuff” could get away with reproducing incidents and plots elsewhere generated. Indeed, Braddon produced an immense deal of work that never could compete with the monstrous visibility of her novels, some of which extend the subversive paradigms of these novels (with fewer “tidy,” socially provident endings) and others that would thoroughly challenge her status as a sensation author all together.

What Braddon was and is still known for are her bigamy novels. In Lady Audley’s Secret,

Braddon introduced the “fair-haired demon of modern fiction” to a polite middle-class audience

(Oliphant “Novels” 263), which drew such throngs of eager fans and articles of vicious criticism that her reputation could never quite exist independently from it.20 With eight editions in three months and several stage adaptations, Tromp, Gilbert and Haynie argue that “the fierce popularity of this early novel” has largely obscured the nuance of Braddon’s oeuvre,

20 Ironically, Lady Audley’s Secret almost failed to reach the public in a finished form at all. It began serialization in Maxwell’s new sixpenny magazine Robin Goodfellow from 6 July 1861 to September 1861, but the magazine folded after only thirteen issues. At that time, it looked like the novel would be abandoned, as Braddon began work on Aurora Floyd and later wrote that she “did not mean to finish ‘Lady A’” (qtd. in Wolff 4). However, after receiving several appeals from the public, including one from J.B. Buckstone, she resolved to finish it, which she did successfully in Ward and Lock’s Sixpenny Magazine, running January – December 1862 (Wolff 5).

44 “overshadow[ing] the growth and development of her later fiction” (xxii). Saverio Tomaiuolo’s manuscript In Lady Audley’s Shadow positions the novel as a “macrotext” with “biographical, parabiographical and narrative paradigmatic value” for understanding her as a writer and maintains that her works will necessarily always exist in the “shadow” of that indisputably successful work (14). Although Tomaiuolo clearly sees value in the novel as a point of access for understanding Braddon’s later works, he also makes clear that it was an adversarial text to her attempts to evolve in the public’s perception:

Braddon’s sensational blockbuster would similarly be her ineluctable Nemesis during her long literary career, in the course of which she brought up eleven children (six of whom were hers), published more than eighty novels, wrote a large number of short stories, edited two magazines (Belgravia and Misletoe Bough), and conducted a busy social life in Richmond. (9)

Despite her efforts to experiment with new narrative forms and genres, Robert Lee Wolff contends that Braddon “all her life remained ‘the author of Lady Audley’s Secret’” and that

“Even today . . . she is still associated with her artless and somewhat trashy first great success”

(4).

While the preoccupation with novels and novel-reading at mid-century is perhaps why

Braddon is remembered primarily as a novelist rather than as a playwright, poet, or writer of short stories, the story of her literary career—and particularly all those many “unnoticed” short works—dramatizes how the new age of sensational market culture created the conditions for the short story’s growth while also, and ironically, sheltering it from view. For an age where unthinking consumption posed one of the most formidable threats to British intellectual and moral righteousness, short fiction was generally not thought about much. Even now, scholarly attempts to do better justice to Braddon’s literary legacy by pulling under-studied works out of

Lady Audley’s shadow generally produce studies of new novels, though there seems to be growing interest in her stage writings and supernatural short fiction. Of all the authors we have

45 come to associate with the sensation school, it is Braddon who not only produced the greatest number of short stories all together but who also produced the highest volume of those stories in the ‘60s specifically.21 Indeed, if Braddon’s bigamy novels monopolized public attention for the way in which they made a spectacle of secret middle-class iniquities, we might wonder what they subsequently hid from view.

Freedom to Experiment

With their unapologetic portrayal of female passion, ambition, and cunning, Braddon’s novels clearly challenge the ideal of proper Victorian middle-class femininity while also emphasizing how constructions of social identity are far from immutable truths. Yet, despite critics’ using these erring women as the springboard for their violent harangues, some scholars have questioned how subversive such texts can really be given that Braddon’s heroines tend to meet “justice” in asylums and other unfortunate ways to satisfy convention.22 To put it another way, as Lyn Pykett writes, some believe that Braddon’s “nerve tended to fail in the final volume”

(“Mary Elizabeth Braddon” 132). In her important recovery project A Literature of Their Own,

Elaine Showalter characterized the fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon and her contemporary female sensationalists as “a transitional literature that explored genuinely radical female protest against marriage and women’s economic oppression, although still in the framework of feminine convention that demanded the erring heroine’s destruction” (28-29). Thus, while writing novels may have provided Braddon with the “visibility and power” to disseminate the kind of cultural

21 At least twenty-three stories have been identified as Braddon’s in 1860s periodicals, with the greatest number appearing in her own Belgravia. She released a collection of her former periodical stories first in 1862 and then a second version in 1867 under the title Ralph the Bailiff and Other Stories. Wilkie Collins’s production of short stories all but died out in the ‘60s (with his most productive decade of short fiction [twenty-three in total] being the ‘50s), while those published by Ellen Wood in that decade appeared mostly in 1868 and 1869.

22 D.A. Miller is one of the number who see Lady Audley’s incarceration in a maison de santé at the end of the novel as the ultimate verdict of her culpability: “Lady Audley’s Secret thus portrays the woman’s carceral condition as her fundamental and final truth” (171).

46 messages women could often not express (Lee 140), it is precisely this visibility that might have contributed to Braddon “losing her nerve.” Short fiction, however, offered a different avenue for exploring the intersection of class and gender that preoccupied Braddon’s fiction throughout her career.

Much of the recent critical attention given to the short story posits it as a marginal form, as a place where “alienation” and the “ex-centric vision of the outsider” prevails (Liggins,

Maunder, and Robbins 15). Far from being a mere novel in miniature, by this logic, the short story could “liberate” writers from the restrictions of the novel while inviting “experimentation and subversion of the norms of the mainstream” (Liggins, Maunder, and Robbins 16). Clare

Hanson, for example, writes in the introduction to her collection Re-Reading the Short Story that

The short story is a vehicle for different kinds of knowledge, knowledge which may be in some way at odds with the ‘story’ of dominant culture. The formal properties of the short story—disjunction, inconclusiveness, obliquity—connect with its ideological marginality and with the fact that the form may be used to express something suppressed/repressed in mainstream literature. . . . The short story gives us the other side of the ‘official story’ or narrative . . . [and] suggests that which cannot normally be said. (6)

Hanson’s reading of the short story has perhaps been most commonly applied to late-nineteenth century, twentieth-century, and American examples of the form, as it is in those stories that the more profound or obvious expressions of narrative play have typically been thought to take place.23 The essays in her collection testify to the pervasiveness of this logic, featuring articles that engage the works of primarily twentieth-century American authors despite the introductory claim that it will seek to “re-establish the short story as a legitimate subject for discussion” in general and rescue it from neglect (1). Hanson’s study, and much of the body of work that

23 That is not to say that earlier examples of British short fiction do not engage narrative approaches that are unique from the novel’s largely linear approach to narrative (the sketch, for example, is one example of this difference); however, because British short fiction throughout much of the nineteenth century was viewed as a disorganized form, scholars have been slower to embrace it as one in which narrative and effect could be designed with intentional differences in mind.

47 informed and followed it,24 has viewed short fiction largely from a formal perspective, discounting other important factors contributing to and conditioning its expressions, and indeed, its very existence.

More recently, and particularly in those studies concerning British short fiction before the end of the nineteenth-century, there has been more of a concerted effort to think about circumstances of publication and their impact on the stories produced. Convincingly, Dennis

Denisoff has suggested that the short story’s status as a throw-away genre might have encouraged greater risk-taking, writing that “to some degree, because such fiction was less lucrative, less respected, and less of a risk to publishers, . . . [it] gave authors greater freedom to experiment” (17). Unfortunately, Denisoff seems to undercut the significance of these writers’ contributions to an extent by later implying that they were written too quickly and thoughtlessly to be of much value (much as the criticism of Braddon’s literary endeavors served to discredit her career for so many years): “It was common for short stories to be written quickly by ‘hack’ writers who . . . [gave] little attention to subtlety of language or depths of character” (19). It is crucial, however, to shift the conversation from what these stories supposedly lack to what they offer, to break from the widespread notion that their neglect has been somehow justified by a so-

24 The second edition of Charles E. May’s collection The New Short Story Theories (1994), which is updated with eighty percent new content from its 1976 edition, is one example of how short story scholarship of the late-twentieth century heavily leaned on formalism. The impulse that motivated the new edition stemmed from criticism levied at the first edition’s inability to address the “issue of definition”: “in the first edition of Short Story Theories there is no single characteristic or cluster of characteristics that the commentators claim absolutely distinguishes the short story from other fictions” (xv). How May addresses this criticism is by featuring essays that focus on “shortness” as a formal characteristic that uniquely shapes how short stories produce knowledge. Mary Louise Pratt’s contribution, “The Short Story: The Long and Short of It,” which has since become something of a landmark essay in scholarship of the genre, argues that the short story is secondary to and dependent on the novel (what she identifies as being, historically, the “dominant, normative genre” [xvi]), and thus, she suggests that short stories can only be understood relationally. In his own contribution to the collection, “The Nature of Knowledge in Short Fiction,” May encourages scholars to “relat[e] the shortness of the form to the typical kind of experience embodied in the form” (xvii). His approach falls in line with those he used in his published articles throughout the 1970s. Other examples of formalist approaches to criticism include Valerie Shaw’s The Short Story (1983) and Susan Lohafer and Joellen Clarey’s collection Short Story Theory at a Crossroads (1990).

48 called lack of “artistry.” To do so is especially necessary given the fact that women contributed in such high volume to the body of short works produced at the time. Keeping the means of production invisible likewise serves to erase women as valuable participants in these important cultural exchanges, and dismissing their stories as the work of “hacks” undercuts the potential to see these texts as deeply critical in their response to prevailing ideologies.

“Ralph the Bailiff”

To have an impoverished, unsupported woman reinvent herself, eschew romantic love, and capitalize on a marriage with an affluent man is a bold move even in fiction when it comes to

Victorian attitudes about women and social hierarchies, but to allow this woman to get away with it is something Braddon would apparently only hazard in a short story. Indeed, one of the ways that short fiction allowed Braddon greater freedom to experiment is that it offered an opportunity for exploring more radical endings than those provided in her most famous novels, and a great example of a short story that takes a subversive figure who behaves in much of the same spirit as

Lady Audley and lets her live free from punishment is “Ralph the Bailiff (1861).25 Although not a ghost story in the traditional sense, “Ralph the Bailiff” features dreams, premonitions, and instinctual “gut” reactions that help sensationalize the tale of family misfortune while offering

Braddon an opportunity to comment on the instability of social identity and roles. In characteristic fashion of sensational short stories (which I discuss at greater length Chapter 5),

“Ralph the Bailiff” privileges feelings over logic and moves the plot toward its denouement—the heroine’s realization that her husband is a bigamist and murderer who is being blackmailed by his unsavory bailiff—by suggesting that one can feel the emptiness of middle-class domestic arrangements even when appearances tell a different story.

25 Published in St. James’s Magazine (April-June 1861) and later republished as the title story of her collection Ralph the Bailiff and Other Stories (1862 and 1867)

49 Like Lady Audley’s Secret, “Ralph the Bailiff” presents marriage as a social convention that can be easily manipulated by the female servant class to climb the social ladder in a way not otherwise permitted by nineteenth-century British custom, but unlike the novel, the perpetrator of the “crime” in this story ends up with money, freedom, and a blemish-free name while her affluent husband is the one who ends up in the grave. The story features a grieving brother,

Dudley Carleon, who has just lost his older brother to an unexpected and particularly severe case of ague produced by “fatal dampness” permeating his residence at the Grey Farm (4). While

Dudley struggles to cope with the death of his brother, he also inherits the family estate and all of its future prospects, though he seems to take no joy in his new fortune. Just as readers start to really believe that the eligible (but morose) bachelor might actually intend on staying one,

Dudley happens to run into a young woman—“so bright in colour, so radiant in appearance, so airy and fluttering in motion . . . A fairy dressed by a Parisian milliner could not surpass [the] exquisite, fragile creature” (20)—by the name of Jenny Trevor. They marry, of course, but before the wedding day turns into night, a suspicion is cast on the bridegroom that sends the happy marriage into an unyielding downward spiral: an accusation that Dudley poisoned his late brother. Within a short time, Jenny explicably declines in health until she wakes one evening from a night terror only to find she is living a nightmare far more horrible than the one of her dreams, one where her husband is conspiring in her own death to satisfy the blackmail demands of his lawful first wife (Martha, the couple’s former housekeeper) and her brother (Ralph, their bailiff). As Jenny crouches behind a door eavesdropping on her husband and his bailiff, readers learn that marriage to Martha was negotiated in return for the brother and sister’s silence concerning the truth of the so-called “ague” death: that Dudley, in an effort to pay his pressing college debts, did indeed poison his brother. The result of that lawful first marriage was a lawful

50 heir, whose infant cries have been haunting Jenny’s fevered dreams. With all secrets now out in the open, Jenny flees the home and narrowly escapes her own death by slow poisoning, Dudley

Carleon drowns himself, and Ralph and Martha take possession of the estate, which they immediately sell to later become “wealthy and . . . respected citizen[s]” in Australia (54).

Although neither Martha nor Ralph is portrayed as especially likeable or sympathetic characters, Braddon’s story effectively reverses the power relations between servant and master in such a way that reformulates the middle-class family and distorts the foundations of lineage and inheritance. As Eve Lynch points out, it is Jenny who is “‘crouching at the threshold of the door,’ spying through the keyhole to observe her fall from authority, while the housekeeper sits inside by the fireplace with the master, holding his infant son” (241). If the hand that rocks the cradle is indeed the hand that rules the world, the scene is an ominous one for the way in which it forges a traversable pipeline from “downstairs” domestic caretaking to legitimate “upstairs” motherhood. In the novel, Lady Audley and her maid Phoebe Marks are the specular image of one another, with markers of identity differentiated only, according to Saverio Tomaiuolo, by

“the dress they wear, the enamels they use and the presence of fashionable hair dyes” (76); however, Lady Audley is ultimately recognized as an upstart imposter who has no “right” to her position, a woman whose “latent insanity” has given her delusions that she could really be the mistress of Audley Court, and so there can really only be one reasonable outcome—off to the madhouse with her. Here, in “Ralph the Bailiff,” the mistress-servant relationship is effectively transposed: what Lady Audley threatens to do in the novel is well-accomplished. And if there be a moral objection, there can certainly be no legal one, as it is the “good people” with wealth and breeding who are actually committing the crimes. Ultimately, no one likes Martha or her brother

Ralph—they are, after all, “grim, sleek, dark, and silent” (54)—but Braddon makes sure to

51 emphasize that while “they are neither of them liked by their dependents,” they are “feared, and are better served than a better master and mistress might be” (54). In the end, the former dependents not only have money and property, they have control.

“Ralph the Bailiff” also highlights the tendency to label as insanity or madness the perfectly fair but troubling appraisals women make of the problematic social arrangements that often inform their lives, while cautioning that these labels are destructive to justice and truth.

Many critics have pointed out that Lady Audley’s declaration that she is a madwoman at the end of the novel serves to undercut the social criticism Braddon had until that point been developing in the novel. Jill Matus, for example, has famously argued that this final revelation in a story punctuated with thrilling “reveals” actually functions as a “cover up,” serving instead “to displace the economic and class issues already raised in the novel and to deflect their uncomfortable implications,” which is an “obfuscation [that] is managed through the discourse of madness, because it allows historically specific issues of class and power to be represented instead as timeless sand universal matters of female biology” (334). “Ralph the Bailiff” supports this logic, as the only character with the power to prevent the unholy marriage union between the innocent heroine and the bigamist-murderer-posing-as-grieving-bachelor is the heroine’s friend

Agnes Marlow, whose sisterly attempts to warn her friend are ignored because of a well-laid plot by the husband-to-be to mischaracterize these warnings as the ravings of a lunatic.

Indeed, Agnes’s so-called “madness” is determined by none other than the bigamist murderer himself, who has the most to gain from discrediting her: “Agnes Marlow is a madwoman; whatever she says to you, remember that” (25). Because readers do not yet know

Dudley Carleon’s true history (that he poisoned his older brother to acquire the means to pay his debts), Agnes’s intense distrust of him is presented, plausibly, as a true lack of reasoning, the

52 unfortunate result of an excess of grief, having just lost her own fiancé—the elder Carleon brother. Dudley, it should be noted, is still very much presented to readers as a grieving younger brother struggling to cope with his older brother’s death, and Agnes’s attempt to intervene in and obstruct his marriage without any evidence of an actual crime seems not only unjustified but cruel. After all, it is Dudley’s developing interest in bright, young Jenny Trevor that first offers hope that taking an “excessively pretty” wife whose voice is “music itself” may be just the thing needed for him to move past his affliction once and for all (20-21). Consequently, Agnes’s attempt to impede the union is negatively cast as an endangerment to the marriage redemption plot already fully in motion.

Eve Lynch has suggested that the story is one in which Braddon “interweaves the theme of ‘possession’—both in its spectral and material senses—between the seemingly supernatural, metaphysical authority characters have over each other, and the legally sanctioned authority they hold over the physical and economic properties of the estate” (240). Agnes, the widow once betrothed to Dudley’s older brother (the late Martin Carleon), is “possessed” by an intense and overwhelming need to deliver the “truth” about Dudley, and while her “wild” delivery of the message—with “large lustrous eyes” and a “harsh, discordant laugh” (26)—offers some reason to doubt the stability of her mental faculties, it is the absolute lack evidence upon which she bases her accusations that fills Jenny with “pity” for one who has become a “victim to so horrible a delusion” (28): “I cannot tell you what I know, I can only tell you what I believe so firmly, that if my words were to lay you dead at my feet, I would say them rather than see you pass over the threshold of that man’s house. . . . Dudley Carleon poisoned his brother Martin! . . . I have no proof of this. . . . I have no proof, but I have—conviction!” (27).

53 Although Jenny is unmoved by Agnes’s plea, particularly because she has been predisposed to distrust and dismiss any attempts her friend might make to pit her against her husband, Braddon suggests that Agnes’s intuition and the intensity of her assertion stems from a kind of supernatural, spiritual intervention meant to “guide us in this blind, dark world,” for as

Agnes says upon reflection, “Something stronger than myself possessed me, and I could not keep silence” (28). Even Jenny, who tries to disavow the information, cannot shake the “hissing whisper at her ear” that shapes “with supernatural distinctness” the “two horrible sentences:

‘Dudley Carleon poisoned his brother Martin.’ ‘Martin Carleon died from the effects of slow poison administered by his brother’” (29). So while Agnes is at first presented as having all the makings of a madwoman given her fearless accusations implicating a powerful man—perhaps even more so than Lady Audley who is officially diagnosed with “latent insanity” despite actions that offer “no evidence of madness” (371-72)—Braddon ultimately rejects pathologizing

Agnes’s commitment to challenging appearances that serve only to obscure the truth. In “Ralph the Bailiff,” madness is as Matus says: a cover up. The story need not rely on madness as a crutch for supporting a narrative where women can speak and act in accord with their own interests. The short story, as a less visible form, offers a safer avenue for expressing radical ideas.26 If we were suspicious of Braddon’s tidy excuse of “latent insanity” as justification of

Lady Audley’s ambition in the novel, it is rightly so, for the public eye often demands a good performance, and as Saverio Tomaiuolo points out, it has traditionally been accepted that

Braddon “conceived to give a morally edifying ending to her novel and to avoid (unsuccessfully)

26 Saverio Tomaiuolo hints at the fact that madness as a narrative resolution is not a particularly radical approach to dealing with class and gender inequality in his suggestion that Lady Audley’s Secret has persisted in its popularity “despite” Braddon’s decision to “attribute Lady Audley’s rebellion to inherited madness and puerperal insanity” (17). Thus, by making Agnes’s intuition a perfectly sane and legitimate form of female expression in “Ralph the Bailiff,” Braddon capitalizes on modern publishing practices and the market conditions that inform them to convey an unconventional and provocative message without fear of censure.

54 critical attacks” (11-12). With having to write the entire third volume of the novel in less than a fortnight,27 it seems Braddon simply chose a sensational ending that would excite readers while avoiding the need to provide complicated and potentially provoking answers to the questions of inequality raised in the novel.

The Subversive Supernatural

Of all the mid-century genres of Victorian short fiction, the ghost story must certainly rank as the one that has received the most critical attention for the way in which it offered women freedom to express social discontent and explore alternative paradigms, and this was certainly true for Braddon. In 1991, Michael Cox and R.A. Gilbert proposed that “one of the great unasked critical questions” was the reason why women “took to the ghost story so successfully” (“Victorian Ghost Stories” xiv). This is a question that has since been taken up by several scholars, with Vanessa D. Dickerson’s Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural being the first book-length exploration of the subject. Dickerson argues that supernaturalism allowed female writers an outlet for “expression and exploration of their own spirituality and their ambiguous status as ‘other’ living in a state of in-betweenness” (8), and she finds that women’s ghost stories frequently address the “issues of gendered energies and spirituality, of power and powerlessness, of women’s precarious position on the continuum of materials and spiritualism, or women’s visibility and invisibility” (9). The material conditions of women’s ghost stories, however, cannot be understated, for as Cox points out, the fact that women took to these stories

[W]as due less to an inherent susceptibility to the supernatural . . . than to the practical—often pressing—need of a certain type of educated woman to earn a

27 Braddon comments on her timeline for finishing Lady Audley’s Secret in a letter to her literary mentor Bulwer Lytton; she says, “I wrote the third & some part of the second vol of ‘Lady A.’ in less than a fortnight, & had the printer at me all the time” (qtd. in Matus 348).

55 living. The monthly magazines required an endless supply of fiction, short and long, and authorship was often the only means some middle-class women had to meet their financial needs. As ghost stories were consistently in demand it was natural that women, who provided so much fiction for the magazines, should provide these too. (“Victorian Ghost Stories” xiv)

While ghost stories and tales of the supernatural do not appear exclusively in short form in the nineteenth century, the writers of these stories certainly favored it,28 and it is important to recognize how the material conditions of short story writing and reading—a highly visible and yet invisible form, as I have discussed—made it a suitable channel for women to employ the supernatural as an expression of their “in-betweenness” in narratives of social discontent.

Several critics have pointed to the way that the supernatural served Braddon in her critique of women’s roles. Kate Krueger, for example, has suggested that Braddon used haunting as a way of drawing attention to the home’s insecure façade and acknowledging the “drastic differences between the ideologies of domesticity and the reality of [women’s] complicated emotional lives” (58). Eve Lynch has argued that Braddon made use of the supernatural tale to explore the “unmarked ‘boundary-line’ dividing the public world of societal convention from the

‘unknown region beyond’ that lay hidden in private frustration as a reminder of English social and psychological dislocation,” and those “murky regions” were the “ambiguous and fluctuating outlines of inequities Braddon saw persisting in the affluent decades of high Victorianism in spite of political reform, economic expansion, and philanthropic volunteerism” (237). More generally, Jenny Uglow has commented on the difficulty female sensation novelists had of concluding their radically subversive novels with radically subversive resolutions, arguing that many made use of shorter ghost stories as a way of exploring less conservative endings than

28 Diana Wallace writes that Elizabeth Bowen articulated “what many women writers seem to have felt when she wrote that she considered it to be ‘unethical . . . to allow the supernatural into a novel’ but often used it in her short stories,’” and she contends that “the very shortness of the short story is what makes it an excellent vehicle for the treatment of the supernatural” (58).

56 would be expected in their novels: “in the novels the wayward heroines are cruelly punished and order is restored, though the cracks in the structure remain. But in the stories the passionate women wreak vengeance on false, weak men, selfish betrayers of women’s trust” (xiv). The logic of the supernatural story imbues the dead with great power, and for Braddon, those who were disavowed and discarded in life, gain better control over the terms of whom and what is seen in death.

“The Cold Embrace”

While Braddon’s use of the supernatural is more complicated than a mere device of paybacks, “The Cold Embrace” (1860)29 provides perhaps the most obvious example of a woman who “wreak[s] vengeance” on a false, selfish man, as it offers a revenge narrative of a wronged, would-be bride’s post-mortem efforts to terrorize her former lover after the artist’s feelings for her mysteriously disappear in the company of his “bewitch[ing]” model (71). Beginning as a story of romantic love, the story features the secret betrothal of two cousins—one rich and one not—who make a promise of marriage despite the more mercenary concerns demanded by fatherly protection of an affluent daughter. The young man of nineteen—“young, handsome, studious, enthusiastic, metaphysical, reckless, unbelieving, heartless” (69)—cares most for whatever happens to strike his fancy at whatever particular time, and he soon forgets his

“eternal” love when he leaves on a commissioned trip to Florence to paint “for some rich man”

(71). The forsaken girl’s letters go increasingly unanswered in his absence, even those that implore her artist lover to return and save her from a rapidly approaching marriage to a rich suitor of her father’s choosing. But it is only when the errant painter returns home that he remembers what has been lost and feels the extent of it: “a corpse washed ashore . . . a young

29 Published in Welcome Guest (29 September 1860)

57 girl, very handsome . . . His cousin Gertrude—his betrothed!” (78). Lyn Pykett has argued that women’s interest in ghost stories stems from a “pre-occupation with the consequences of unequal power relations” (“Sensation and the Fantastic in the Victorian Novel”198), and here, in

“The Cold Embrace,” Braddon raises the “handsome” suicide from the grave in an effort to subvert the social conditions that bind women’s fate to men’s choices, the conditions that make the grave seductive to a powerless girl to begin with. With an unwanted marriage being forced upon her in the absence of the man who was supposed to protect her “until death alone could part them” (70), Gertrude’s options are few, and she chooses to sacrifice her life. The gesture, however, is not one of self-effacement but rather one of retribution, for as Gertrude tells her fiancé at the height of their lovemaking, “it is only the suicide—the lost wretch on whom sorrowful angels shut the door of Paradise—whose unholy spirit haunts the footsteps of the living” (70). In short, she satisfies her desire for revenge by giving up her place in heaven, haunting her deceiver with her ghostly embrace—an unrelenting reminder of his sin against her—until he dies from “want of food, exhaustion, and the breaking of a blood-vessel” (78).

The supernatural may provide Braddon with the device to make her protagonist powerful in a patriarchal world that habitually denies women such power, but it is the short story framework that lends itself to such a device in the first place. The British short story is itself specter-like, the emphatic materiality of its existence at odds with its status as a critically

“immaterial” form of art. Furthermore, the tendency toward disjunction and fragmentation promoted in the form necessarily does violence to the linear narrative of living life, where the narrative develops as a process of chronological unfolding (as with life itself) and where resolution is truly final. “The Cold Embrace,” like the short story form more generally, provides a life in fragment. Gertrude is only alive for three of the story’s ten pages, and her existence is

58 reduced to a triangulated relationship with her betrothed, her father, and the suitor of her father’s choosing. In this framework, there is little room for a complex existence. Yet, in “The Cold

Embrace,” Braddon is able to underscore how what appears to be the whole truth or whole story

(Gertrude’s entire life, for example) is really only one part of a more complex whole. Gertrude kills herself not out of sadness or some sort of womanly confliction but out of rage and a desire for revenge, which she can only achieve as a “lost” soul outside of the parameters of normal life.

While the supernatural then offers an opportunity for Braddon to conceive of a more complex portrait of Victorian womanhood, as a short story in a new literary market, this supernatural tale participates in a process whereby dominant cultural discourses—that which appear to be most whole and complete—are interrogated and challenged. Thus, it is not simply the ghost story paradigm that gives Braddon freedom to experiment with more subversive endings, but it is also the genre of the short story itself, always half hidden in its extraordinary visibility, that invites it.

“The Shadow in the Corner”

While the short story highlights the liminal spaces opened up by commodity exchange and the room for marginalized voices that such an exchange can make possible, the expressions of dissent that materialize on the page nevertheless live an ephemeral lifespan, often disappearing as quickly as they appeared. But like the ghost that haunts, these stories frequently represent that which refuses to be ignored and disregarded. Braddon’s short story “The Shadow in the Corner” (1879),30 for example, draws attention the plight of the female domestic servant, the overlooked and uncared for “shadow” in the corner of the genteel Victorian home, by narrating how a young, educated girl must enter into service only to be driven to suicide by the unremitting appearance of a spectral shadow in her lonely room. The story takes place at

30 Published in All the Year Round (22 November 1879)

59 Wildheath Grange, a lonely mansion occupied only by a former professor of natural science and his two servants. Michael Bascom, the proprietor of the estate, while “fanatic in his love of scientific research” is mostly indifferent to more “commonplace” things like love, money, family, and status (113). However, when Maria—a young orphan educated beyond an unanticipated life of servitude—takes a position at the Grange and begins to deteriorate from nightly ghost-sightings, Bascom is forced to recognize that he is still ignorant to many things that his privileged life of solitude has kept from view.

As Maria faces the “shadow in the corner” each night, in each encounter she also comes face-to-face with the reality that she is herself condemned to a life of devaluation and invisibility, a life that as an educated, respectable young woman she had never expected to have. So when

Bascom decides that he will demonstrate to the “foolish girl” that the shadow is “nothing more than a silly fancy, bred of timidity and low spirits” by sleeping in the room himself (124), he is shocked when he is violently awakened by a

[C]onsciousness of a burden of care . . . [a] sense of all-pervading trouble that weighed upon his spirits and oppressed his heart . . . [an] icy horror of some terrible crisis . . . the pangs of unavailing remorse; the agonizing memory of a life wasted; the stings of humiliation and disgrace, shame, ruin. . . . Yes; there was the shadow: not the shadow of the wardrobe only—that was clear enough, but a vague and shapeless something which darkened the dull brown wall; so faint, so shadowy, that he could form no conjecture as to its nature. (126-27)

In Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists: Theories of Vision in Victorian Literature and

Science, Srdjan Smajić writes of a need to shift focus from the specter, which is “in many respects timeless and universal,” to the ghost-seer, as “representations of the observer, practices of spectatorship, and philosophico-scientific theories and conceptual models of vision are invariably contingent upon historical and socio-cultural factors,” that indeed, “say what we will about the boundary-defying habits of ghosts, living human observers are always rooted in time and place” (17). That Bascom is awakened by the specter to a new “consciousness of a burden of

60 care,” a feeling that was for him “as novel as [it was] painful” (126), suggests that while his life has hitherto “flowed on with smooth and sluggish tide, unbroken by so much as a ripple of sorrow” (126), he now has a new awareness of his inability to see the nature of unequal human relations clearly even though he has spent his life observing the laws of nature. Do what he may to suppress the pain of this new awareness, he ultimately cannot do it: “Again and again he succeeded in composing himself to sleep, but only to wake again and again to the same torturing thoughts, the same remorse, the same despair,” though “he told himself that the trouble was not his trouble, . . . these vivid fancies were as painful as realities and took as strong a hold on him”

(127, my emphasis). While he may not want the plight of the female servant class to be his

“trouble,” Braddon ensures that he is haunted by the notion that it is, and though the next day he shrugs the experience off as “Indigestion very likely” (128), he does order that Maria be placed in another room the following night. Refusing to disclose that he has seen anything out of the ordinary, however, makes Maria feel “ashamed of being so full of fancies,” and she vows she will “never complain of [the haunted room] again” (130). And she never will because she commits suicide that night.

In life, Maria’s concerns about “the shadow” in the corner—the way class prejudice undercuts education and demoralizes working women, or what Eve Lynch characterizes as a problem of “quite literally forcing poor women into a corner” (244)—are mere “complaints” that can be silenced and discounted, but in death, her message is able to “darken the rest of Michael

Bascom’s life” (131). Even after he flees Wildheath Grange for the comfort of Oxford and his beloved books, “the memory of Maria’s sad face, and sadder death, [is] his abiding sorrow,” and

“Out of that deep shadow his soul [is] never lifted” (131). What then begins as a problem that can easily be overlooked, turns into one that can no longer be ignored, an injustice that, in

61 overshadowing his “soul,” changes Bascom’s perception of the world. It matters little in this supernatural tale whether the ghost that haunts Maria’s room is a “real ghost” or not because the actual shadows in the home are those women whose existence has been reduced to one of abject servitude by the very real problem of social inequality. Ultimately, Braddon suggests that

Maria’s life has greater epistemic value than books, money, or even an Oxford education, as it is she who has the power to make visible those things to which privilege and power can make people blind. Indeed, in many ways, the material life of Braddon’s story offers its own version of the shadow in the corner: it faces the threat of being overlooked and cast aside in a saturated market, but it nonetheless persists in its rebuff of problematic class hierarchies and their injurious impact on women. It is one example of many that reflects Braddon’s ongoing project of critiquing the conditions that did disservice to her and so many other women of the age. And as women’s ghost stories so frequently remind us, even a brief encounter with unfamiliar phenomena can begin to change the way we see the world.

“Her Last Appearance”

Although Braddon chose against making an explicit social commentary in Lady Audley’s

Secret by rationalizing Lady Audley’s behavior as an unfortunate result of her latent insanity rather than a mindful response to the barriers posed by her class and gender identity, her supernatural short story “Her Last Appearance” (1876)31 suggests that she nonetheless saw artistic expression as a way of articulating that which cannot generally be communicated in

“real” life, particularly for women. In this tale that draws heavily upon her own career on the stage (Buzwell 9), Braddon explores how social disempowerment can slowly (and literally) drain the lifeblood from women. The story features an abused young actress whose “natural” ability on

31 Published in Belgravia (December 1876)

62 stage stems from the part she has played in the tragedy of her own life, and when the she makes

“her last appearance” on stage as the Duchess of Malfi, her performance of the Duchess’s death commences with her own actual death on the stage. Braddon suggests in the story that the dividing line between art and real life can be blurred. Dismantling the division between the

“real” and “performance” emphasizes, on the one hand, the extent to which identity is socially constructed rather than biologically determined. However, on the other hand, Braddon also implies that a moving performance—and indeed, all of the best kinds of art—stems not from embodying the mindset of a tragic character but rather by bringing personal anguish to that character. In other words, the best actresses, writers, and artists are successful because their lived experiences drive their art. While such art can be empowering—commanding the attention of an audience and providing freedom of expression, for example—it can also be self-defeating, as it reinforces the idea that such power can only be achieved through performance. For a story that is so much about women “being used” (used by both ill-intentioned and well-intentioned men, and used by the social conventions that inspire both kinds of men to patronize her in the first place) it is fitting that Braddon chose a short story form in her own Belgravia to deliver such a message, as it gives her the most freedom to comment on her own artistry after she had already become a household name.

In the story, Barbara falls victim to the “first flush and glamour of a girlish and romantic love” until the “fond and foolish dream” is put to rest within a month’s time (99). She realizes her husband is a “tyrant and a ruffian . . . a drunkard and a gambler, a brute who was savage in his cups, a profligate who had lived amongst the most degraded women until he knew not what womanly purity meant, a wretch who existed only for self-gratification, and whose love for her had been little more than the fancy of an hour” (98-99). She is thus drawn to the “study of

63 drama” for the moments of “consolation” and “temporary forgetfulness” it could provide, but more than that, she finds in tragedy a connection between herself and those female characters for whom life offered only despair: “These heroines of tragedy, who were all miserable, seemed to sympathise with her own misery. She became passionately fond of her art before ever she had trodden on the stage” (99). While the stage offered an outlet for emotional upheaval if not actual escape from the hardships of her life, Sir Philip Hazlemere, an enamored admirer of Barbara’s, wishes to provide her precisely that out: marriage to himself. Barbara, however, is resigned to her fate, asserting that the coffin will be her only path to escape, and in light of this emotional resignation, physical deterioration follows. Sir Philip resolves to save this “faded woman” by killing her husband so that she might be free (101), but for him, freedom simply means the ability to transfer her affection legally to himself. After he successfully orchestrates Jack

Stowell’s death, he attends what he anticipates will be Barbara’s last appearance on the stage, expecting that when the curtain falls, she will finally become his own forever.

The play is the Duchess of Malfi, and it is in this performance that Braddon fully distorts the boundaries between life and art to offer her own more macabre definition of what “freedom” really means for women living in a society where “choice” is limited to one man or another. As

Sir Philip watches her on stage, “devour[ing] her pale loveliness with his eyes” (109), it becomes clear that the play is a pretext for the way in which Barbara’s own “thrilling tragedy” arouses his sympathy only insofar as the opportunity to assert, save, and possess titillates masculine sensibilities (108): “The creature standing there, pouring out her story of suffering, was wronged, oppressed; the innocent, helpless victim of hard and bloody men” (109). Although Sir Philip sees himself as a liberator, as he watches the “victim” on the stage, his mind ironically wanders to his plan to intercept her at the stage door after the show. He intends to “stay with her” and

64 “accompany her” until he “win[s] her promise” to become his wife, and out of his own goodness, he will “respect even idle prejudice for her sake” by waiting for her while she goes through the

“ceremony” of mourning (109). As her savior, Sir Philip cannot imagine a resolution in which he is not “the winner,” and for life in nineteenth-century Britain, perhaps such an absolute faith in such an outcome is warranted, but through art, Barbara can access another possibility. In the final scene of the play, Barbara’s simulation of death in acting the duchess’s character turns into actual death, where “the curtain was no sooner down than she dropped all of a heap, with one narrow streak of blood oozing out of her lips and trickling down her white gown” (111). Sir

Philip, oblivious, is intercepted by her after the performance ends instead of vice versa and fails to understand that Barbara’s “last appearance” will be one she makes on her own terms:

Barbara was standing there, in the dress she had worn in that last scene—the shroud-like drapery which had so painfully reminded him of death. . . . He leaned eagerly forward, and tried to clasp [her hands] in his own, but she withdrew herself from him with a shiver, and stood, shadow-like, in the shadow of the doorway. (109)

Braddon’s phantom women, evidently, only embrace when they want to, and for Barbara, it is her art that grants her the autonomy to express her suffering freely without fear of retaliation or retribution.32 While the supernatural provides Braddon with a means of granting her heroine absolute freedom—she can confront, without distress, the “liberator” who seeks to possess her, knowing with absolute certainty that one can never hold or possess a “shadow”—this short story

32 “Her Last Appearance” is sometimes read as a story of tragic love rather than one of escape and freedom. For example, the story is included in Victorian Love Stories: An Oxford Anthology (1998) and The Mammoth Book of Gaslit Romance (2014), where the implication is that Barbara is plucked from the world just before she is able to find safety in one who truly loves and cherishes her. Still, the way she is used up by all around her (the husband who abuses her, the fans who adore and crave her, and the avenger who wants to have her all to himself), makes death seem like more of a relief than a punishment and thus renders such readings suspiciously simplistic. Patricia Zakreski has shown how nineteenth-century periodicals frequently discussed the plight of less-fortunate actresses, arguing that “actresses were frequently cast as the unwitting victims of profligate husbands, unscrupulous managers, and malicious moralists” (144). As a former actress herself, Braddon reinforces this logic in her story, but she also seems to suggest that the stage, as with other forms of art, offers an opportunity to express that which would otherwise go unsaid.

65 tells a tale of its own value as a work of art that enables women to give voice to the social impairments that inform, and sometimes cripple, their lives. Instead of a bad marriage, and instead of a good marriage, Barbara chooses art, and in doing so, she opens a new realm of infinite possibility.

The Less Sensational Braddon

While the subversive potential of the supernatural short story is clear, the market conditions that made it a hallmark of middle-class reading (not simply its thematic considerations of supernatural “inbetweeness,” to use Dickerson’s phrasing) contributed much to this potential, and thus, it is important to look beyond the supernatural and the sensational to think about how the short story form more generally could offer a channel for marginalized voices to disseminate dissenting points of view in this sensational arena of commodity exchange.

Although Braddon has become somewhat synonymous with sensation fiction,33 many of her stories and novels bear little resemblance to what we have come to associate with the genre. The recovery work of her biographers Robert Lee Wolff and Jennifer Carnell have helped restore many of her lost stories to modern readers, but there is still much to learn about the less sensational Braddon. These stories not only testify to the dynamic, multifaceted nature of

Braddon’s oeuvre, but they also offer an opportunity to see how the sensational author would approach the themes of her more spectacular, widely read novels differently in a more disposable, invisible form. Here is a sampling:

33 Tomaiuolo contends that Braddon’s persistent association with sensation fiction stems from her inability to escape the shadow of the success of her early novels both during her life and after, arguing that “Braddon’s literary career can be . . . interpreted as a continuous struggle for independence from the Lady Audley paradigm and as a confrontation with the novel that made her famous in the Victorian literary market” (15).

66 A man abandons his betrothed the night before his wedding when he suspects her attachment to another—the other, unseen given the rash retreat of the unhappy bridegroom, is merely a black cat. – “Captain Thomas” (1860)34

A father, who repeatedly declares that he is “not sentimental,” lists all the ways his grown daughters are burdensome and implores other fathers to steer their own daughters away from novel reading; in turn, he, and not his daughters, becomes the ridiculous figure for consideration in this satiric character sketch – “My Daughters” (1860)35

A middle-class solicitor falls in love with an heiress but, to respect propriety, does not propose marriage until the girl’s fortune is put in jeopardy and the disinterested nature of his affection can be proven—the couple marries and the fortune is (mostly) restored. –“Found in the

Muniment Chest” (1867)36

Two theatre men spend their lives as rival actors and enemies until one falls ill; the other pays his expenses without anyone’s knowledge until he confesses it to his former rival who lies dying—they embrace tearfully with a newfound appreciation and respect for one another. – “At

Daggers Drawn” (1867)37

An unfortunate-looking orphan grown into an ugly man has had to work his whole life to move up the ladder of fortune only to be outshone by a man of good birth, good looks, but questionable ability and ethics; though he spends over a decade of his life plotting revenge

34 In Welcome Guest (1 September 1860) and later republished in her collection Ralph the Bailiff and Other Stories (1862 and 1867)

35 In Welcome Guest (20 October 1860) and later republished in her collection Ralph the Bailiff and Other Stories (1862 and 1867)

36 In Belgravia Christmas Annual (December 1867) and republished in her second, expanded version of the collection Ralph the Bailiff and Other Stories (1867)

37 In Belgravia (January 1867) under the pseudonym Babington White

67 against his handsome rival, he ultimately doesn’t get it, but he does later become his friend. –

“Samuel Lowgood’s Revenge” (1861)38

A lonely orphan experiences his first happy Christmas in the company of a jovial admiral until he is dropped off at a graveyard after the party; after being told he is actually dead, the boy jumps back into his grave and falls into a dark abyss until he wakes with the knowledge that he has been drunk for the first time. – “My First Happy Christmas” (1861)39

These represent a handful of Braddon’s 1860s short-story plots, and they are notable for the way in which they lack the devices we have come to associate with her sensation novels.

There is little talk, for example, of murder, disguise, infidelity, bigamy, or secrets; indeed, there is not a single “beautiful fiend” to be found.40 While there are stories like “Samuel Lowgood’s

Revenge” that do indeed center on vengeance, the thirst for retaliation tends to dissipate and fully disappear by the story’s end, and forgiveness of another’s “luck” in life is instead celebrated as the great achievement of a humble heart. This is true too for “Daggers Drawn,” the title of which, knowing what we do about Braddon, might certainly make us think that those two rival actors would eventually come to blows instead of coming together in a tearful display of Dickensian sentimentality. Braddon’s stories are sometimes comical, as in the case of “Captain Thomas”

(1860) where a man mistakes his fiancée’s cat as a rival and has to pay her a thousand pounds in damages for “Breach of Promise of Marriage” (67), and also too in the case of “My Daughters”

38 In Welcome Guest (23 February 1861) and later republished in her collection Ralph the Bailiff and Other Stories (1862 and 1867)

39 In Welcome Guest (22 January 1861) and later republished in her collection Ralph the Bailiff and Other Stories (1862 and 1867)

40 In Lady Audley Secret, Robert Audley first suspects that there may be a sinister quality to his aunt when he sees her pre-Raphaelite-style portrait: “The perfection of feature, the brilliancy of colouring, were there; but I suppose the painter had copied quaint mediæval monstrosities until his brain had grown bewildered, for my lady, in his portrait of her, had something of the aspect of a beautiful fiend” (72).

68 (1860), where a father’s lamentations about his daughters’ novel-reading turns himself into the character being sketched in the ironically titled work.41 To be sure, that Braddon could take a solemn would-be ghost story of a dead orphan and turn it in to a tale of a boy’s first encounter with strong Madeira wine suggests that she at least had a sense of humor about what constitutes a

“happy Christmas” for those in lonely privation.

Many of these stories lean toward the comic and sentimental rather than the sensational, but what they share is a critical awareness of the way in which patriarchal England routinely disempowers those on the social periphery from engaging in economic or intellectual pursuits that might serve improve their lives. Braddon’s short stories—to a much greater extent than her novels—frequently emphasize in their closed narrative form women’s marginalization and the difficulty of effectively navigating beyond it. Unlike Braddon’s bigamy novels that draw attention to problematic tenets of patriarchy by depicting cunning and passionate women who attempt to subvert the conditions that bind them (only to end up dead or reformed by the novel’s end), Braddon’s short stories, offer much fewer “active” heroines and consistently emphasize how gender inequality is exacerbated by financial distress and economic inequality more broadly. Through the 1860s, Braddon’s short fiction is narrated with very few exceptions from the first-person perspective of a male character or from a limited-omniscient perspective where a man serves as the central character. While these stories generally hone in on a particular moment

41 The father’s frustration about the impact of novel-reading on his daughters’ marriage prospects is ironically echoed in later criticism of Braddon’s own novels. For example, he says, “Of course it is only natural that, being blest with three marriageable daughters, their settlement in life is a question of some importance to Mrs. Blankstars and myself. But, good gracious me! What are you to do with girls who form their idea of a husband from the last book they read, and whose standard of perfection alters every time John Thomas brings a fresh cargo from Mudie’s?” (84). Later, in an 1866 Saturday Review article, Braddon’s novels are characterized as a kind that can impose a dangerous influence on the female readers—either wives or young women destined to become wives— who consume them: “As possible wives, they ought to be taught to admire what is truly admirable in the opposite sex, and weaned as far as possible from the mere fetish-worship of money and a moustache. . . . But what sort of man is the model husband of modern fiction? At best a good-looking, good-tempered, wealthy dolt” (“Novels, Past and Present 439).

69 or event of significance in the man’s life—discovering a wife has been “unfaithful,” a resolved rivalry, a first drunken episode, etc.—women almost always pay a price as peripheral characters in this form that is in itself a marginalized one. The short form thus allows Braddon a narrative mechanism for representing how women’s entire lives often (and regrettably) hinge on a single moment in a man’s, which is an important and provocative argument to put into circulation as her more visible villainesses are made to suffer and repent for acting in accord with self-interest.

“Captain Thomas” offers one early example of Braddon’s ongoing effort to call into question social conventions that bind women’s outcomes to men’s choices. In this simple, humorous narrative, the male narrator, Mr. Benjamin Strothers, opens the story of his feline rival by suggesting that women hold the most power in matters of romance and relationships only then to offer a tale that repeatedly calls into question the validity of such a claim, a point that comes to a head when he deserts his would-be wife the night before her wedding because his fragile ego cannot support her affection for another—not even a cat. As Sally Mitchell points out, Victorian comedy differed from earlier eighteenth-century varieties of the form in that it commonly emphasized social concerns and political issues rather than focusing on “surreal” characters

(182). While Strothers is indeed a ridiculous character, Braddon makes it clear throughout the story that his expectations about women and his generous assessment of his own importance is in line with cultural narrative of the time.

At the beginning of the story, Strothers decisively announces, “I hold it as a rule, that nine men out of ten are unfortunate in their first attachment,” but immediately undercuts the solemnity of the assertion by proclaiming that “it’s a very good thing for them that they are”

(55). He admits that he has been “unfortunate” in seventeen such attachments, which alerts readers to what are probably some fairly objectionable personal qualities; however, the extent of

70 these are still as of yet unknown. Luckily for him, he meets the lovely Rosa Matilda at a tea party, and though her “faded silk . . . had been turned from top to bottom” and her crinoline “set vilely,” he ignores his sisters’ warnings that she was an “affected thing” and pursues her all the same (58). The girl’s financial distress is in plain view, and in fact, Mr. Strothers himself witnesses the logic upon which she has based her reciprocated affection when he perceives her whispered sentiments to her mother at the party: “either my eyes deceived me, or that lady’s lips shaped the syllables, ‘five hundred a-year, and expectations from an uncle’” (58). Strothers is apparently unaffected by the supposed mercenary motivations at play, and simply says, “at any rate, the effect of the communication was pleasing, and the mamma of my loveliest smiled upon her child” (58). During the couple’s brief courtship, the name “Captain Thomas” escapes twice from the lips of Rosa Matilda, but instead of confronting her, Strothers decides to stew over his new “unknown and mysterious rival” until the point where he sneaks upon her and overhears that

“indescribable and unmistakable sound—something between the whistling of birds in wet weather and the drawing of corks—which one is in the habit of hearing under the mistletoe”

(66).

Although Strothers is clearly written as a comic character, and readers are encouraged to see his courtship strategies as ridiculous and self-indulgent, this simple, humorous tale underscores a deeper concern that permeates much of Braddon’s writing: that disadvantaged women are frequently dependent on men who are selfish, impetuous, and short-sighted. Braddon offers very little of Rosa Matilda’s psychology, and the short story format lends itself to the logical exclusion of others’ complex thoughts and motivations beyond the first-person narrator, but the communication between the girl and her mother shows, at least to some extent, that money was motivating her assent to the union. Instead, Braddon focuses on Strothers, whose

71 perception is questionable but whose judgment is dangerously quick. Strothers fails, for example, to see his seventeen unsuccessful romantic attachments as out of the ordinary while also insisting that he has found his true “Aphrodite” in his eighteenth attachment over tea and talk of indigestible muffins at a party (57). He judges, however, that the reading of yellow-bound books has caused an unpleasant deficiency in his betrothed (while apparently blind to his own deficiencies), attributing the “evident absence of moral region in the cerebral development of the woman [he] adore[s] to a gradual eating away of that department of the brain, from the perusal of books in a foreign language” (65). Furthermore, Strothers mistakenly deduces the source of the

“unmistakable sound” he hears as kissing shared between Rosa Matilda and her lover, and instead of confronting her to find that his rival is only the lost feline companion of his soon-to-be wife, he leaves unannounced assured of his sound judgment. When Strothers retreats and subsequently breaks his vow to marry, Braddon highlights how women’s social and financial well-being can be deeply impaired by the mere appearance or suspicion that they are morally compromised, and her humorous tale simply points to the ludicrous extent to which some take this “logic.”

Braddon, however, ultimately empowers Rosa Matilda—despite her “faded silk”—to use the law to her advantage and capitalize on the ignorant and impulsive tendencies of the man with whom she might otherwise have spent her entire life: “There was an action for Breach of

Promise of Marriage, and I had to pay one thousand pounds damages. Captain Thomas was a very handsome BLACK CAT, which Rosa Matilda had been attached to from his kittenhood. . . .

I offered—I offered!—nay, I implored her to marry me, and forget the past; but she wouldn’t”

(67). Braddon’s decision to vindicate the ill-used Rosa Matilda by awarding her a thousand pounds in damages actually approaches the breach-of-promise law from a different angle than

72 that used by many of her contemporaries, those whose fictional representations tended to use the law as a way of demonizing women rather than supporting them. As Ginger S. Frost writes, while Victorian writers sometimes approached the topic with humor, the “vision of breach-of- promise cases . . . was decidedly negative. In no case did the plaintiff need the award, and in several instances . . . she had no right to one at all. Plaintiffs were represented as vindictive, mercenary, and scheming” (7). Still, while Rosa Matilda is not the scheming villainess of Lady

Audley’s Secret, she is not a particularly active or aggressive character either, as the first-person narrative structure of the short story necessarily inhibits her agency by positioning all of her choices in relation to those of Strothers’s. Even at the close the of the story, Strothers makes a last attempt to call her virtue and class into question by hinting that the money she received in the lawsuit was used to furnish an “elegant house” in Regent’s Park that she shares already with a new husband, a man who was once a wealthy potential suitor whom he had at first beat out in the race to the altar. Ultimately, he is made out to be ridiculous by his own actions rather than by any effort of Rosa Matilda’s.

“Captain Thomas,” like many of Braddon’s stories, is comic rather than sensational, but it uses a sensational market to disseminate new ideas about how existing social paradigms ill-serve women. As Michael Billing writes, “mockery provides momentary freedom” (97), and while comedy in mid-nineteenth century short stories is still an understudied genre, it may be that the short story’s humor offers greater freedom than the novel’s because, since stories are more likely to stay within a single narrative mode, mockery becomes the point (and not just an element) of the story. For example, Robert Audley, as the ironically “short-sighted” amateur detective hero of Lady Audley’s Secret (127, 198), gets as many things wrong about the case against his aunt as he gets right; however, despite his eye-roll-worthy mistakes, he is still successful in

73 overpowering her, and he ultimately becomes a “rising man” in law (435). Strangely enough,

Robert distinguishes himself in his field with the “great breach of promise case of Hobbs v.

Nobbs,” where he “convulsed the Court by his deliciously comic rendering of the faithless

Nobb’s [sic] amatory correspondence” (435). Braddon’s handling of the case, as Randall Craig points out, “confirms the low regard in which breach of promise cases [were] held, and it emphasizes the role of the skillful lawyer in manipulating language and constructing narratives to serve self-interested ends” (88). While Robert may get the last laugh in a novel that needs to punish deviant femininity in the end to satisfy critical expectation, it is Rosa Matilda who—with the full support of readers—is laughing all the way to Regent’s Park in the story. For Braddon’s comedic short fiction, a short-sighted man can be the end rather than the means.

On the other side of the genre spectrum are Braddon’s sentimental stories, with one such example being “Samuel Lowgood’s Revenge,” a story, like so many others of that genre at the time, which engages readers through narration of women’s suffering in relationships over which they have very little control. In this story, Braddon does not reward the woman who stands in the middle of two men’s long-standing grudge; instead, she suggests that being a “good woman” ultimately leads to self-sacrifice that only serves to benefit men while destroying the woman.

The story features a decades-long battle between Samuel Lowgood and Christopher Weldon— two “rivals and enemies”—which persists from the time they are junior clerks to partners (121).

While Weldon is a “very handsome” son of a gentleman who easily wins good favor with pretty much everyone with whom he comes in contact, Lowgood is a “pauper orphan . . . a pale-faced, sallow-complexioned, hollow-eyed insignificant lad” who is mostly underestimated by everyone around him (121-22). Lowgood hates Weldon. He hates him for his “foppish ways,” his

“haughty manners,” his “handsome boyish face … [and] blue, beaming, hopeful eyes,” for the

74 “sword which swung across the stiff skirts of his brocaded coat,” for “the money which jingled in his pockets,” for his “melodious voice,” for his “jovial, winning ways,” for everything, basically (123). Most of all, though, he hates him for the influence he has over Lucy Malden,42 who is deceived by his charming ways into believing he will actually love and commit to her. So when an opportunity comes to put Weldon in his place once and for all, Lowgood acts on it: he uses his life savings to “buy back” a forged check that Weldon has illegally cashed so that when the right opportunity arises, he may produce the check and crush his most detested of foes. Time goes on, Lowgood marries Lucy (although she never seems to fully forget her former lover), and finally, when Weldon ascends to the highest rank in the firm, the time comes for his long- awaited payback—except the check, which he has kept hidden for the last decade in a locked chest, is gone.

Ultimately, Lucy prevents her husband from getting revenge by removing the forged check from the chest, and as she reveals on her deathbed the role she played in foiling his plan, she is able to catalyze reconciliation between the two men, which occurs only after she has passed. While all of this sounds fairly positive (forgiveness and reconciliation are, after all, good things, generally speaking), it is not such a good deal for Lucy. Even though Lucy is characterized as an “angel” who “save[s] [her husband] from disgrace,” she spends the entire story as a silent sufferer in a decades-long love triangle. She is described as “pale,” “grave,”

“faded,” as one who “suffer[s]” with a “poor, pitiful, broken heart” (133-34), one whose life is eclipsed by a feud between two men, and one whose life is celebrated at her own funeral by men alone: “every clerk in the house of Tyndale and Tyndale” (138). Her value is gained by the

42 Braddon will later use a similar version of the name a year later for the eponymous Lady Audley, who is Helen Maldon at the time of her first marriage and Lucy Graham at the time of her second (bigamist) marriage.

75 sacrifice she makes for all of the men who surround her, but on her own deathbed, she says, “I have done my best to do my duty, but life for me has never been very happy” (138).

Although Lowgood is not a cruel husband, and though Lucy avoids physical violation in her early interactions with Weldon (even if she is exploited emotionally with “false promises”), she suffers—and readers likely sympathize with her because she is subsequently neglected at every turn of the narrative. Indeed, it is only because she is not noticed that she can remove the forged check from its hiding place and catalyze reconciliation between the men at all. While

Braddon may not offer a solution to this problem, the affective appeal of the story, as with the many stories like this one which were so popular at the time, might, as Pamela K. Gilbert writes, have much to do with readers’ “self-recognition in the potentially universal affective plight of womanhood” (“Genre Fiction and the Sensational” 147). At a time when women were gaining ground in the fight for greater social and political freedom, the sentimental story invites a momentary break to mourn those misfortunes over which women still seemingly have no control, to cry over them because they can.

***

Stories like these may not have registered on Victorian best-seller lists nor left much of a mark in literary canons; however, their impact as objects of mass circulation among a new class of consumers is indeed an observable and important one. As Kate Krueger writes, “the social interactions that occur in reality are established and confirmed by the texts people consume and circulate” (5): despite her reputation as a “hack” author of sensation fiction, Braddon’s prolific writing career in this market endowed her with a great deal of power in shaping popular ideas about and attitudes toward women, work, and social hierarchies. Although Victorian critics identified sensation fiction as the catalyst of a new age of unthinking consumption and the key

76 offender in the crime against high art and middle-class morality, the British short story functioned in a similar—though less conspicuous— way. Its development and proliferation during the mid-nineteenth century testifies to a growing demand for reading material that could be produced quickly and sustain the interest of busy readers, and crucially, it offered working women, in particular, a convenient and financially expedient avenue for expression. As a result, this so-called “minor” genre was uniquely poised to offer more diverse and often dissenting perspectives of Victorian society that could affect readers’ understanding of their increasingly modernized world. For women like Braddon, as Liggins, Maunder, and Robbins point out, “short fiction offered an opportunity to explore new ways of being, sketches which both diagnosed the problems of femininity for their audiences and offered some alternatives to the marriage plot”

(9). Importantly though, short fiction was a product of a market that not only provided a means to represent alternative models of femininity, but one that created new models by serving as a mechanism through which new forms of independence could be realized for women seeking to support themselves outside of the existing channels of domestic work. Thus, independent of their plots, these stories were indeed sensational as a product and an indication of the extraordinary changes taking place in Britain that were shaping a new knowledge economy then materializing at the time.

77 CHAPTER 3 THE PERIODICAL WITH A SECRET: INTERTEXTUAL EDITING AND GOTHIC PARADIGMS IN THE CULTURE OF SENSATION

As Chapter 2 makes clear, short fiction of the mid-nineteenth century was a product of sensational changes in print and market culture that offered an outlet for marginalized voices to critique dominant ideologies. In the shadow of sensational novels, individual stories could generally avoid the criticism so frequently leveled at the more visible novel, which in turn created a site where greater freedom to experiment with form, and greater freedom of expression more generally, was possible. Studies of Victorian short fiction have always to some extent acknowledged that how we understand and talk about short stories has been shaped by comparisons to the novel. Scholars like Mary Louise Pratt and Charles E. May have pointed out that “shortness” can never be an intrinsic quality but rather something that makes sense only in relation to something else. But how scholars have made sense of this relationship has varied considerably, with early scholars like Pratt suggesting that because the short story is defined by its comparison to the novel, it is therefore dependent on and secondary to it, while more recently, others have argued that there are unique generic characteristics that become observable in comparisons with the novel. Looking at short works in their original periodical context, however, offers a different way of thinking about their relationship to novels, as serialization in periodicals created intertextual reading practices where meaning derives from the interplay between texts.

The 1860s supplied an increasingly literate reading body with an unprecedented range of affordable periodicals. As a result, readers had more options when it came to the types of magazines they could choose to consume, which thus rendered the lifespan of a periodical indefinite and unstable. Embroiled so in a literary survival of the fittest, these new “respectable” magazines—that is, magazines designed for middle- rather than working-class audiences—had to cater to readers’ tastes with fiction that many critics would not see as especially respectable.

78 Hilary Fraser, Stephanie Green, and Judith Johnston explain in Gender and the Victorian

Periodical that Victorian editors were “constrained by the economic need to make their journals desirable,” and to be successful, they needed to “seduce and … retain a readership” (77).

Succumbing to market pressures in this way opened the door for including the kind of morally objectionable fiction that could excite, and yes, even seduce readers, all the while occasioning the now infamous diatribes by Henry Mansel, Margaret Oliphant, and the like about the

“dumbing down” of literature and the ungodly state of British taste.1 Thus, the explosion of periodical publishing helped establish and fuel a culture of sensation by working to deteriorate the line between respectable and scandalous.

If the success or failure of a magazine depended on its ability or inability to understand and meet the market demands created by readers, then surely a magazine’s editor would be largely responsible for either outcome.2 Indeed, Fraser, Green, and Johnston confirm this logic by finding that “inevitably the most successful periodicals were those with the most able editors,” those who were “well practiced, professional, practical” (84). These qualities are taken a step further by John Stuart Mill who, adopting a military metaphor, likens the editor to a kind of “general in-chief” who must rally “the scattered hosts around him” (qtd in Robson 236). In his view, in other words, able editors can make heterogeneous entities work together to make something unified; they can turn innocuous fragments into a force to be reckoned with.

1 According to Ellen Casey, approximately three quarters of the novels Dickens edited were sensational, as he believed that novels with sensational plotlines and mysteries were among the best suited novels for serialization. In fact, when explaining the art of serial publishing to Mrs. Brookfield, a potential contributor whose work he had denied publication, he encourages her to make a study of seven novels to learn what best works for serial form; all of these were sensation novels.

2 The editor, according to Margaret Beetham in “Towards a Theory of the Periodical as a Publishing Genre,” is responsible for “processes of negotiation between authors, proprietors and readers,” as well as maintaining a consistency of style that normalizes the standards of the periodical and makes it visually recognizable to potential consumers (25).

79 Importantly, the act of piecing together “the scattered hosts”—i.e., the novel installations, short stories, articles, advertisements, illustrations, and so forth—actively creates a new text that tells a story of its own.

Looking at a whole periodical installment as a text in and of itself opens up new ways of thinking about mid-nineteenth-century literature and the experience of reading in the Victorian period. Periodicals wielded tremendous power at this time—power to disseminate knowledge, shape social attitudes, and inform public practices—and how these periodicals were pieced together played a key part in structuring and conveying important cultural messages. Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism and intertextuality posits that all texts contain within themselves a range of discourses that interact,3 and Laurel Brake suggests that the “structural correlative” of this phenomenon occurs within the magazine format, which “invites intertextual and dialogic readings of the larger, magazine text of which the individual text is a part” (“Writing, Cultural

Production, and the Periodical Press” 55). In this way, meaning, according to Brake, is based on the “specificities of the location of writing” (55), which is an interesting rebuff to the ethos of

“self-containment” or “isolation” suggested by book form.

Drawing upon similar logic as Brake, Deborah Wynne’s groundbreaking work The

Sensation Novel and the Victorian Family Magazine shows how looking at sensation novels in their periodical context can further refute assumptions that these works were merely “light reading” that were somehow devoid of meaning or social significance.4 Citing W.J.

3 From M.M. Bahktin’s The Dialogic Imagination (1981).

4 Early critics of sensation often dismissed the genre. In The Reading Lesson, Patrick Brantlinger suggests that these thrilling works offered “few if any philosophically, socially, or morally redeeming features” (142).

80 McCormack’s theory of lateral reading,5 she reveals how a sensation novel installment might attract readers to a particular periodical but suggests that it would not likely be the only thing they read. Wynne claims that the periodical is a site of “simultaneity” that presents a “cluster of apparently unrelated texts at the same point in time and space, all having the potential to be read in relation to one another” (20). She identifies an “intertextual approach” used by editors in piecing together any given number of their magazine, which would serve to invite readers to make thematic connections between serialized novels and other features by the “power of juxtaposition” (3). “Interpellating” readers in this fashion, according to Wynne, was a way of enhancing the pleasure of reading while also generating debate about the issues brought up in the novels. Ultimately, if an editor could succeed in the interpellation of his or her readers, the more likely it was that the magazine could survive.

Although Wynne is correct in her suggestion that thematic connections could often be made between the serialized novel installments and the works that accompanied them, editors could run the risk of alienating readers if all of the works included were too closely related. For popular family magazines like All the Year Round, keeping readers entertained was the primary objective, and offering works diverse enough to stimulate the imagination played an important part in realizing this objective. In other words, an editor would not necessarily want to accompany a novel installment about bigamy with other texts that deal explicitly with bigamy.

Since it would not be in an editor’s best interest to include works that too closely replicated the novel’s paradigm—there are, after all, as many works that do not bear direct thematic similarity

5 McCormack argues that the novel installment is “only one of numerous items . . . which impinge immediately on its readers, permitting them to read on (or back) from fiction into political commentary or lyric poem or into (seemingly) different fiction” (115).

81 to the novel installments as those that do—it is worthwhile to consider other ways that the short stories, articles, histories, biographies, and the like function within this periodical context.

Indeed, the novel, as the “central commodity” of magazine, would logically dictate the makeup of the rest of installation; however, the so-called “filler material” that accompanied it could not only change the way the novel was understood or experienced, and not only help generate debate about ongoing social concerns raised by those novels (shifting class identities, the position of women, deterioration of the family, etc.), but I argue that it could also “place” the novel. Here, by “placing,” I refer to the practice of “homing” parts of a novel into an issue of a periodical (turning fragments into a new whole), as well as situating the sensational plot as imperiled domestic space. Serialization of sensation novels is, I argue, a different kind of articulation of the gothic. On the one hand, serialization gives us only one part of an unknown whole, thus burying any answers to the text’s secrets—any finality or resolution—in an unknown future (rather than an ancient tomb).6 On the other hand, the ghost stories, foreign adventures, travel writings, etc. that served as mainstays of the middle-class periodical could perpetually reinforce the idea that “home”—indeed, English domesticity itself—is always under threat, that foreign “otherness,” something odd and unknowable, is lurking just outside the border.

In terms of its plot, the sensation novel is often compared to its gothic predecessor, and what is most commonly cited as separating the two is time and location. With its focus on displaced family relationships that leave women at risk and its perpetual transformation of shelter into a site of terror, it is of no wonder why the “novel with a secret” is so often compared

6 As one reviewer writes of The Woman in White in the Guardian, part of the appeal of the novel’s plot—indeed, its “chief interest”—is that the reader is kept in a “real state of uncertainty,” as it is “never possible to see more than a few pages ahead” (89-90).

82 to these eighteenth-century tales of terror and horror.7 Proximity to home, of course, is generally cited as a key divergence from the gothic, as the sensation novel sets its mysteries in modern

British society among average people rather than in foreign castles among monks. Henry James has famously alluded to the transformation of the gothic in these modern tales, writing in a review of Braddon’s Aurora Floyd,

To Mr. Collins belongs the credit of having introduced into fiction those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors ... Instead of the terrors of Udolpho, we were treated to the terrors of the cheerful country-house and the busy London lodgings. And there is no doubt that these were infinitely the more terrible. (James 110)

Obviously Radcliffe’s Apennines in the eighteenth century were meant to be a source of terror and mystery to British readers, as the Apennines are removed from the supposedly “safe” hearth of England. There anything can happen. To imply, on the other hand, that one’s neighbor or the cheery country maid or even one’s own spouse could be a villain encroaches on what should be safe territory—the mystery is not only “at” one’s own door but just as often within one’s own doors.

Echoing James, Winifred Hughes suggests in her landmark study of the sensation novel

The Maniac in the Cellar that the “sensationalism” of the sensation novel derives from precisely this paradox of the unfamiliar in the familiar:

The subject matter of the sensationalists is at once outrageous and carefully documented, ‘wild yet domestic,’ extraordinary in intensity and yet confined to the

7 Much has been written on sensation’s debt to the gothic. Tamar Heller, for example, has discussed how the tradition of the female gothic emerges through the theme of “buried writing” in Collins’s works. She argues that images of buried writing represent social and textual marginality, often showing how the “surface” of convention tends to hide subversive truths in these texts. The female Gothic, she suggests, “maps a plot of domestic victimization” (2), and many sensation novels are centrally concerned with the way women can disrupt and subvert social norms when they encounter domestic arrangements, laws, and mores that can disempower and confine them. Alexandra Warwick discusses the “domestic gothic” as “spaces, and the state of marriage or family life that the spaces embody, [as] terrifyingly ambiguous” (30). Laurence Talairach-Vielmas discusses how the “search for the secret” in sensation novels was “much modelled” on its gothic predecessor (29); she suggests that “secrecy and the body go hand in hand” (31), with sensation plots often hinging on mistaken identity and intentional artifice.

83 experience of ordinary people operating in familiar settings . . . The aim of all this, similarly paradoxical, appears to have been a kind of civilized melodrama, modernized and domesticated . . . an everyday gothic, minus the supernatural and aristocratic trappings. (16)

Although it is clear that the gothic “erupts” within the otherwise mundane world portrayed in these novels, I suggest that the novels’ periodical context played a key role in highlighting their domestication of gothic “foreignness.” Using Wilkie Collins’s No Name as a case study,8 I show how an overwhelming number of stories, articles, histories, and biographies that were published alongside it in All the Year Round emphasize foreign adventures, bizarre rituals, cruel pasts, and uncanny occurrences. The “narrative” of these contextual materials if they were, let’s say, bound up and read together in the typical fashion of a novel is one strongly rooted in the foreign—all that is exciting, different, and other than “normal” domestic English life. Rather than pinpointing various themes that are at times developed laterally in particular issues of the magazine, as Wynne has done, I show here how an intertextual reading of the novel in its original periodical context consistently reveals how readers would be encouraged to see the

“civilized,” “modernized,” and “domesticated” events of the novel (to use Hughes phrasing) always in relation to the subversive, foreign, and strange.

This way of reading serialized sensation novels offers a new context for thinking about

Judith Halberstam’s claim that the gothic is a narrative that works to critique the coherence of

8 I have chosen No Name for this study for several reasons. For one, Collins had just had tremendous success with The Woman in White two years before. His reputation had by the time of No Name’s serialization already been established as a writer of the “sensation school.” By this time, too, better ideas about what sensation novels were and the social impact they were having had been established. Second, AYR had thrived during The Woman in White’s serialization and Dickens needed another popular hit, as sales of AYR had slumped badly during the run of Charles Lever’s A Day’s Ride, A Life’s Romance (18 August 1860 – 23 March 1861) that followed it. While sales were recovering with Great Expectations and A Strange Story, they were not growing exponentially. As I will discuss at greater length elsewhere, Dickens had a lot at stake with this serial, so it makes sense that he would take great care to structure each issue with special care.

84 genre itself. Speaking specifically about novels, she argues that the gothic is not only the disruption of realism but the disruption of all generic purity:

It is the hideous eruption of the monstrous in the heart of domestic England but it is also the narrative that calls genre itself into question. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which I think functions as an allegory of Gothic production, contains a domestic tableau of family life (the De Laceys) right in the heart of the narrative. This structure inverts and threatens to maintain a reversal whereby, rather than the Gothic residing in the dark corners of realism, the realistic is buried alive in the gloomy recesses of Gothic. It may very well be that the novel is always Gothic. (11)

Serialization complicates the novel’s generic consistency differently from the way Halberstam describes because it only ever offers part of an unseen and unknowable whole. The “structure,” which Halberstam suggests is the novel itself, becomes, in Brake’s sense of the term, the periodical installment. This context offers a different “narrative.” Thus, my study extends

Halberstam’s claims about generic disruption to Brake’s ideas about the dialogism within an issue of a periodical, ultimately revealing that AYR deliberately and consistently uses the gothic in its supplementary materials in a way that threatens to “bury alive” No Name’s domestic realism.

Overview of All the Year Round Editing History

Before creating All the Year Round (1859-1893), Dickens became one of the first editors to address a middle-class readership with Household Words (1850-1859). HW was imagined with a specific social mission in mind, and it was clear from the start that this miscellany would be driven by this social purpose rather than a literary one. As Robert Terrell Bledsoe says, “it was a miscellany that had a mission before it had a name” (13), and, per Dickens, it would be

“designed for the Entertainment and Instruction of all classes of readers and to help in the discussion of the most important social questions of the time” (Dickens Uncollected Writings, 1-

18). In a letter soliciting Elizabeth Gaskell’s assistance with the project, Dickens indicated that

85 HW would concern “the raising up of those that are down, a general improvement of our social condition” (“To Elizabeth Gaskell” 6:22). Deborah Wynne has suggested that HW truly belonged to the “spirit of the 1850s,” that it offered “a voice calling for reform and social justice” in light of the extreme poverty and social turbulence of ‘30s and ‘40s (23). “Social problem” novels, like

Dickens’s own Hard Times (1854) and Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1854), found a home in HW and were generally serialized alongside articles that dealt directly with themes such as poverty, dangerous working conditions, and industrial unrest (Wynne 23). All the Year Round, however, would take a different turn.

When Dickens parted ways with Bradbury and Evans, who were his publishers and part owners of HW,9 he had a new mission in mind, a weekly miscellany driven by the literature itself, which he would call All the Year Round. It isn’t that Dickens became unconcerned with social problems (in fact, early issues of AYR tended to echo the format of HW with explicit features that described social and political abuses),10 but rather, as he alludes in his introduction to The Woman in White,11 he wanted to promote entertaining literature without interruption: “We purpose always reserving the first place in these pages for a continuous work of fiction . . . It is our hope and aim, while we work hard at every other department of our journal, to produce, in this one, some sustained works of imagination that may become a part of English literature”

9 The catalyst for splitting with his publishers stems from Dickens’s formal separation from his wife in 1858. Bradbury and Evans refused to publish Dickens’s explanation for the separation in their magazine Punch. Dickens wanted to counteract rumors about the reasons for the separation in a public way, but he was told “statements on a domestic and painful subject in the inappropriate columns of a comic miscellany” were wrong, which infuriated him (Bradbury and Evans 3). He told Foster and Wills that the best way to discontinue the partnership would be the “Cessation and discontinuance” of Household Words (Pilgrim 8:758).

10 See pg. 23 of Wynne for more information of the imperfect transition from Household Words to All the Year Round.

11 The note to readers occurs at the commencement of A Tale of Two Cities, which was the first serialized novel in the magazine, and just before The Woman in White. Dickens wanted to give readers a sense of the pattern they could expect in the magazine, even indicating that the works would always be original and that the serialization timeframe would be similar for each novel.

86 (AYR II: 95). Each weekly edition of the magazine would open with a novel installment, which would then be followed by stories, sketches, travel writing, literature reviews, etc., rather than the current affairs articles that would so often appear in HW. According to Wynne, the novel installment would comprise approximately 36 percent of each issue, whereas the primary rival magazine, Once a Week, had novel installments comprise only 25 percent of each issue. To place the novel installment in the opening pages of each issue, to let the novel’s themes “dominate” it, would be, in Wynne’s view, “unthinkable” in the context of HW (24); however, these changes do illustrate how important it was for Dickens to pick novels that would generate sales and choose articles and stories that could create an appropriate context for the featured novel.

Dickens’s letters to Wills reveals how invested he was in the makeup of each issue of

AYR, as he frequently instructs him as to which articles and stories should be placed with each installment. The fact that Dickens was sole owner of the magazine gave him tremendous power and autonomy as its editor, which often translated not only into micromanaging the affairs of the magazine (hiring and critiquing writers, dictating payment—often arbitrarily depending on how much he personally “admired” someone—overseeing layout and design, etc.) but also going as far as to intervene personally in the writing of other people’s stories during their publication.

Indeed, J.A. Sutherland has remarked on the “essential egocentricity” of AYR reflected by

Dickens’s early consideration of the name Charles Dickens’s Own and his disinclination to offer the expected “pliability” with which so many successful publishers were apt to reward their respected clients (Victorian Novelists and Publishers 170). Dickens also demanded that contributors remain anonymous, which, as Wynne points out, was a problematic imposition given that his own name was prominently displayed on each page (25).

87 Given then that Dickens was such a steadfast and exacting “conductor” of AYR,12 two things are clear: 1) the novel leading each issue was extremely important and therefore carefully chosen and supervised to drive sales, and 2) the other texts included in those issues were prudently selected to enhance the reading experience of the novel without “taking over” the issue. The goal was not to center on any one particular social problem but rather to let the novel shine. With such a formula in mind, it makes sense that Dickens would embrace sensation novels. When the Woman in White ran (26 November 1859 – 25 August 1860), for example, magazine sales soared, and not only did magazine sales soar, a new commodity genre of literature emerged—just think of the “Woman in White” cloaks, bonnets, and perfumes for evidence of a commercial exploitation of the novel.13 After the run of The Woman in White, however, Dickens suffered from a major decline in sales during the serialization of Charles

Lever’s A Day’s Ride, A Life’s Romance, a decline so bad that Dickens took the uncharacteristic move of publishing his own Great Expectations (1 December 1860 – 3 August 1861) concurrently with A Day’s Ride to rescue sales while the Lever’s serial continued to limp on.14

Great Expectations helped, but as that serial came to a close, Dickens took it upon himself not only to advertise the novel to follow, which was to be Bulwer Lytton’s A Strange Story (10

August 1861 – 8 March 1862), but also the one to follow that: “a new serial story by MR.

12 Each issue of AYR reminds readers that it is a weekly magazine “CONDUCTED BY CHARLES DICKENS.” In any typical issue, the only text in boldface is the title of the magazine, the title of serial novel, and Charles Dickens’s own name.

13 Stewart Marsh Ellis has testified to influence of The Woman in White on nineteenth-century marketing strategies, writing that “all through 1860, . . . every possible commodity was labelled ‘Woman in White.’ There were ‘Woman in White’ cloaks and bonnets, ‘Woman in White perfumes and all manner of toilet requisites, ‘Woman in White’ Waltzes and Quadrilles” (29-30). Labelling these commodities in such a way not only promoted the goods so branded but also offered additional publicity to the novel.

14 Great Expectations appeared for the first time in AYR on 1 December 1860 after fifteen installments of Lever’s serial had been published. Catherine Delafield notes that the appearance of Great Expectations as a weekly serial offers a “significant . . . textual representation of Dickens’s ongoing responsibilities for the sales of the magazine series” (64).

88 WILKIE COLLINS, to be continued from week-to-week for nine months” (AYR 3 August 1861

437). While Jerome Meckier contends that sales had almost entirely rebounded by the end of A

Strange Story,15 Catherine Delafield and Deborah Wynne have suggested that Bulwer Lytton’s serial was something from which the magazine needed to be “rescued.”16 Thus, Dickens found himself in need of a story that could truly anchor the magazine and grow sales, and Collins’s work, of which he was himself a big fan, could do just that. He needed to deliver with Collins’s

No Name in order to regain control of the market—the stakes were high. Thus, examining the issues of AYR from No Name’s serialization (15 March 1862 – 17 January 1863) offers important insight about what kinds of texts Dickens thought would be best suited to supplement the novel in an age that had already become sensationalized.

No Name

No Name narrates the story of two sisters, Nora and Magdalen Vanstone, whose happy, peaceful lives in 1840s West Somersetshire get turned upside down when the unexpected passing of their parents reveals that they are not able to inherit the estate lawfully. They discover that unfortunate circumstances—isn’t that always the case in sensation fiction?—prevented the

Vanstones’ legal wedding until mere weeks before their death, and because the Vanstones had not foreseen their impending demise, an updated will had not been secured. In short, Magdalen and Nora are left without a home, without any property, and indeed, without even a name. What follows is what Christine Bolus-Reichert’s terms a “highly self-conscious exploration of the

15 See p. 74 in Dickens’s Great Expectations: Misnar’s Pavilion versus Cinderella.

16 Catherine Delafield, for example, points out that the way past volumes of AYR were marketed during No Name’s run “prioritize” A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, and The Woman in White as the novels chiefly responsible for making the magazine successful (176). Deborah Wynne goes as far as to say that A Strange Story was an “unpopular novel,” after which Dickens “rel[ied] on No Name to boost sales” (99). She also identifies the incredible success of Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Ellen Wood (Collins’s two female rivals publishing in other venues) as exacerbating the problem of sales (98).

89 consequences of losing one’s identity” (23), which is manifested in Magdalen’s stop-at-nothing approach to regaining her “stolen” fortune from its legal inheritor Noel Vanstone, the son of her deceased father’s estranged brother.

The novel was successful in garnering the attention of sensation-hungry English readers and steadily increasing sales of AYR, with one anonymous reviewer writing in The Reader,

“Since it began, thousands of English households have studied its progress with unfailing interest” (15).17 Contributing to the more conservative North British Review, Alexander Smith suggests that it was some sort of bewitching “magic” fostering that interest, as he writes,

“so long as you have the book open, you are spell-bound” (184). Perhaps no better enthusiast of the novel can be found, however, than Dickens himself. Dickens does nothing but offer unremitting praise for the novel in his letters to Collins, saying that it evoked in him a “strong interest” and “great admiration” (Hutton 108), that it is “wonderfully fine” and develops with an

“ever-rising power and force” that “fills [him] with admiration” (Hutton 112). In turn, as an important installment of the novel approaches (the one in which Magdalen enters a loveless marriage with the detestable Noel Vanstone),18 Dickens assures Collins, “I am bent upon making a good No. to go with No Name” (Hutton 117).

Wynne points out that the features ultimately included with this number were Eliza Lynn

Linton’s “The Girl from the Workhouse,” and two stories of unknown authorship, “Blind Black

Tom” and “The Story of Major Strangeways.” Leaving out Thomas Adolphus Trollope’s “The

17 When No Name was issued in book form on December 31, 1862 after its serial publication, the first edition immediately sold four thousand copies.

18 The issue alluded to here is the one from 18 October 1862.

90 Duchess Veronica,” which also appeared in part in the issue,19 Wynne claims that these stories are examples of Dickens’s goal to provide “regular support for the serial’s themes” (100). On the one hand, she makes a good case in particular for “The Girl from the Workhouse” since both it and the novel explore in explicit ways how life for young women without the support and shelter of a respectable family can lead to disastrous consequences, hence the unfortunate marriage of

Magdalen to her cousin. On the other hand, “Blind Black Tom” with its “alarmist discussion of race and theories of degeneracy” and “The Story of Major Strangeways” as a “historical story of violent crime and punishment” have themes that are not inconsistent with sensation novels generally but have less of a direct thematic connection to this novel, and particularly, this installment (99-100). Trollope’s “The Duchess Veronica,” set in seventeenth-century Florence, seems the most removed from the novel in terms of time and location, which is perhaps why

Wynne chooses not to deal with it directly.

The “problem” of setting in “The Duchess Veronica,” however, actually offers important insight into Dickens’s editing process and his ability to help boost sales of his magazine at a crucial time; indeed, the story hints at a trend that persists throughout the entire run of No Name: features that accentuate the threatened British home by focusing on foreign, removed— sometimes otherworldly—phenomena. In the mid-nineteenth century, this “threat” to the British home—the British “way of life”—that is so thinly veiled in sensation novels is in many ways modernity itself, changing ideas about class, the role of women, the sanctity of marriage and the family unit, and so forth. As Lyn Pykett has argued, “modernity and domesticity are more than simply the mise-en-scène of the sensation novel, they are also among its main preoccupations;

19 “The Duchess Veronica” takes place in eight chapters and spans five issues of AYR (4 October 1862 – 1 November 1862). The portion appearing in the October 8th issue of AYR that features Magdalen’s marriage is Chapter 4.

91 they are topics of discussion and investigation” (The Nineteenth-Century Sensation Novel 8). The

“violent yoking of romance and realism” that Winifred Hughes has used to describe sensation novels creates an “everyday gothic” that works to destabilize the quiet English home.20 Thus, to use Laurel Brake’s phrasing, when we forego the “vertical category” of “author” and choose instead to look at the “horizontal slice” offered by a work’s periodical context, a new framework of meaning is opened up (“Writing, Cultural Production, and the Periodical Press” 55). So instead of saying, for instance, that a novel like No Name is part of Collins’s ongoing effort to show how the mysterious exists in the everyday, looking at its serial publication in AYR shows how domesticating the gothic was a literary preoccupation on a much grander scale.

To go back then for a moment to “The Duchess Veronica,” it becomes much clearer as to why Dickens would run this “long” short story as Magdalen’s actions start to become more desperate—it is a gothic tale that at once narrates the tragic possibilities that can occur if a woman enters a loveless marriage, but in its foreign, far-removed setting, the story also emphasizes the unlikelihood of such horrible events happening in modern Britain. Readers may fear that Magdalen is taking her revenge too far with the marriage, and “The Duchess Veronica” may help them realize the extent of why. It is a tragic story that describes how a poor seventeen-

20 Kate Krueger has argued that popular mid-century fiction was preoccupied with the connection between a stable woman and a stable home, suggesting that the “image of the reputable home hinged upon the presence of a contented housewife” and that “to disturb one was to destroy the other” (58). Partly how Victorian writers called into question “normative representations of gender” was by dramatizing the “vulnerability of the boundaries of the house” (58). Krueger focuses her analysis specifically on mid-century ghost stories, but we can see the same logic in sensation fiction as well. For example, the opening scene of Lady Audley’s Secret depicts Audley Court as an estate of merit because of its age but also one made vulnerable by it. Though we are told that the door is made of solid oak, and if one were to knock upon it, one would “never penetrate the stronghold” (8), Braddon takes great care to mention that the door was “squeezed into a corner of a turret at one angle of the building” as if “hiding from dangerous visitors” (8). In turn, she emphasizes the many windows with “frail lattices that rattled in every breeze” (7), the piles of chimneys” that are “so broken down by age and long service, that they must have fallen but for the straggling ivy” (8), and of course, all those “secret chambers” and passages so convenient for hiding things that do not belong (9). Of course, Lucy Graham is able to penetrate the home and turn herself into Lady Audley, which leads to all of the problems for which Lady Audley’s Secret has become so famous. Another example is East Lynne’s Isabel Vane who is able to re-enter her home in disguise after becoming a fallen woman, which gives her unfettered access to her former husband and children without their knowledge or judgment.

92 year-old young woman, Caterina Cannaci, becomes imprisoned by her marriage to a financially stable but in every other way deplorable seventy-year old man and how that marriage leads to a physical separation from her friends and support system. This separation leaves her vulnerable to a series of unfortunate events that ultimately end with her body in a well and her head in a basin.

The story is worth looking at in greater detail because it not only offers evidence of many well- established gothic themes, but it also provides a significant example of how Dickens could—and, as I will show, frequently did—use these themes to heighten the sensational appeal of the novel and interpellate readers in AYR.

While Magdalen’s Protestant wedding is happening in Suffolk, “The Duchess Veronica” takes place in Catholic Florence in the 1630s. At the opening of the story, readers are told that

“the country presented every symptom of moral and material decrepitude” (88). Though such a description refers to the fact that the plague has just served “divine justice” to a morally bankrupt

Florentine population, it also emphasizes how the place itself is tied to decay. People breaking down physically—reduced to dust like the relics around them—because of their spiritual dissolution would make sense for modern British Protestants; it is precisely what they might expect of Florence at the time. In such a place, it also follows logically that someone like

Seventy-year-old Signor Giustino Canacci with his “bloated, evil countenance”—indeed, his

“villainously bad” countenance (VIII: 89)—would enter the story and reveal a wicked scheme.21

And to be sure, Signor Giustino does just that when he divulges that the plague has made conditions in the marriage market favorable, as the families of young girls were being wiped out, leaving them “wholly unprotected and unprovided for in the world” (VIII: 91). Although it was an ill-timed train accident and shock-induced childbirth that precipitated the deaths of

21 In The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, Sedgwick identifies the “tyrannical older man with the piercing glance” as a key recognizable gothic trope (9).

93 Magdalen’s parents, the thematic similarity between the novel and story is pretty clear: without the protection of family, a young girl is likely to be victimized by men with the financial means to do it.

Caterina is passed from her father to Signor Giustino in one business-like conversation; she moves as a daughter from a home “unlike anything else in the nineteenth-century world,” with beams built from “pine forests of the Apennines” (VIII: 91) to one as a wife with “doors well shut and bolted” (VIII: 92), an “inmate” (VIII: 94) living in “dead solitude” (VIII: 93). The descriptions imply that she, like a typical gothic heroine, never had a choice in her situation at all. And although she thinks of her future husband as a “horrible man” (VIII: 92), Giustino makes no matter of it, for as he says, a “home-keeping daughter will make for a home-keeping wife” (VIII: 92). As Judith Halberstam as argued, “Gothic fiction is a technology of subjectivity, one which produces the deviant subjectivities opposite which the normal, the healthy, and the pure can be known” (2), so in Giustino’s “badness” Caterina’s “goodness” is thus reinforced.

Magdalen, conversely, seeks out Noel Vanstone; she is not “passed” from father to husband, per se, because her marriage is part of her own elaborate plot to regain her lost fortune and status.

Combe-Raven, her former home, is not structured with wood from Radcliffe’s Apennines, and the nomadic life and identity-transforming stage talents that Magdalen has developed as a result of her disinheritance suggest that she will be an “inmate” for no one. Still, Giustino’s ominous intimation that an obedient daughter will make for an obedient wife, reminds readers of AYR that the domestic philosophies of “decrepit” seventeenth-century Florence still inform the domestic arrangements of nineteenth-century Britain. The fact that Caterina’s world is so different from

Magdalen’s, and yet so similar in these regards, invites readers to “feel” the limits of

Magadelen’s agency. Her choice actually feels quite claustrophobic, like a choice that isn’t a

94 choice at all. The stories taken together narrate Magdalen’s victimization in a world that requires her to her sacrifice her pride and happiness for the financial security that unjust laws have denied her, and perhaps help readers see her otherwise shocking actions more sympathetically.22

Furthermore, not only is “The Duchess Veronica” removed from No Name’s British countryside in time and place, but it is also removed because of its Catholic traditions and rituals that fill the backdrop of the story, customs that inspire their own version of gothic terror.23

Caterina willingly enters the marriage with Giustino largely due to a sense of religious obligation. “Pretty, innocent Caterina” avows to “do her duty” by marrying her father’s preference, which, as the narrator tells us, is more of an obligation than an actual choice, the

“result of the teaching, avowed and unavowed, conscious and unconscious, which she had received from the religious theories and the social practices in vogue around her” (VIII: 93).

Roger Luckhurst points out that Catholicism is in itself an evil Other for nineteenth-century

English Protestants: “In a Protestant England, self-consciously forging itself as the centre of the modern world, Gothic . . . came to mean the dark medieval past, the tyranny of feudal lords, serfdom, and superstitious Catholic priestcraft that held the masses in ignorant idolatry” (x). For

Caterina to proceed then in such a short-sighted venture might be expected by British readers, because as an “ignorant” Catholic she would be compelled to “horrible” victimization from her

22 Most scholars have pointed out that England’s property laws as they relate to the children of unwed parents are indeed extreme and unjust at this moment in history. Mark Ford, for example, has characterized the law as “flagrantly unfair” (ix). Collins himself seemed to imply as much, for in his Preface to the novel he says that he tried to make Magdalen a “pathetic character” even in her “perversity and . . . error” (xxi). Some critics, however, were afraid that the novel’s protest against the social status of illegitimate children might encourage “moral relaxation” to unwed parents. Conversely, Barickman, MacDonald, and Stark make a compelling argument—one Collins would likely agree with—when they say that “Victorian society’s oppressive and hypocritical sexual system produces the deviants whom it then piously condemns” (139).

23 For more information on Catholic rituals and the gothic, see Patrick O’Malley’s Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture, which traces the history of anti-Catholic anxiety and offers extended analysis of how the gothic represents Catholicism as fundamentally alien and threatening to Protestant England.

95 corrupted, ungodly religion. It is an example of what Patrick O’Malley asserts for the British would be a “demoralizing . . . institution of tradition that overrides the individual will” (37).

Caterina’s marriage, however, is not so unlike many marriages taking place in Victorian

England in the nineteenth century, and we can easily see a parallel between hers and Magdalen’s despite the women’s dissimilar faiths.24 The narrator of “The Duchess Veronica” admonishes

Caterina for eschewing romantic love due to what is described as an imperfect understanding of what her “real” duty actually is: “A loveless marriage is a sin against nature, fatal, irremedial, from which no good, but evil only and further sin, can arise—on which no blessing can be hoped—a sin excusable by no conceivable circumstances—justifiable by no plea whatsoever of antagonistic or antecedent obligations” (VIII: 93). But the narrator also cautions modern British readers against hasty judgment: “But if, strange as it is, this eternal truth is not invariably recognized, and universally acted on even in enlightened nineteenth-century England, what could be expected from seventeenth-century Catholic Florence!” (VIII: 93). While Caterina’s marriage is described as a “sin against nature,” Magdalen pronounces her own impending marriage as a

“profanation” of herself (VIII: 103), an ironic avowal having just attempted to reassure Mrs.

Wragge (and perhaps herself) of the logic of the marriage: “Thousands of women marry for money . . . Why shouldn’t I?” Reading these stories in tandem thus encourages consumers of

AYR to view Magdalen’s marriage as “horrible” not simply because it is mercenary, but because romantic love is framed as a Protestant value.

24 Patrick O’Malley suggests that while Gothic novels, as well as sensation novels, often “locate their threats in organizations (like the Catholic Church in the works of Radcliffe or Lewis) that are portrayed as inimical to English Protestant domesticity, they can also undermine the putative differences between them” (“Gothic” 84). Furthermore, Maureen Moran speaks about this collapsing of differences at length in Catholic Sensationalism in Victorian Literature, suggesting that the “Roman cloister and the English hearth cast remarkably similar shadows” (127).

96 Collins and Trollope both suggest that their heroines err in the logic that inspires their union, so they in turn make marriage their punishment rather than their “reward.” Marriage for

Caterina is a site of containment and suffocation, and the narrative of “fulfilling a duty” does little to obscure the fact that she is a victim of her father’s desire to “protect” her. She is in many ways a typical, helpless heroine suffering from tradition, paternalism, patriarchy, and the “sins” of her country.25 Conversely, Magdalen has been called Collins’s “most active and resourceful heroine” (Ford x); her mercenary marriage is the stuff of realism (despite the extraordinary maneuvering on Magdalen’s part to make it happen). And yet, with all “sources of human emotion . . . frozen up within her,” Magdalen’s “tearless resignation” on her wedding day depicts her as a victim of what she rightly calls a “cruel law” (VIII: 103). Here, taken with Caterina’s fate, we see that the “realistic is buried alive in the gloomy recesses of the gothic,” to use

Halberstam’s phrasing (11). While marrying for money or social advantage is not an unrealistic thing for Victorian women to do, Collins takes care to emphasize that such arrangements are really “traps” that testify to the limits of women’s agency at a time when they could not participate meaningfully in the legal and economic systems that could easily render them helpless.

The end of Caterina’s story portends bad things for Magdalen. Caterina, five years into her marriage, becomes a person of interest for a “pleasure seeking duke” (VIII: 96), who, unfortunately for Caterina’s future well-being, happens to be married to a duchess whose jealousy and contempt for her husband’s conquests is well-known throughout the country.

Jacobo Salviati, Duke of San Guiliano succumbs to an “engrossing passion” for Caterina and

25 In Art of Darkness: A Poetics of the Gothic, Anne Williams argues that it is the patriarchal family that provides the “organizing myth” of the gothic, and that it was “equally fundamental” in shaping English political history. Williams ultimately suggests that British history itself is a gothic narrative (29).

97 becomes a “changed man” with respect to his philandering ways (he is deeply committed, we are told, to this particular mistress); she likewise falls in love with him (VIII: 96). The Duchess

Veronica, however, is not amused, and asks her brother to send her “men…with silent tongues” so that she might deploy her revenge (VIII: 164). She chooses the last day of the year, which is a

“day of note” in the Catholic Church, a fasting day in vigil of the feasting day to follow, a day with a “certain degree of solemnity” as one stage of life comes to a close (VIII: 164-65). Not a stage of life, for Caterina Canacci, but life itself, for “her fate . . . at the hands of the Ruffians” was this: she “must die this night” (VIII: 166-67). When pleas for her own life and her unborn child’s fail to move her captors’ sympathy, she meets her demise in a prayer that would highlight for Protestant readers its own futility in that it confuses safety with salvation and idolatry with godliness:

What she would fain have prayed for was what in very truth and reality she earnestly desired, the present and immediate saving of her life. And it was to Pippo accordingly that her real prayer was addressed, as she knelt before him with her clasped hands upraised. But her lips recurred mechanically to the familiar formula, as to a conjuring spell connected in her poor dark mind with the idea of prayer. ‘Ave Maria, gratiâ plena! Dominus tecum!’ (VIII: 168).

The prayer is cut short with a dagger’s steel, which “entered the upstretched throat immediately above the collarbone, and went straight to the heart” (VIII: 168). The Duchess serves Caterina’s head (along with her own retribution) to the Duke, and the body is discarded in the dark abyss of a well, not to be seen again.26

Patrick O’Malley has remarked that the traditional Gothic novel’s obsession with

“confined bodies” (be they in castles, prisons, cloisters, confessionals, or tombs) focuses

26 O’Malley suggests that “the resonances of enclosed spaces—imprisoning, protecting, penetrated, contaminated— have been fundamental to the notion of the Gothic from the beginning” (“Gothic” 83). Caterina’s story falls directly in line with these steps—she is imprisoned in her home, “protected” by her father in the arrangement of her marriage, engaged sexually (read: penetrated) by a unhappily married duke and later by a “dagger’s steel,” and ultimately contaminated by that interaction. Her body is then “buried” in a well with her transgressions contained.

98 “particularly on women” (“Gothic” 83), which is an entrapment Jerrold E. Hogle attributes to the

“contradictory pressures and impulses” these women face (9). Caterina’s errant sexuality is disciplined through the breaking of her body and its subsequent confinement to a well, and her containment could easily signal to readers of AYR that Magdalen’s freedom may very well be the cost of her successful plotting.27 After all, because the details of Magdalen’s marriage ceremony are not narrated for readers, they only know it is has transpired because of the ominous confirmation: “It was done” (418). “It” here refers directly to the marriage ceremony but also signals that Magdalen has indeed secured what she has described earlier as her own

“profanation.” Readers will have to wait until the next installment to find out what that looks like. But to be sure, Dickens does an excellent job helping build suspense, helping readers imagine just how bad things might get or how far Collins will take it.

Home

Home is central to No Name. Homelessness and finding a home move much of its plot.

Bolus-Reichert argues that in critiquing legal institutions that threaten it, Collins assigns

“profound moral significance to the idea of home” (24), and so thus reifies “home” as a marker of British identity, but one that is unstable and requires protection. Kate Krueger has written about the way in which certain locations can “accrue naturalized social codes” and thus function simultaneously as “social signs” (4), and this is true for many “scenes” in No Name. Collins takes great care to set the domestic scene of the novel with minute and mundane details that

27 It is worth noting that an earlier installment that depicts the budding relationship between Magdalen and the well- meaning but perpetually unfortunate Frank Clare also suggests that marriage might be an outcome more to be feared than embraced. That particular installment is coupled with “A Curious Marriage Ceremony,” which is an article that details the “curious” customs of a Brahman wedding ceremony. It introduces the idea of marriage into the No Name narrative (which has not yet come up) but associates it with sacrilege and idol worship. Too, “Under the Leads” appears, which is a detailed account of Casanova’s escape from prison. Magdalen has not yet engaged in explicit talk of marriage to Frank, but the intertextual context of the novel suggests that such talk is imminent and perhaps worthy of being fled from.

99 signal realism and permanence because it is precisely those ideas that he wants to call into question.28 The gothic context of the periodical invites further distrust of these quiet moments, for as Halberstam argues, the Gothic warns us “to be suspicious of . . . discourses invested in purity and innocence” (27). And because the home is deeply connected with women and women’s bodies, these weird, habitually foreign, and often historical contextual works reinforce the possibility that a corrupt “Other” threatens to erupt within the novel itself.

It is well-documented that No Name stands apart from Collins’s earlier best-seller The

Woman in White because it gives away the only “secret” of the novel within the first few chapters. In his Preface to the novel, which was included in the novel’s book form at the end of its serialization in AYR, Collins writes, “The only Secret contained in this book, is revealed midway in the first volume” (xxi). Luckhurst points out, however, that it is not only in the divulging of the Vanstone daughters’ illegitimacy—that is, the exposing of the novel’s “secret” early on—that sets it apart from Collins’s other works. He notes that “the suspense of No Name is of a quite different kind from that which mesmerizes the reader of The Woman in White,

Armadale, or The Moonstone,” as it “features no mysterious apparitions, foreboding dreams,

Shivering Sands, or exotic Orientals” (viii). The difference it seems is in its ordinariness of place: “Combe Raven, where the story begins, is a placid, utterly commonplace country residence which Collins takes pains to evoke in the opening pages of the book” (viii). Philip

O’Neill,29 Lyn Pykett,30 and others have remarked on the care that Collins obviously took to emphasize the everyday domestic comforts of the English home. Dickens’s response to the

28 Leila Silvana May suggests in Disorderly Sisters that No Name is centrally concerned with the “artificiality of home” as well as the “the family,” whose status “has proved to be a legal fiction created by patriarchal authority for its own convenience” (154).

29 In Wilkie Collins: Women, Property, and Propriety (153-54).

30 In The Nineteenth-Century Sensation Novel (40).

100 Englishness of Collins’s opening scene, however, is to make the accompanying materials decidedly less English, a trend which continues throughout the course of the novel. In the issue of the first installment, these works include “Long Sea Telegraphs,” “Worse Witches than

Macbeth’s,” “Russian Travel,” and “Singing to Some Purpose,” a biography of Neapolitan singer

Carlo Broschi.

The run of the novel begins with the home. The setting is familiar for a domestic English novel: there is a dog “stretched on a mat outside the dining room door,” “oaken stairs,” a

“spacious lawn,” and before long, a housemaid, cook, and footman appear so that they may ready the home for the family before they descend for breakfast (VII: 1). The scene is comfortable—familiar—but when a mysterious letter arrives for Mr. Vanstone from New

Orleans that necessitates he and his wife leave immediately for London, the order of the home is brought under fire to foreshadow the deterioration of the family itself. With servants “jostling each other on the stairs,” the daughters wandering around the home aimlessly when they should be attending the piano or their books, and the matron of the home “immersed in endless preparations” for the impending journey, “the influence of household disorganisation” causes the

Vanstones’ twelve-year governess to ponder: “What does it mean? Change? . . . I don’t like change” (VII: 6). The installment ends with Mr. and Mrs. Vanstone leaving their home for

London without providing their two daughters or their governess, Miss Garth, with any explanation as to why it is they must go.

The article that Dickens places directly after the novel in this particular issue of AYR is called “Long Sea Telegraphs,” which describes the current state of telegraph technology and emphasizes the importance of fostering the expansion of this technology to communicate with the colonies and America. The main idea of the article is that faster communication to faraway

101 places (especially across oceans) should be a scientific priority. With readers just having read about the American letter that throws the Vanstone family into chaos, the article not only confirms the importance of the correspondence but also encourages readers to draw ominous conclusions about it; after all, given the haste with which the Vanstones must head to London, one can only conclude that a speedier delivery of the message might have prevented some impending catastrophe that is as of yet still unknown.31 Too, as Grimes suggests, telegraph machinery itself has a gothic connotation in the way it collapses distinctions between the machine and the human. She reveals that the way telegraph technology was talked and written about closely resembles the language one would use to discuss nerve impulses being sent through the brain, with “electrical impulses relaying messages from (nerve) centre to (nerve) centre” (30). Later in the century, telegraph technology will rhetorically structure discourses of telepathy and the occult.32 Here, then, in this particular issue of AYR, “Long Sea Telegraphs” evokes what Grimes would call “bodily intimacy over distance,” encouraging readers to see the

Vanstones’ letter as not merely a “message” but a threat to their domestic space by a foreign body.

Also included in this important issue of AYR is a story that may seem a bit out of place.

Entitled “Russian Travel,”33 it is not clear whether the story is indeed a story or whether it is actually an article until the reader makes his or her way through the first few paragraphs of it, but

31 Dickens frequently invites readers to draw conclusions about the importance of a particular scene by the works he places in the issue. For instance, another example comes after the scene in which Magdalen decides to forego propriety to participate as an actress in a private theatrical. The article that follows the scene is an exposé about “real” English cottages that reveals how they are very different from the quaint and charming “stage” English cottages that get represented in art, literature, and music. The article takes care to highlight the falseness of the stage—which we assume will not bode well for Magdalen’s character—divulging that the “stage world…is not meant to represent English life” (31).

32 See Roger Luckhurst’s “Trance-Texts: Distance Influence as Gothic Trope” (204) in The Invention of Telepathy.

33 “Russian Travel” is an ongoing series that spans several issues of AYR.

102 it is clear from the start that it is certainly quite different from No Name and that Russia is not

Somersetshire. As the title suggests, the narrator of the story is travelling through the outskirts of

Russia with a quiet “yeamscheek” as his only guide. The scene is exotic and thrilling, for immediately the narrator and his guide deviate from the “main road” to explore a terrain little known by most:

Let no man imagine that he has tried Russian travel if he have merely visited Moscow and Petersburg, and run a few hundred versts on any of the few main well- kept roads. Wide of these, lies on both sides the interior life of this immense country, and to see it we must penetrate through forests seventy miles long, jolt over wave-like undulations of endless barren or poorly-cultivated land, and bid farewell to every vestige of macadam. (16)

“Russian Travel” tells the story of what excitement—and danger—awaits those who are brave enough to venture off the beaten path and embrace change. “All changes,” the narrator informs us, “are sudden and complete in Russian”; life itself seems to hang in the balance, “today well, tomorrow dead” (16). One minute you can be on a pleasant ride with a yeamscheek and some

“vodki,” and the next minute you can be mauled by a giant bear. That is how it is in Russia, at least per the story. The subversive potential of Russia’s exotic outskirts then erupts within this installment of No Name; those changes in Russia that are so “sudden and complete,” the idea that one is “today well, tomorrow dead” is actually the early plot of the novel. It is the gothic at once

“burying alive” No Name’s domestic realism within the periodical and erupting within the text itself. It is the terrors of Russia in West Somersetshire.

If “Long Sea Telegraphs” and “Russian Travel” exacerbate tensions in the novel by hinting to readers that domestic space is unstable and vulnerable to outside dangers, “Worse

Witches than Macbeth’s” encourages readers to interpret the contradictory nature of Collins’s newly introduced heroine as an evil omen. Magdalen, we are told, is a product of “one of those strange caprices of Nature which science leaves still unexplained” (VII: 3). She resembles

103 neither parent, and so thus Collins suggests that her features have developed in spite of her family ties rather than because of them. Beyond that strange (dis)inheritance though, Collins reveals that Magdalen’s features are oddly misaligned, that her face is a contradiction of itself that “failed of performance in the most startling manner”:

The eyes, which should have been dark, were incomprehensively and discordantly light…Her lips had the true feminine delicacy of form, her cheeks the lovely roundness and smoothness of youth—but the mouth was too large and firm, the chin too square and massive for her sex and age…The whole countenance –so remarkable in its strongly opposed characteristics—was rendered additionally striking by its extraordinary mobility. The large, electric light-grey eyes were hardly ever in repose; all varieties of expression followed each other over the plastic, ever-changing face, with a giddy rapidity which left sober analysis far behind in the race. (VII: 3)

Out of the periodical context, readers might see these contradictions as markers of Magdalen’s difference; they make her interesting—a Marian Halcombe type of heroine rather than a Laura

Fairlie.34 In its periodical context, however, “Worse Witches than Macbeth’s” invites us to read this coding in a more overtly negative way, as the article provides many horrible details about the unchristian practices and justified deaths of sixteenth- and seventeen-century Scottish witches.

The article is actually a review of Eliza Lynn Linton’s book Witch Stories, but in evaluating the work, the author takes care to overview some of the history and lurid examples of the worst kinds of witches. The article opens with what would feel like an intriguing quote from

Dr. Harsnet35 for those having just read the opening installment of No Name; he says, the “true idea of a Bewitching Woman” is an “old weather-beaten crone, having her chin and knees

34 Readers would be making comparisons to Collins’s first major success The Woman in White. Marian Halcombe, though described as “ugly,” is the intelligent, active heroine of the novel who attempts to protect the more traditionally passive/feminine heroine Laura Fairlie from the evil plans of Count Fosco and Sir Percival Glyde.

35 Probably a reference to Dr. Samuel Harsnett, who was a spokesperson for the Anglicans and chaplain of the Bishop of London in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries. He wrote two books on the subject of religion, Popish imposters, and witchcraft (one in 1599 and the other in 1603). King Lear draws from these works.

104 meeting for age . . . hollow-eyed, untooth’d, furrow’d on her face, having her lips trembling with the palsy, going mumbling in the streets” (VII: 12). The description calls into question the

“goodness” of Magdalen’s spirit and encourages us to read her as too spirited, not simply

“bewitching” but practically evil (or capable of it). The most terrible witches need not necessarily look like “weather-beaten crones,” however, and the author of the review uses this fact to begin an article deriding the “superstition” that appears to have replaced common sense among the British public. Such a goal is in line with Linton’s. She apparently desires to debunk superstition and cultivate “wholesome scepticism” (sic) in writing her book, but the problem with this noble goal is that the book (not unlike the review of the book) reads like a titillating tale of supernatural phenomena, crime and punishment, devilish design, and of course, torture.

Here, then is the possibility of evil lurking inside the Vanstone home—though perhaps it is difficult to confirm on that “ever-changing” face. Although the reviewer of Linton’s book chastises anyone who might believe in “quackery” and “absurdity” (VII: 13), by the end of the review, glowing praise is offered for the work: “No one who is interested in this curious subject should be without Mrs. Linton’s admirable book” (VII: 15). And while witches were last executed in England and Scotland in the early part of the seventeenth century, there is still clearly an ongoing fascination with them. Indeed, Magdalen’s own name, which we are told is associated with “mournful ideas of penitence and seclusion” (VII: 4), might convince readers to see that the nineteenth-century British home is no defense against unholy crimes.

105 Leaving Home

Enclosed spaces have always been crucial to the idea of the gothic.36 Castles, cloisters, tombs, and confessionals have punctuated gothic novels from the beginning, and the bodies those structures have confined—be it to protect or imprison—have primarily been women’s bodies.

The houses of gothic novels, as Kate Ferguson Ellis writes, are those in which people are “locked in and locked out” (3), implying that there is a clear demarcation between interior and exterior, restriction and freedom, safety and threat. Sedgwick, however, has called the distinctions of these categories into question, arguing in The Coherence of Gothic Convention that the gothic receives its most “characteristic energies” from the collapsing of the inside-outside relation, that what is truly the “worst violence, the most potent magic, and the most paralyzing instances of the uncanny” are “evoked in the very breach of the imprisoning wall” (13). After all, “no nightmare,” she says, “is ever as terrifying as is waking up from even some innocuous dream to find it true” (13). For No Name, we can see this collapse happen when Magdalen and Norah realize they are “Nobody’s Children” (VII: 195); indeed, the most frightening thing for the girls about their new awareness is perhaps not in thinking of what dangers and tribulations might lie ahead but in realizing that they have been “in danger” their entire lives, even as genteel daughters in a happy home.37 They have already been living their worst nightmare but unaware of it, and they are themselves but yet never who they thought they were.

36 Patrick O’Malley has drawn attention to the fact that it is not coincidental that so many gothic stories use places as their title: Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Radcliffe’s The Mystery of Udolpho, Eliza Parsons’s The Castle of Wolfenbach, Austen’s Northanger Abbey, etc. (“Gothic” 83).

37 No Name’s sensationalism partly hinges on this realization for Victorian readers—the possibility that one’s friends or neighbors might not be the people they appear to be, or indeed, that we ourselves might be living in total ignorance of who we really are. The idea that the flesh can misrepresent the person, that we can “misread” people, is a preoccupation of sensation novelists writing at a time when science sought to “measure” people’s character through their physical features (phrenology) while also positing that people might have evolved from other species (Darwin).

106 In light of their new knowledge, Combe-Raven takes on new symbolic significance.

What was once a site of protection and safety becomes a site of terror, and the girls become outsiders as long as they are inside the walls of their former home. The girls are not different people, but they experience themselves differently, and in turn, they experience place differently.

For example, when Norah writes to her lawyer Mr. Pendril to inform him that she and her sister have left Combe-Raven forever, she describes a place made unfamiliar by their change in perception:

The long, quiet rainy-evening out of doors—our last evening at Combe-Raven— was a sad trial to us. I think winter-time would have weighed less on our spirits . . . I can’t tell you how dreary the grey daylight looked . . . the lonely rooms . . . the noiseless staircase . . . the loneliness was more than we could bear . . . Oh, what a cruel last night it was; no moon, no stars; such deep darkness, that not one of the dear familiar objects in the garden was visible when I looked for them; such deep stillness, that even my own movements about the room almost frightened me! (VII: 241-42)

Although Norah sees her “true” situation more clearly, her new perspective enshrouds her former world in darkness; ironically, Collins makes it clear that the home is only bright and familiar when she is “in the dark” about her actual familial situation. Too, it is clear that her new troubled relationship with her home bespeaks a new troubled relationship with herself, as she no longer even recognizes her own person: “even my own movements about the room almost frightened me!” And indeed, while Norah hardly recognizes herself, Miss Garth writes Mr. Pendril in the same installment of the novel to communicate that Magdalen has disappeared entirely. Miss

Garth’s panic, of course, stems from her belief that Magdalen has gone to make a life on the stage, that she has “given herself up . . . to her own brooding thoughts” (VII: 245). While she has fled her home and the nightmares it holds, the damage has already been done—the threatening weapon is neither a knife nor privation but rather the voice inside Magdalen’s own head. She has

“given herself up” to herself. Magdalen recognizes her victimhood too, as her next letter to her

107 sister reveals, “My Darling . . . I have struggled against myself, till I am worm out in the effort”

(VII: 245). The danger that originated from the outside now becomes the danger from within.

Magdalen is gone, and as an anonymous letter rightly warns, “the longer you look for her, the longer she will remain, what she is now—lost” (VII: 246).

If Sedgwick’s idea about the gothic convention of the collapsing inside-outside relation is at this moment strongly felt in the novel, it is an effect that is perhaps further heightened by the supplementary works in this particular issue of AYR, which are also deeply concerned with dismantling this binary in startling ways. “The Polite World’s Nunnery,” “The Bemoaned Past,” and “Italian Nightmares” are three short works that dissolve categorical distinctions in key aspects that are consistent with a gothic ethos: between past and present, Catholic and Protestant, nightmare and reality. These works not only provide a counterpoint to the novel’s modern domestic plot with their focus on North-German nunneries, “brutal” histories, and Italian debauchery (in ways similar to those already described), but here, they also highlight that frightening realization that what separates those things operating “outside” of the normal, the safe, and the self can be penetrated, a lesson we have already learned from the gothic tropes of breached walls and sexual violence. Structurally, too, these works also suggest that periodicals themselves make new kinds of narrative “seeping” possible.38

In his article, “The Bemoaned Past,” Dickens addresses what he sees as the contemporary impulse to return to the past and offers what is tantamount to a pros and cons list of the past

38 Katie Lanning has recently discussed how a meaning of a text can shift when readers participate in what she calls “tessellated reading” practices: This tessellated reading of Victorian serialized publications points to the often porous boundaries between the “inside” and the “outside” of a text. Readers could collapse borders as they explored ways to connect various texts into some meaningful pattern. In her recent examination of Robinson Crusoe’s function in The Moonstone, she argues that Betteredge’s beloved novel takes on new meaning when considered in light of other texts published in AYR, particularly advertisements.

108 compared to the present. The need for such a comparison apparently stems from the growing perception that the more society progresses into the future, the worse off it inevitably becomes:

We have gone back in the world. The pre-Raphaelites say so. Antiquarians say so. The men who rank Gothic architecture among the moralities, and class a well- carved finial with a well fulfilled virtue, say so. So say the grumblers and fault finders, the pessimists and the unbelievers; the times of the San Graal and Sir Launcelot [sic], of abbots of Crowland and monks of Hereford, were better than they are now, and humanity has slipped two steps back for every one taken in advance. (VII: 257)

The article describes a shift from ignorance to enlightenment, from inefficiency to productivity, from brutality to lawfulness. Dickens clearly “bemoans” the past and attempts to make a case for the “doctrine of Progress.” Who, after all, would want manuscripts transcribed by “dirty old monks in horsehair shirts” when one could have “Subscription Circulating Libraries with rapid supply” (VII: 257)? And certainly those people of King Arthur’s time had “no inns of any decent character” (VII: 261)! And yet, Dickens’s assertion that the “false glitter of romance has gilded many a falsehood in this world” (VII: 261) seems ironic given the seemingly idealistic description of the modern time; indeed, the closing condemnation of all those who would

“den[y] the truth of the glorious doctrine of the infinite and enduring progress of humanity” sounds emphatically tongue-in-cheek (VII: 261).

By the end of the article, it is clear that the “bemoaned past” is really about a past that is not fully differentiated from a “bemoaned present.” Although the few scholars who have commented on this article have not generally read it as ironic,39 the way Dickens describes the treatment of modern poor children compared to those “benighted children of the past” hints at a critique of present-day practice knowing what we do about his empathy for the helpless and

39 In Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius, Sylvia Nasar contends that “The Bemoaned Past” is a straightforward critique of conservatives and socialists (Carlyle and Mill, respectively) who refuse to see the modern era as one of progress (9). James Marlow cites the article as one that testifies to Dickens’s public stance as a “staunch defender” of the contemporary world (35), but he also recognizes that Dickens was “no idolator of the present” (36). He sees his work largely as an “extensive dialectic” for dealing with the past in the present.

109 innocent: “Talk about the decay of the present—yes, about as much decay as goes to ripen an orchard or to make a man out of a child!” (VII: 261). There are indeed many other moments in the article where Dickens critiques a past that is still very much alive in the present—for example, when talking about religious hypocrisy, social inequality, and husbands who were

“more lord than husband” and who could “do with [their wives] as [they] like” (VII: 258), just to name a few. Although some may long for the past while others celebrate the present, the article suggests that the past is not fully “outside of” the present anyway; to be certain, the very idea of

“progress” relies on a linking of where we are currently to where we have been. Notably, this is a key point for Collins whose plot centers on the idea that “the law of England . . . visits the sins of the parents on the children” (110).40 Patrick O’Malley has argued that among the many approaches to the gothic, one characteristic seems to persist: “the representation of the terror and fascination produced by the refusal of the past to remain in the past” (12). The Vanstone daughters’ expulsion from the home signals this very working of the past operating within the present. And indeed, with the “secret” of the sensation novel being revealed so early on in its run, readers might wonder what trickery the spirited Magdalen might employ to rewrite the past in the present. Sometimes it is just a simple matter of tearing the right page out of the marriage register.41

40 The phrasing quoted here is spoken by Miss Garth to Mr. Pendril after she has learned that the girls have been disinherited. It did not appear in the serialized version of the novel, but it was added for the novel’s release in book form. The point must have been important enough that Collins wanted to emphasize it more clearly.

41 Laurence Talairach-Vielmas talks about the ways that searching for “buried texts” in The Woman in White aligns the pursuit of secrets and answers with a search for historical origins. At the time of the novel’s serialization, Darwin’s On the Origins of Species by Means of Natural Selection had not only intensified interest in the history of the earth and its origins but revealed the extent to which science might rewrite the “truths” of past. In fact, the novel installment that features Walter Hartright making his way to Knowlesbury in search of Sir Percival Glyde’s secret is paired with a review of Darwin’s work called “Natural Selection.” Of course, Hartright will discover that history appears to have been “altered” by a forgery in the marriage registry. Sir Percival has added the marriage of his parents in a very small space at the bottom of one of the pages, and when Walter checks this register to a copy in a neighboring town, he discovers that Percival is illegitimate and therefore unable to inherit his father’s property legally.

110 Like “The Bemoaned Past,” “The Polite World’s Nunnery” also deals with colliding ideas about the “immoral” past and “enlightened” present, but it also collapses distinctions between Catholic and Protestant traditions in a way that threatens the security of British religious identity. Susan M. Griffin has argued that “The nationalist religious teleology that marks

Catholicism as retrograde religion makes Catholicism Protestantism’s—and thus, variously,

Britain’s— . . . past” (7). She further suggests that “Protestantism’s Catholic past haunts the present—as the uncanny, manifested in monsters both literal and metaphoric” (7). “The Polite

World’s Nunnery” is an article that details what was sure to be a topic of fascination for British readers: Protestant nunneries for unmarried women. Situated in North Germany, these cloisters are described as having “retained many customs and ceremonies of the nuns,” but they are

“strangely mixed up with their present lay constitution” (VII: 245). As a kind of “fashionable almshouse” for unmarried women of high rank, the cloisters are further described as having all the trimmings of modern life with some figures of Patron Saints and secret shrines thrown in for good measure:

If the present convent be really the same that gave shelter to the pious nuns of old, it must have been very much altered since their time. The poor little cells have developed into light and airy rooms; and, where they have kept their original dimensions they are transformed into charming boudoirs or cozy studios, as the taste of their present owners may direct. (VII: 247)

For women to become “canonesses,” money is optional but noble blood is not; all ages are welcome. Even with all the modern updates, the author hints that there is a perceivable meanness at work; the “root of the evil,” it appears, stems from a lack of employment that could nurse jealousy and incite tempers among the canonesses that would “take away their peace of mind”

(VII: 250). It is perhaps that Catholic “passion” still lurking about and making a mess of an otherwise modern, holy place.

111 Although these cloisters are not located in Britain, the article makes clear that borders— of all kinds—are permeable. Indeed, those surfaces that seem most smooth and “pure” are those most at risk, and the site of the puncture—in other forms of gothic fiction, the tip of the knife, the fangs of the vampire, etc.—leaves the trace of that which is most to be feared. For readers of

AYR, the message here emphasized is the same as that of the installment of No Name: the most vicious terrors that threaten your future are those that have already taken place in the past, things over which you have no control—much like being imperiled by something that already exists inside of you.

With “Italian Nightmares,” the stuff of a frightening dream is, according to the anonymous writer, the stuff of a frightening realty. In this article, Italy (and Naples in particular) is described as being in a state of utter moral and intellectual decay: “Poor Naples! On regarding her closely, one pities her as one would pity a beautiful human form from which some magician had stolen the soul for his own egotistical purposes” (VII: 262). Unlike the evil sorcerer of one’s nightmare, however, it is the “priests and rulers” who teach that “moral and intellectual qualities are of little value” who are most to be feared (VII: 262). The irony is that even though the country has a “soil and climate ready to produce almost anything,” the people—with their souls stolen—have no ability or inclination to make anything of it (VII: 263). They are zombies, it seems, who live only for money and pleasure, beings who simply exist rather than reason and persevere. Of course, from the standpoint of the article, this isn’t a nightmare at all, but rather what is more like a waking dream for the Italians, and as Sedgwick has said, nothing is more terrifying than waking up only to find the nightmare true.

For British readers of AYR, though, these Italian “nightmares” are scary not because of the “reality” they depict for the Italians but for their suggestion that a nation could be living in a

112 nightmare unaware—perhaps even Britain itself. Although No Name is fiction, a “real” British law has victimized Norah and Magdalen to the extent that they are unrecognizable even to themselves. If the Italians live a life of depravity—stuff so bad that it should only exist in dreams—it is only because, according to the anonymous author, “to a populace so misinstructed, money is the greatest earthly good” (VII: 262). However, for the British, who should presumably

“know better,” the love of money and revenge triumphs nevertheless, as a scorned miser will not hesitate to make even his two helpless nieces homeless. A work of fiction to be sure, but the

“fantasy” of No Name is undercut by real laws and real social beliefs. Perhaps the opportunistic swindler Captain Wragge says it best when he responds to those who might criticize his behavior by reminding them that his unscrupulous methods are not inconsistent with modern values:

“Don’t think me mercenary—I merely understand the age I live in” (VIII: 412). Past/present, nightmare/reality, fiction/fact—though we can draw the lines between these ideas, enclosing the spaces only make breaching them the more thrilling.

“Out of the House of Bondage”

Deborah Wynne has written that “Out of the House of Bondage” is a short story that offers the “most significant link between Collins’s story [No Name] and All the Year Round

(103), and indeed, there are many undeniable similarities between the two protagonists of these stories that invite us to draw comparisons between one work and the other. Like Magdalen, Clara is secure in her belief that she is a respectable white, middle-class woman until she discovers that her family lineage is not what she thought. Not only does she learn that her parents were unmarried, but she also discovers that her mother was actually a slave on her father’s cotton plantation in the American South. Despite being educated for the greater part of her life in

Canada by a woman who taught her to feel pity for the black slaves of the South, Clara returns home at sixteen to find that her kindness toward the slaves cannot produce the results her father

113 expects in terms of household management. She becomes not only impatient with the slaves but cruel, and she embraces the lash as the best form of punishment the more that she “accepts the creed that men and women with African blood in their veins belonged to a lower humanity; that there was a great gulf fixed between their nature and [hers]” (VII: 156). So when Clara discovers her own “taint of blood,” and deliberates its potential to cause an “inherent defect in [her] nature,” she—in and as a house of bondage—must accept that she is that which she has learned to hate most. As with Magdalen, what is most to be feared is already inside of her (VII: 159).

One of the things that this story accomplishes quite well in its periodical context is that it encourages readers to expect linear movement from ignorance to truth, from concealment to candidness, and perhaps most importantly, from bondage to freedom. The title “Out of the House of Bondage” encapsulates the feeling of freedom Clara ultimately experiences once she realizes and embraces the truth of her past. There is a sense that simply knowing who she “really” is will set her “free,” and indeed, she is able to leave America for England upon her father’s death, a place where there is “the possibility of being loved and treated as an equal, by the pure white race” (VII: 162). Part of this freedom is never attempting to hide the truth about who she is, that she refuse to have anyone “deceived in respect to [her] personal history” (VII: 163). Although she fears that she might never be fully accepted, she says that “every lingering doubt [is] dispelled” when she is asked to be married one day by a white man, who apparently is the barometer for acceptable racial identity. We are told at the close of the story that he is still a loving husband to this day.

In turn, at this moment in No Name, readers know that the Vanstone daughters are about to discover some secret about their own past that will threaten to dismantle their world and identity within it, but however terrible the revelation might be, there is a sense that knowing the

114 truth will ultimately “set them free.” For Norah, that is mostly true. She accepts her new position in the world and takes on work as a governess to labor patiently “off screen” until the novel rewards her in the end with a husband who just so happens to be in possession of her lost fortune.

But for Magdalen, the news of her illegitimacy does not lead her to some comforting revelation about who she is or what her place in the world might be; on the contrary, it sends her spiraling into a world of shifting, kaleidoscopic identities, first on stage and then in “real life” as she plots to regain her lost fortune.

The idea that Clara is “exposed” as her “true self” once she embraces her past and escapes her house of bondage positions Magdalen—who seeks constantly to cover herself up and present herself as other people—as one who is still imprisoned by hers. Yet, even in the prison of heavy costume and cosmetics, Magdalen not only acquires safety (financial support from her stage endeavors and freedom from censure) but value too. Just as Sedgwick describes the veil in the gothic novel as a device that gives value to the flesh (145), so too do Magdalen’s costumes titillate readers by obscuring who she really is while, at the same time, serving as evidence of a transgression that codes her as something worth figuring out. Her disguises both hide her and mark her in a way that she seems unable to escape from. As Laurence Talairach-Vielmas writes, sensation writers’ gothic revisions often suggest that

The truth lies beyond the smooth surface of the skin . . . In Victorian Gothic the body replaces the old manuscript buried in a chest, concealing secret narratives in its unfathomable depths. . . . Secrecy and the body go hand in hand, and the more sensation novels highlight the elusiveness or artificiality of human identity, the more hair-raising Gothic loci appear as the ultimate place where fragments of truth can be recollected and reunited. (31)

While Clara’s embrace of her identity is coded as virtuous, Magdalen’s resistance to hers is coded as monstrous. Even though she has been victimized by circumstances of the past that were fully outside of her control (much in the same way as Clara is), the depth of her hatred for those

115 who have benefited by way of her misfortune even scares the ne’er-do-well swindler Captain

Wragge, who hints that what lurks beneath the stage-wear should be carefully minded: “She has shown the cloven foot already. I begin to be a little afraid of her” (VII: 339).

The dangerous portent of Magdalen’s first non-stage transformation (into the character of

Miss Garth) is emphasized by the accompanying work “The Small Hours” in that issue of AYR, which posits that the wee night hours are a most terrifying and magical time, that indeed, they can offer the conditions necessary to transform solid objects and material bodies into other shapes and forms. As Halberstam notes, in the Gothic, “crime is embodied within a specifically deviant form—the monster—that announces itself (de-monstrates) as the place of corruption”

(2). Although Magdalen simply adopts the “customary stage materials” from her “character- costume box” to acquire a meeting with Mrs. Lecount (VII: 385), “The Small Hours” signals a more sinister transformation taking place. “Night,” the anonymous author writes, “is a terrible time. There are certain hours which one should know nothing about. Nature intended them to be passed over in unconsciousness” (VII: 397). Because of an unfortunate bout of insomnia, the author can offer a first-hand account of the seemingly supernatural, transformative potential of darkness:

I am ignorant, I say, of many things connected with the human frame, yet I fancy that at certain periods of the night or morning there are queer changes that the body is liable to, unhallowed revels held by intestinal demons of which the less we say the better, which should come off without our knowing anything about them— topsy-turvy moments, crises which the constitution pulls through with difficulty, and which seriously affect the mind and spirits, if we happen to be awake while they are going on. (VII: 397-98)

Magdalen needs darkness to help pull off her scheme, and she feels certain of her success at being undiscovered “excepting the one case of seeing her face close, with a strong light on it”

(VII: 386). And in this context, Magdalen is not simply dressing up to enact her revenge, she is transformed by it.

116 As a monster, Magdalen becomes the symbol for what Halberstam calls the “interpretive mayhem” of the Gothic, a place where the boundaries between “good and evil, health and perversity, crime and punishment, truth and deception, inside and outside dissolve and threaten the integrity of the narrative itself” (2). Collins also calls attention to this fact at various points in the narrative, suggesting that Magdalen has a “cloven foot,” that she is “devilish cunning,”

“devilish sharp,” that she has “devilish determination,” and indeed, he twice indicates she is

“possessed” by a devil. Readers must have felt disoriented by what at times feels like a very

“realistic” narrative otherwise punctuated by moments of seeming impossibility/epistemic breakdown. As one reviewer writes, “so long as you have the book open, you are spell-bound; whenever you close it, you feel you have been existing in a world of impossible incidents, and holding converse with monstrosities” (Smith). Magdalen is a character who warrants sympathy, and yet, for some people like Henry Mansel, she also serves as a dangerous invitation to offer moral laxity toward unwed parents. Her monstrosity is underscored by the contextual works of the periodical that inspire readers to see her “choices” as the result of a terrifying supernatural conversion rooted in realism.

On Magdalen’s second attempt to appeal to Noel Vanstone, this time in the form of a potential marriage partner as Miss Bygrave, Dickens pairs the novel installment with a ghost story that encourages readers to consider the vastness of the universe and accept the possibility that there is phenomena in the world that is incomprehensible even to the most learned mind.

Entitled “Strange but True,” the story is fairly typical in its representation of the ghost story genre. Despite what appears from the title to be an assertion of absolute certainty that “extra- natural visitations” really occur (VII: 544), the narrator of the story actually suggests that the

“truth” of these visitations stems only from our inability to disprove them:

117 Whatever be the cause, the fact will hardly be disputed that a taste for the supernatural has greatly augmented of late among the educated classes of society . . . As every age of some grand discovery—as every successive year reveals its half- suspected wonders—the mind becomes less and less inclined to impose limits upon that vast unexplored ocean which, like the natural horizon, seems to know no bound but God—and man, as he grows wiser, grows humbler. (VII: 540)

Noel Vanstone, who has already “grown wiser” after receiving one spectral visit from “Miss

Garth,” has reason to “grow humbler” in the presence of “Miss Bygrave,” for neither he nor readers can really fathom what is at the bottom of it. The story helps reaffirm Magdalen as the site of meaning, and as Halberstam rightly asserts, “Monstrosity always unites monstrous form with monstrous meaning” (11). When it comes to understanding what Magdalen actually is after she is stripped from all markers of her previous social identity as the daughter of Mr. Vanstone, all are in the dark.

So while in the end the truth of Clara’s social and racial identity sets her free, her story offers only cruel irony for Magdalen, whose supposed “release” from her own “house of bondage” after her “true” identity is discovered upon her parents’ death actually reveals that she is more stuck than ever before. In this terrifying nightmare world, each door “out” opens to someplace worse, and although Magdalen can move around freely within this world, she cannot escape it. As she attempts to claw her way out, she becomes increasingly unhinged until she breaks down, completely incapacitated and immobilized by illness and starvation. Only then is she capable of being rescued by a noble patriarch in whom she had never before taken any romantic interest. Much of the novel revolves around what appears to be a series of terrible decisions that serve only to lead to Magdalen’s deeper and deeper suffering. As Anna Jones has written, “Magdalen is an independent agent who is able to act on her own behalf,” but she “uses her relational independence to enter contractual alliances or relationships that allow her to transgress and to be punished” (203, my emphasis). The pleasant ending of “Out of the House of

118 Bondage” encourages readers to have confidence in the idea that the truth is difficult, but bearable—indeed, preferable to the lie. But the world Collins creates is much more complicated by comparison. While Clara can easily direct her anger at her father given that her own existence is a product of his raping of her enslaved mother, Magdalen’s anger is often self-referential; as the title of Jones’s work indicates, she is truly a “victim in search of a torturer,” but only because her own body houses her deepest fears.

Returning Home

In the final installment of the novel, Magdalen—who has existed hitherto as a geographical and societal wanderer—finds a home. This home is not a new home exactly, although it is not Combe Raven, the home she has sought to regain throughout the novel. Rather, it is both a place and an idea Magdalen rediscovers and understands differently. Aaron’s

Buildings, situated on a “poverty-stricken street” and serving once as Magdalen’s lodgings when she was incapacitated by physical deprivation and moral ruin (VIII: 388), is transformed into a space where she will find love, acceptance, and protection. No longer weighed down with heavy costume and wrath, Magdalen returns “simply dressed in muslin” donning only a “plain straw bonnet [with] no other ornament than the white ribbon with which it was sparingly trimmed”

(VIII: 438). She feels her own transformation, saying, “I suppose this street is very ugly . . . and I am sure nobody can deny that the house is very small. And yet, it feels like coming home again”

(VIII: 438). Bolus-Reichert has described this scene as one that “articulates the ideal of a home—a place where one is loved, to which one can always return” (38), and it is only because

Magdalen has successfully disavowed her ambition that she is able to realize this ideal and finally find her place in the world: to go home.

Importantly it is only in this place that Magdalen can be “redeemed” from the transgressions of her past. The building is now occupied by Captain Kirke, and it is with him the

119 power lies to forgive Magdalen or not, to accept her into his home or not.42 The very presence of

Kirke, a man who once served as her fatherly savior,43 and who is notably also twenty years her senior, inspires immediate shame in Magdalen, who knows that the letters she sent to him detailing the events of her past may give him cause to cast her away forever. When he asks, for example, “May I speak to you about your letters?” she “ha[s] no courage to look at him—no courage to raise her eyes from her lap” (VIII: 438). When she realizes that he still wants her in spite of her past, she questions whether or not the love is warranted: “Do I deserve my happiness?” As she “cling[s] to him,” and in so doing “cl[ings] to the hope of her better life to come,” she begs Kirke to reveal if he has any “shadow of a misgiving” that might threaten to bury her hope of safety and forgiveness in a shade of doubt, that might cast her out into a world of terror just when she has “come home again” (VIII: 439).

While Magdalen’s fears are put to an end when Kirke ends the novel with a protective locking of the lips, a kiss that seals her place in his estimation and his home in Aaron’s Buildings in London, Dickens calls such safety into question with the article he places right after this final installation of the novel. “Links in the Chain” suggests that past is always lurking in the present, that there is “something in the progress of successive ages, very analogous to the links of a chain” (VIII: 439). The article calls attention to the fact that the past exists as a kind of ghostly presence within the people whom one might meet in the street, and at any moment, when we come into contact with the right person, we might be “startled to find ourselves in the presence of

42 Ironically, Kirke takes abode in Aaron’s Buildings because it is in some ways already occupied by Magdalen. He elects to live in the dilapidated apartment rather than his “pretty parsonage-house in Suffolk” because the latter “wanted all those associations with herself [Magdalen], in which the poor four walls at Aaron’s Buildings were so rich” (VIII: 438).

43 When Magdalen is in a state of delirium and rescued by Kirke from a fate of death or the workhouse, she actually mistakes him for her father, murmuring, “Poor papa! . . . Why do you look so sorry? Poor papa!” etc. (VIII: 389). Kirke then proceeds to pay her back-rent and take two rooms in the house for himself to ensure proper care is taken of her.

120 an extinct age” (439). The article invites readers to see Magdalen’s past, though disavowed—or

“extinct,” to use the phrasing of the article—, as existing still in her present person. This kind of articulation of the gothic is taken up by Alison Milbank, who writes about the way that history comes back to haunt the present in a process she describes as the “Gothicizing of Victoria”

(147). She argues that the figure of Queen Victoria comes to represent a kind of continuity between modern Victorian society and a foregone dissolute monarchy; her image evokes the past, and the past shapes our understanding of the present. Thus, in Kirke’s embrace, as

Magdalen is “folded in his arms” (VIII: 439), the potential of gothic disruption emerges, for

“returning” home creates a new site for buried secrets.

The idea that the past is always threatening to erupt in and thus destabilize the present is further implied by the poem that Dickens places directly after “Links in the Chain,” which is entitled “A ‘Mercenary’ Marriage.” Magdalen’s marriage to Kirke is not mercenary; indeed, her redemption and recuperation into polite society is predicated on her renouncing her past behaviors, the most shocking of which is probably the mercenary marriage with Noel Vanstone

Magdalen herself calls a “profanation.” Magdalen’s imminent union with Kirke is “pure,” one based on love and Christian protection, one happy enough to make Mrs. Oliphant fume in an

1863 Blackwood’s review that Magdalen should get it after “a career of vulgar and aimless trickery and wickedness” (139). Even as the novel restores order, the periodical threatens that order by reminding readers of Magdalen’s past transgressions. The home is a haunted one, which perhaps Oliphant, more than anyone, would be the first to remind us. Smith and Hughes have argued that the gothic “represents a particular manifestation of the uncanny in which the ‘home’ now becomes . . . the site of troubled sexual secrets, so that far from guaranteeing safety, the domestic becomes the space through which trauma is generated” (4). In the end, then, far from

121 all being well, the novel becomes more frightening for many readers because Magdalen is rewarded with a good husband and happy home instead of punished for her recklessness.44 Her past threatens to become the “secret” that threatens the stability of her future children’s lives in sensation novels to come.

***

While No Name was an important work in helping to maintain the momentum of sensationalist literature in the 1860s, as well as establishing Wilkie Collins’s reputation within this genre, All the Year Round played a key role in augmenting its subversive potential. Those gothic elements that are so often pointed to as a defining feature of the genre take new shape when we see the periodical, rather than the novel-as-book, as the text. Although they might in some respects be meant as “filler materials,” to use Henry Orel’s phrasing, the works published in each issue of AYR effectively stage the modern domestic lives presented in the novels as being vulnerable to foreign evils and vengeful histories—neither is so far away that readers should feel safe. These works do provide support for the serial’s themes and encourage readers to engage in ongoing social debates as Wynne has argued, but more than that, they collapse boundaries in ways that are simply unsettling. The fact that No Name was arguably more successful in periodical form than book form testifies to the power of the weekly magazine to generate different kinds of suspense related to but beyond the reach of the novel’s plot.45

44 Deborah Wynne writes that the most “sensational element” of No Name for Victorian reviewers was not Magdalen’s fall but her restoration to a good social position. Unlike Braddon’s Lady Audley who is sent to an asylum and suffers a premature death, or Wood’s Lady Isabel who is mutilated by a train accident and later suffers a premature death, Magdalen is not punished in a permanent way. To some, like Oliphant, it seems like she is actually rewarded for her transgression.

45 AYR’s sales increased steadily throughout the run of No Name. When the novel was released in book form on 31 December 1862, the first edition of four thousand copies sold out immediately. However, Mark Ford argues that these numbers might be a bit misleading because most of the copies were a prearranged bulk order from Mudie’s Circulating Library.

122 Indeed, the very idea of intertextual editing and lateral reading suggests the extent to which boundaries become much more meaningful when we perceive the ways they are crossed, punctured, or broken. Sensation novels, perhaps more than any genre, testify to how exciting these perforations can be—romantic yet realistic, coincidental but plotted, wild yet domestic.

These were works read across classes, and although they were revered by general readers and frequently emulated by other writers, critically, they were despised and condemned. Even the idea of Victorian “Sensation” is no longer tied exclusively to the novel. It isn’t just the “secret” of the novel that makes it “sensational,” it is also its delivery and the market culture, in short, the conditions that made magazines the force that they were. The Gothic offers a useful way of thinking about these conditions as well as space, identity and meaning, as studies of Victorian sensation fiction expand beyond the boundaries we have created.

123 CHAPTER 4 “EXTRAORDINARY APPARITIONS”: GHOST STORIES, SENSATION, AND THE WOMAN IN WHITE

As I discuss in Chapter 3, because of the way periodicals were constructed—each issue

“built” around an installment of a serialized novel—short stories necessarily helped shape readers’ experience with sensation novels whenever those novels would first debut on the market. The impact of short stories, however, extends beyond the intertextual reading these periodicals encouraged, as the influence of one genre of short story in particular haunts the pages of sensation novels of all kinds throughout the period: the ghost story. While stories of crime, mystery, and detection were in high demand during the middle part of the nineteenth century, ghost stories, too, filled the pages of periodicals high and low. Michael Cox and R.A. Gilbert have suggested that these stories were “as typically part of the cultural and literary fabric of the age as imperial confidence or the novel of social realism” (x), and that the explosion of periodical publishing made “the rise of the ghost story a rapid one” that not even the “implacable demon” of science could stop (xv). As I show here, the ghost stories in circulation during the rise of the sensation novel were already positing the home as a place of vulnerability. If, as Edward

Coke first claimed in his seventeenth-century legal treatise, a “man’s house [was] his castle . . . his defense against injury and violence as for his repose” (qtd. in Bartlett 24),1 supernatural stories charmed with their insistence that ghosts need not be bothered with the laws of man.

Sensation novelists used the idea of the home’s vulnerability to suggest that it is the people with whom one cohabitates who possess the dark secrets and sinister intentions capable of shaking the

1 Sharon Marcus points out that Coke’s phrase was cited frequently throughout the nineteenth century, but with two important changes: 1) it was evoked in “primarily domestic contexts,” which “transmuted its original political and legal import,” and 2) it was often modified to convey a national component—“an Englishman’s home is his castle” (91). For example, in 1852, Henry Mayhew explicitly transformed its original political reference into a social one, writing, “The maxim that an ‘Englishman’s home is his castle’ . . . shows that the dwelling of the family has ever been considered in this country as a kind of social sanctuary” (262-263).

124 foundation of the family, and indeed, the broader social order of British society. The questions ghost stories were introducing into popular discourse about the limitations of human perception and understanding were also central to sensation novels—works where realism, as this chapter illustrates, frequently threatens to turn toward the supernatural.

One of the most immediately recognizable characteristics of both short ghost stories and sensation fiction of the mid-nineteenth century is one the genres share: their domestication of the gothic. Mid-century readers, for example, hungered for tales about ghosts who haunted pubs, inns, and manor homes, and the majority of authors and editors were content to let the ghosts of ancient castles and broken-down abbeys rest in their graves to appease these readers. Julian

Wolfreys and Ruth Robbins point out that this updated interpretation of gothic horror was “even more potentially terrifying because of its ability to manifest itself anywhere” (xiv), that is, anywhere where normal citizens might congregate on any normal day. In his Victorian

Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature, Wolfreys explains,

Haunting is nothing other than the destabilization of the domestic scene, as that place where we apparently confirm our identity, our sense of being, where we feel most at home with ourselves . . . Haunting cannot take place without the possibility of its internal eruption and interruption within and as a condition of a familiar, everyday place and space (5).

Like those stories where actual ghosts return from the grave to haunt the living, “internal eruption[s] and interruption[s]” of everyday life—and the affect these interruptions in turn produce—are also what make sensation fiction sensational. Sensation fiction’s oddly othering effect on readers, which often occurs at the hand of an eerie destabilization of social norms and modes, is what has secured its status as gothic progeny in the eyes of so many contemporary scholars.

Although these tales of the supernatural have much in common with sensation fiction of the period, Victorian readers saw them as somehow different from quintessential sensation

125 novels like the The Woman in White or Lady Audley’s Secret.2 While it is true that ghost stories, like sensation novels, were often situated in domestic settings to amplify their horrible effect and produced the same kind of bodily sensations as sensation fiction, what is thought to set them apart from the genre is primarily their reliance on the supernatural to explain the mysteries of the text, for as Nick Freeman notes, while sensation fiction could only “gesture toward” the supernatural, it was “essential” to the ghost story (187). For ghost stories, the climactic “answer” to the story tends to be a question: did these events really happen? They also narrate a distrust of the powers of observation (do my eyes deceive me?) and the impossibility of knowing (how can I prove what I believe I have seen?). Sensation mysteries, on the other hand, depend on the sensational events having some sort of grounding in realism, even if the situations are somewhat extraordinary—they insist that a person, not a specter, is at the bottom of things.

Although making a distinction between the genres of the supernatural and sensational is logical,3 it is also important to acknowledge that for novels that were supposedly not about the supernatural, ghosts do appear to haunt the pages of at least the most well-known sensation works. Such a coincidence should make us pause before assuming these genres are only connected by their mutual indebtedness to the gothic, while also inviting us to consider more complex relationships between the genres. In Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), for example, the

2 Both Alysia Kolentsis and Clare Stewart point to a difference in critical reception as partly demarcating supernatural stories (particularly those written by women) and sensation works. In “Home Invasions: Masculinity and Domestic Power in the Supernatural Fiction of Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Rhoda Broughton,” Kolentsis asserts that ghost stories written by women were “generally greeted with ambivalence” and thus “often slip[ped] under the radar of critical scrutiny” (63). Writing of authors who split their writing efforts between sensation fiction and ghost stories, Stewart explains in her article “Weird Fascinations” that critics “did not quite know what to make of Victorian women’s ghost stories,” even if they were “normally confident in discussing the authors’ more mainstream work, they struggled to impose reason and meaning on this particular genre, not quite sure if it met with their approbation or not” (114).

3 Although scholars like Nick Freeman have pointed out that genre parameters were “more fluid and permeable [in the 1860s] than would be the case later in the century,” which thus allowed writers to “combine supernatural menace with ingredients familiar from other forms of fiction” (198), there are no “real” ghosts that haunt sensation fiction in the way that they do in supernatural fiction.

126 listless-novel-reader Robert Audley transforms into amateur detective when “ghost-haunted” by the disappearance of his friend George Talboys, whose supposed “unburied body” haunts him

“like a horrible spectre” (394). And indeed, Lady Audley herself is quite ghost-like, as it is she who rises from the tombstone of Helen Talboys unafraid of a little murder and pyromania. In

East Lynne (1861), the estate in question is haunted by a deformed governess who is believed to be the “ghost of Lady Isabel Vane, come into the world again” (532). And then in No Name

(1862), the over-wrought-with-shopping Mrs. Wragge swears she sees a ghost—“a worse ghost than any of ‘em”—in a gray cloak and poke bonnet (246). The list really does go on and on.

Of course, none of these works are ghost stories per se, as each ultimately explains away its ghosts with logical—if sensational—rationale. Victimized by the heavy plotting of the nineteenth-century serial, all of these spectral beings are in the end just regular corporeal individuals who simply get caught up in extraordinary situations. For example, in Lady Audley’s

Secret, Robert’s “unburied kinsman” can’t be haunting him, unless, that is, it is from America where he has chosen temporarily to displace himself to forget “the darkest passage of [his] life”

(434). We know that the body that lies beneath Helen’s tombstone is actually Matilda Plowson’s, and Lady Audley is merely the reinvented, “new-and-improved” aristocratic version of her former self. The ghastly governess who haunts East Lynne is really just the fallen former mistress of the house, who stricken with grief for leaving her children, and disfigured by a morally-opportune train accident, returns to the estate as their governess—a “ghost of her former self” (336). And indeed, it is no ghost in a poke bonnet who frightens Mrs. Wragge in No Name, only the consummate actress Magdalene Vanstone donning one of her many disguises to trick the usurper of her fortune into marrying her.

127 What is strange, if you can excuse the pun, is how entrenched our understanding of both of these genres has been in their indebtedness to the gothic, but how we have largely overlooked the potential of these genres to be mutually informative to the reading experience of Victorian consumers. In the introduction to Victorian Ghost Stories, Jennifer Uglow contends that the ghost story “seems a natural extension of [sensation] novels, which brought dislocation and menace to the very heart of the family home” (xiii-xiv), but she does not elaborate on the shape of this “extension” or its relevance in the literary marketplace. More recently, there have been some attempts to unpack the supernatural elements that punctuate sensation texts, but these have been limited and unconcerned with mid-century publication trends or readership. For example, in her 2008 article, “‘I Thought You was an Evil Spirit’: the Hidden Villain of Lady Audley’s

Secret,” Elizabeth Lee Steere acknowledges occult images in the novel, but her argument is one that largely begins and ends in the novel, as she suggests that Phoebe is a “ghoulish doppelganger” of her mistress that systematically destroys the people around her (300). She pays careful attention to the way that Phoebe is characterized in “supernatural terms,” as well as how she brings to light “more conventional social concerns” about female sexual relationships, subversion of social class, and Christian morality in the context of secular occultism (315). But, the relevance of Phoebe’s spectral characterization in her overlooked role as villain is reduced to an assumption that Braddon is simply “demonizing the domestic” (315).

In “Beyond These Voices: M.E. Braddon and the Ghost of Sensationalism,” Kate

Mattacks also focuses on Braddon, asserting that “images of mediums, ghosts and characters with hypnotic powers regularly appear in her fiction,” but that “evidence of the supernatural and the spirit world haunts only the margins of [her] fiction, as ghostly figures always turn out to be real-life victims (323). The driving force behind her analysis, however, is to consider the ways

128 Braddon makes use of the trope of spiritualism in her early twentieth-century fiction to articulate her own “spiritual and artistic crisis precipitated by modernism’s rejection of the theatrical”

(320). The “prophetic dreams, visions and mesmerism” during the height of the sensation mania, she grants, “consistently function to drive the sensation plot towards its resolution,” but she simplifies their importance by referring to them as mere “trademark devices for Braddon’s readers rather than thematic concerns” (323). But what is meant by “trademark devices”? What are they trademark of, and how do they move the plot forward?

In this chapter, I argue that the supernatural short stories that thrived in the ‘50s and ‘60s played a significant role in shaping the storylines of well-known sensation novels and influencing how readers would respond to those storylines. While Henry James identified Wilkie

Collins’s The Woman in White as a new breed of fiction for the way in which it situated the middle-class home and family as a place where the darkest of secrets might be kept—“To Mr.

Collins belongs the credit of having introduced into fiction those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors” (110)—Sharon Marcus points out in her study of the haunted London house that the ghost stories circulating in middle-class magazines in the 1850s had already begun to posit the Victorian home as a place where mysteries could abound. Indeed, unlike spiritualist writings that might emphasize the “pleasures of animate buildings” and the

“comfort of dead family members returning to their old homes,” Marcus contends that these haunted-house stories emphasized the “dire consequences of haunting . . . the terror and damage inflicted by malevolent, disruptive ghosts, who, in many narratives, drive families out of their houses and in some cases even kill them” (119). Furthermore, as Tatiana Kontou points out,

“readers of sensation novels did not find the transition from sensation to ghost story in any way forced . . . Sensation novelists veined their novels with elements that veered towards the ghostly

129 and the supernatural” (142). So while comparisons to the gothic have thus been important in developing our understanding of the sensation genre as a marginal form, the recognizable tendency of the sensation genre to rely on supernatural references in what are otherwise modern

British narratives invite us to consider how the contemporaneous appeal and popularity of ghost stories were already establishing the home as a place where things beyond human understanding could happen, and indeed, how they were instrumental in characterizing these mysteries as a threat to the British way of life.

That the central distinguishing characteristic of these genres stems from sensation novelists’ decision ultimately to “explain away” their ghosts in favor of more realistic narratives begs the question of why they needed ghosts at all—even ostensibly “unreal” ones. While the allusion to and refutation of ghostly presence might be an attempt to make otherwise outlandish stories more realistic,4 the elusive phantom—however brief its debut—is a reminder of what is unknown and unverifiable, as well as caution against believing too readily in the “reality” of what one appears to be seeing. For sensation fiction, the unknown and unverifiable are precisely those markers of identity and status the Victorians held so dear: class, gender, family, home. As

Lyn Pykett among others have said, sensation fiction of the period had a particular knack for inciting anxiety about class stratification, financial security, problems with speculative capitalism, and the structure of the middle-class family (especially women’s role as the cornerstone of the family, and indeed, of civilization itself). If sensation novels generally rejected

4 In Lady Audley’s Secret, for example, Braddon’s narrator tells readers, “do not laugh at poor Robert Audley” when he relies on his vast knowledge of ghost stories as a way of dealing with the “real” problem of his friend’s supposed death: “I haven’t read Alexander Dumas and Wilkie Collins for nothing . . . I’m up to their tricks, sneaking in at doors behind a fellow’s back, and flattening their white faces against window panes, and making themselves all eyes in the twilight. It’s a strange thing that your generous hearted fellow, who never did a shabby thing in his life, is capable of any meanness the moment he becomes a ghost. I’ll have the gas laid on to-morrow and I’ll engage Mrs. Maloney’s eldest son to sleep under the letter-box in the lobby” (395). Calling attention to Robert’s history with ghost story reading and his investment in the veracity of the tales is one of the ways Braddon accentuates his eccentricity and naiveté as a character.

130 the supernatural in favor of more “plausible” narratives, ghost stories frequently adopted legal language and courtroom-style testimony to add “veracity” to the sighting.5 Despite the impulse to reach a verdict in the court of supernatural phenomena, the truth in these ghost stories always lies beyond the reach of the law, perhaps as it threatens to do in so many sensation novels where people are driven by incomprehensible motivations and behave in ways that polite society might think unfathomable. Ultimately, the so-called “explaining away” of its ghosts with a narrative that favors characters caught up in a kaleidoscopic world of shifting roles and values is a way for sensation novels to accentuate the fact that identity can be frighteningly inexplicable and social certainties curiously uncertain.

Whereas ghost stories narrate a mistrust of deductive reasoning and refuse to answer questions of identity, sensation writers insist on exploring these questions, delving into the darker side of human motivation over several serial installments. This difference in narrative objective may also hint at why sensation novels received such well-publicized reprimanding while ghost stories could thrive as a medium over which families could bond at Christmastime.6

The fact that ghost stories were socially sanctioned, and indeed a staple of the Victorian

Christmas hearth, even though they dealt frequently in the unsavory business of killing (they are, after all, “ghost” stories), might seem a bit strange. Furthermore, the complimentary tone with which Margaret Oliphant conveys her opinion about “sensational” ghost stories, saying that there

5 Srdjan Smajić explores what he terms the “hybridization” between ghost and detective fiction in his book Ghost- Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists: Theories of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science (3).While he identifies the late-nineteenth to early-twentieth century as the timeframe in which these genres began to blur in significant ways, it is clear that these genres were already starting to mix by the 1860s.

6 Nina Auerbach nicely encapsulates Victorian attitudes toward the supernatural at Christmastime in her book, Private Theatricals: “In Victorian England, Christmas was ghost season. A ritualistic culture, yearning feverishly for transcendence, possessed by faith but deprived of dogma, turned the occasion of the Savior’s birth into a festival of weird apparitions” (102). For a more in-depth discussion of the cultural impact of supernatural tales at Christmas, see “Ghost Stories at Christmas” in Tara Moore’s monograph Victorian Christmas in Print (2009).

131 is no story “more perfect in its power of sensation” than “the short story of the ‘Haunted

House,’” may still puzzle us further (“Sensation Novels” 111-12).7 Looking at both genres alongside each other may help shed light on the extraordinary appeal and violent criticism of sensational works that chose the living over the dead to throw the social order into havoc.

As the novel most widely cited as the first example of sensation fiction, The Woman in

White is exemplary not only for its fashioning of a new kind of fiction but also for the way in which it deliberately revised the notion of what (or who) haunts the Victorian home. Here, I show how Collins draws on a ghost story paradigm to set up his sensational exploration of identity, which cues his readers that what will unfold in the story will not only be shocking and horrible, but it will also challenge assumptions about perception and Truth. As the title implies, the novel revolves around the question of who exactly the woman in white is and how her presence destabilizes preconceived notions about class, gender, and the social order. She is first introduced as an “extraordinary apparition” wandering about in the moonlight (20), a nameless phantom around whom the text will revolve. Walter Hartright is not able to forget this strange apparition, as she continues to haunt his memory as well as the text. Collins ultimately departs from the ghost story tradition by refusing to leave this specter-woman in other-worldly anonymity, refusing to let the reader decide whether she is merely a figure of Hartright’s overworked imagination or a real ghost; instead, over many weeks of serial installments, he opts for the more “sensational” approach of exploring who she is, where she comes from, and why she is out on the open road in the middle of the night. In the end, these questions can be

7 Victorian critic Margaret Oliphant, a writer of ghost stories herself and vocal opponent of the “sensation school” of literature, appears to move into a discussion of ghost stories fairly naturally in the course of her caustic evaluation of sensation novels. In her momentary aside, she testifies to a similarity between the genres insofar as ghost stories produce very similar kinds of bodily “sensations” as sensation novels, but rather than criticize these stories, she actually applauds supernatural sensationalism. She appears to take notice of what might be seen as a contradictory response to the two forms by ending her tangent with the statement, “but we cannot enter upon this school of [supernatural] fiction, which is distinct from our present subject” (“Sensation Novels” 112, my emphasis).

132 answered—the woman in white is not really an extraordinary apparition, but Anne Catherick, a wronged woman—and the effect of this narrative decision is that discovering and understanding

“reality” becomes far more frightening than an encounter with the paranormal.

***

In an 1862 review of The Woman in White in Blackwood’s, Margaret Oliphant applauds

Wilkie Collins for orchestrating such an elaborate, complex plot without the help of supernatural intervention. Although she objects to the manner in which the arch-villain of the story charms readers with his irresistible wit and foibles, Oliphant is evidently impressed by what she terms the “legitimate,” “natural” production of sensation in the story:

Mr. Wilkie Collins takes up an entirely original position. Not so much as a single occult agency is employed in the structure of his tale. Its power arises from no overstriking of nature:—the artist shows no love of mystery for mystery’s sake . . . His plot is astute and deeply-laid, but never weird or ghastly; he shows no desire to tinge the daylight with any morbid shadows. His effects are produced by common human acts, performed by recognizable human agents . . . The more we perceive the perfectly legitimate nature of the means used to produce the sensation, the more striking does the sensation become. (“Sensation Novels” 112)

In many ways, Oliphant is correct. No supernatural hand directs the actions of characters; no otherworldly spirit possesses Laura’s body to bring it back from the dead; no “single occult agency is employed in the structure of the tale”; and yet, I argue The Woman in White is a novel deeply indebted to ghost stories. This indebtedness, however, is not observable in the form of otherworldly forces advancing the plot of the story, but rather in how the sensation is produced by the absence of such forces when a plot so intricately woven would seem to necessitate them.

Indeed, Oliphant’s reaction to the novel reveals just how much ghost stories were a part of the normal reading experience of the Victorian middle class, as Collins achieves his “entirely original position” by choosing to diverge from the expected route of supernatural intervention.

Furthermore, the novel invites a comparison to the “weird and ghastly” short stories so popular at

133 the time because it produces the same kind of pleasant chills without (really) awakening anyone from the dead.

Although there is nothing at the outset of the novel that would overtly cue readers to the fact that the story they will read will walk a fine line between realist and supernatural fiction,

Walter Hartright’s claims of accuracy and truthfulness in his explanation of how the story was compiled noticeably parallel the advisory remarks that preface so many ghost stories. Hartright, a twenty-eight-year-old drawing teacher who becomes entangled in the plot of greed, mistaken identity, and cruelty, compiles the evidentiary narratives of various “witnesses” to the events and produces a text that he asserts, “present[s] the truth always in its most direct and most intelligible aspect” (5). The reader is placed not merely in the position of silent listener, but also, we are told, in the position of judge: “As the judge might once have heard it, so the Reader shall hear it now”

(5). What readers are judging is not entirely clear. Is it whether or not Hartright acted appropriately? Is it whether or not justice was carried out in a way condonable by the law? Is it whether the events are indeed whole, accurate, and true? Regardless of what it is readers are supposed to be judging, what John Sutherland terms the “high-impact, pseudo-authentic,

‘reportage’ narrative” gives the impression that the events that will be narrated are indeed a true story (Introduction xiv), and believing in the possibility that a story like this one exists beyond the page is essential to its effect.

With his specific attention to the process of law as it is played out in criminal court,

Collins created a new kind of storytelling mode in line with the demands of the mid-century to embrace scientific exploration and verity.8 Ghost stories, however, derive from a much older oral

8 In his preface to the three-volume edition of the novel in 1860, Collins remarks that his evidentiary approach in writing The Woman in White was wholly original: “An experiment is attempted in this novel, which has not (so far as I know) been hitherto tried in fiction” (644). This claim, however, has since been disproven by a number of people, as we now know that there are at least two direct influences in form in the examples of Charles Dickens’s

134 tradition that seems almost counterintuitive to these demands. J.S. Le Fanu recognizes as much in his “An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street” (1853), a story that ironically narrates the suicide of a judge who had spent his lifetime sentencing people to death.

At the beginning of this story, the narrator confesses, “It is not worth telling, this story of mine— at least, not worth writing . . . Pen, ink, and paper are cold vehicles for the marvelous, and a

‘reader’ decidedly a more critical animal than a ‘listener’” (19). In this statement, the narrator testifies to the unlikely ability of the ghost story to “hold up” if examined in cold print, and indeed, that the effect of the ghost story is in its “telling” not its writing. Perhaps Le Fanu took a metaphorical knifing to this “critical animal” who he envisioned reading and passing judgment on his story by promptly killing off the judge. Still, with the 1855 repeal of the newspaper tax, improvements in production technology, and increasing literacy rates, the “Magazine Ghost” would become a staple of magazine print culture, and would therefore have to adapt to the “cold vehicles” of pen and paper by readying itself for analysis.9

Seasoned ghost story writers of the mid-nineteenth century, of which Wilkie Collins was also one, were well aware of the need to impress upon their readers the truth value of their tales.

On the one hand, these stories were certainly meant to be spectacular and odd, but on the other hand, it is during this time that we see an evident departure from the gothic tradition of earlier years with the ghosts of ancient castles and broken down abbeys departing their usual haunts in

The Wreck of the Golden Mary and Dinah Mulock Craik’s A Life for a Life. Insofar as the novel’s focus is “forensic” rather than “historical,” John Sutherland contends that the novel’s multi-narrator approach is indeed quite original (Introduction xv).

9 The frequent reliance on a frame narrative structure is one of the enduring ways that nineteenth-century ghost story writers showed the indebtedness of their craft to an oral tradition. Tara Moore elaborates on this point in her monograph, Victorian Christmas in Print, writing that “Ghost stories led to narrative adaptations of the reading circle, and they often opened with a frame that represents the story circle. The print market altered what had been celebrated as a locally based, often oral tradition of performance into a narrative structure: the frame tale. . . . Periodicals tended to adapt ghost tales into frame-telling narratives as a way of capturing the eighteenth-century story-telling circle in print” (85).

135 favor of newfound adventures in otherwise very ordinary domestic spaces. Michael Cox and

R.A. Gilbert explain in their introduction to the Oxford Anthology of Victorian Ghost Stories that

Victorian ghost stories reveled in the “prosaic detail of modernity to establish a credible context for supernatural violation,” which gave them a more realistic feeling than the “pseudo-historical settings” and “improbably fantasies” of the Gothic tale of terror (xvi-xvii). Furthermore, even though these works continuously challenged the presumption that human reason could answer the world’s mysteries, they also relied heavily on the illusion of facts and narrative authenticity as “proof” to readers that they should invest in the story’s truthfulness. The fact that these stories challenged what Cox and Gilbert call “empirical logic” while using that same logic to enforce their validity is one of the great paradoxes of the genre (xvi).

Similar to the profession of authenticity Walter Hartright makes at the beginning of The

Woman in White, ghost stories frequently begin with some sort of truth-statement and very often posit the reader as sole judge of whether or not the story is likely to have really occurred.10 Mrs.

Henry Wood’s “Reality or Delusion” (1868), for example, begins with a knowledgeable narrator

(in this case, Johnny Ludlow11) informing readers, “This is a ghost story. Every word of it is true” (115). The story narrates the adventures in villainy of the good-for-nothing Daniel Ferrar, as well as his suicide by hanging, and of course, his “possible” return from the dead to terrify those he left behind. Ferrar, who had an appetite for “French jades” despite his engagement to a good English girl (116), shows a surprising degree of shame when he gets caught stealing corn

10 Moore speculates that the “need to authenticate ghost tales may derive from the evolution of local legends into mass-marketed printed stories” (87), as the “told” or spoken stories from earlier generations would already have a kind of implicit authenticity in their scope of regional/local legends and in the teller’s personal connection with the listener (probably a friend, family member, or at least a personal acquaintance).

11 Wood authored an ongoing series of short works narrated by Johnny Ludlow (the “Johnny Ludlow” stories) with which readers would have been familiar. They were later released in volume form (1876-79) after Wood admitted authorship.

136 by Mr. Ludlow one evening. Embarrassed, desperate, and too full of pride to be taken to the

Worcester gaol, he steals away to a nearby grove to put an end to his villainous ways forever: by noose. The climax of the story occurs when his English fiancée spots him at the barn where the corn was stolen only to learn later that he had died half an hour before she saw him. So was it a reality or a delusion? Even though Mr. Ludlow comes off as an authority in his telling of the story with his declaration that “every word of it is true” and his first-person participation in the events, ultimately, like the reader of The Woman in White, the judgment of whether the story does indeed present the truth is left up to readers.

Other stories, like Charles Dickens’s ghost story “To be Taken with a Grain of Salt”

(1865), imply their validity in the narrator’s avowal to remain impartial as to whether or not the episode in question is truly a supernatural one, as well as his or her promise to narrate the events exactly as they happened without exaggeration or judgment. In this particular Dickens tale, the narrator establishes credibility by straightforwardly announcing, “In what I am going to relate I have no intention of setting up, opposing, or supporting any theory whatever. I know the history .

. . I have studied the case, . . . I have followed the minutest details” (55). The narrator promises impartiality; he is only willing to offer up what information he can provide based on his intimate understanding of the events—in the spirit of a legal narrative, he is only a witness, not a judge.

Collins of course also recognizes the impact of this kind of approach and embraces a similar model in creating a novel “told by more than one pen” (The Woman in White 5). In support of his avowal that the story offered to the reader will “present the truth,” Hartright, explains that contributors to the narrative have only been allowed to comment on those events with which they have had direct, first-person experience: “When [the speaker’s] experience fails, he will retire from the position of narrator; and his task will be continued, from the point at which he has left it

137 off, by other persons who can speak to the circumstances under notice from their own knowledge, just as clearly and positively as he has spoken before him” (5). The series of eye- witness testimonies gives the impression of objectivity and lawful disinterestedness (even if such impartiality is problematic upon closer review) and invites readers into the position of judge with the promise that they can base their judgment on facts.

Although writers of ghost stories—and Dickens in particular—put a great deal of stock in producing stories that would appeal to a nation of readers bent on “nothing but Facts,”12 these stories ultimately worked to undercut the authority of deductive reasoning. To be sure, as I have already shown in Chapter 2, Dickens was famous for his high standards as editor of Household

Words, and later All the Year Round, always demanding that his magazine contributors consider

“difficult matters of evidence, authority and belief” to substantiate their ghost stories (Henson

59). But even if these literary ghosts may have been garmented in cloaks of fact, the figure underneath is always elusive—if it is there at all—and calls into the question the very logic used to validate its existence. Michael Cox confirms this fact, asserting that “the ghost story reprimands human reason for its presumption of supremacy . . . and cautions against too great a faith in rationalism” (Victorian Tales of Mystery and Detection xxv-xxvi). Nevertheless, the desire to make these stories appear true, as well as the desire of consumers to read convincing stories, was fervently held on both sides, hinting at the larger role ghost stories played in fostering reflection about the possibilities of the spiritual and material world if not detection of their mysteries.

12 We might be reminded of the famous opening in Hard Times: “Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them” (9).

138 For all that, ghost stories were deeply preoccupied with perception and the possibility, and more often impossibility, of finding Truth. Indeed, as Glen Cavaliero has said, in “one way or another,” all “supernaturalist writers are inevitably involved in the nature, possibility, and limitations of the quest for objective truth” (24). A brief sampling of titles from some popular works easily reveals as much: there is Mrs. Henry Wood’s “Reality or Delusion?” (1868),

Amelia B. Edwards’s “Was it an Illusion?” (1881), John Berwick Harwood’s “Horror: a True

Tale” (1861), and Rhoda Broughton’s “The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth”

(1868) just to name a few.13 Of these, Rhoda Broughton’s story stands out for its conviction of veracity, and it warrants further examination to show how the truth claims of supernatural tales only serve to call those claims further into question. The ghastly tales that sweep through magazine installments, as Broughton’s story shows, are only the more elusive because they are

“true stories”—a fact that hints at a slippage between a story that narrates factual events (a “true” story) and narrated events that are “truly” a fictional story.

Broughton’s “The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth” sets up its claim to veracity by situating the story as if it were testimony in a court of law, and the events something a witness could solemnly swear to be true. Originally published in Temple Bar, the story is told through a series of letters exchanged between two friends, Elizabeth De Wynt and Cecilia

Montresor. Elizabeth has taken on the exhausting task of helping her friend find a stylish yet affordable London residence for her and her husband, a search that tenders no results until the mysterious 32,----Street, May Fair home turns up. The home is spacious, fashionably decorated, superbly tidy, and oddly, quite cheap. A complete steal—perhaps even a supernatural mystery—

13 Franco Moretti’s recent article, “Style, Inc. Reflections on Seven Thousand Titles (British Novels, 1740–1850)” (2009), reveals the importance of literary “naming” in a consumer culture. In it, he says a book title is “a code, in the market: half sign, half ad,” that the title is “where the novel as language meets the novel as commodity, and their encounter can be extremely illuminating” (134-35).

139 at three hundred pounds a year. The house is a blessing to the desperate Cecilia, at least until she discovers that her new home has a not-so-fashionable reputation for leaving its tenants running for their lives. Before long, she writes to her friend about how her housemaid fell into a swoon and became unintelligible after seeing “it” (79), “it” being the designated way to refer to whatever it is that is haunting the home throughout the story. The story climaxes when a gallant young officer and friend of the family jestingly offers to stay the night in the haunted room to prove Cecilia’s “babyish” fears are little more than the stuff and nonsense of feminine fancy

(78). Cecilia’s final letter reveals that she and her husband have vacated the home after brave

Ralph Gordon fell down dead following his final proclamation, “Oh, my God, I have seen it!”

(82).

For a story that is set up to imitate witness testimony, it is somewhat odd that neither of the two actual eye witnesses of the supposed ghost is able to testify to what exactly “it” is they have seen.14 After the housemaid swoons while making up the bed in the haunted room, Cecilia assumes it is the result of having seen some listless soul come back from the dead, but then again, she fully acknowledges that she possesses a “firm . . . belie[f] in apparitions” and has an

“unutterable fear” of them (78). Elizabeth, the recipient of the letter, offers an alternative version of the event, asking her friend,

Don’t you think that what the girl had might have been a fit? Why not? I have a cousin who is subject to seizures of the kind, and on being attacked his whole body becomes rigid, his eyes glassy and staring, his complexion livid, exactly as in the case you describe. Or, if not a fit, are you sure that she has not been subject to fits of madness? Please be sure and ascertain whether there is not insanity her family. It is so common now-a-days, and so much on the increase, that nothing is more likely. (79-80)

14 Ralph Gordon, being dead and apparently not favoring the family with a return visit from the otherworld to explain the reasons for his demise, is unable to take the stand. The housemaid is removed to a lunatic asylum, where despite several lucid moments, maintains an “absolute, hopeless silence, and only shudders, moans, and hides her face in her hands when the subject is broached” (80).

140 Elizabeth’s impulse to pathologize the housemaid’s reaction is in line with her “utter disbelief” in ghosts (80); indeed, her suggestion that insanity is the “likely” cause of the incident makes it seem as if she is a character in a sensation novel who somehow took a wrong turn into a ghost story. Her friendly dispute of Cecilia’s take on the events—“Don’t you think,” “Why not?” “are you sure”—and her final plea that she should “Please be sure” are answered by Cecilia’s final letter that another person has fallen victim to the murderous ghost and that the family has left the

“terrible, hateful, fatal house” (80). The story seems to imply that the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is that visitors from the great beyond do indeed walk the earth and are capable of deeds so wicked that they cannot even be articulated.

A complication to this reading comes in the form of a short concluding statement added outside of the epistolary format by an unknown writer: “This is a true story” (82). With this addition, the letters become part of a frame story that creates, at least to some extent, a story about telling ghost stories. Perhaps taken in this light, the truth claims of the story’s title are less of a move to legitimize testimony about a ghost coming to mentally incapacitate and kill unsuspecting victims as it is a reference to the paradox emerging from the dubious play on words in the phrase, “true story.” The utter inability to distinguish between a story that is based on factual events and a story that is only that, a “true” fictional story, is what Broughton’s story ultimately testifies to. Furthermore, the use of the word “this” in the concluding sentence “this is a true story” could refer to either the story told in the letters that precede it (meaning, the story just told is a true one) or the new story being told at the moment the final statement is read (this story I am creating by adding a frame is a true one). The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is that there is no definitive truth at all. The ghost story, to be sure, is an excellent medium through which to convey such a message.

141 ***

Whereas questions of “truth” in ghost stories tend to revolve around the supernatural elements and their plausibility, those of sensation works are usually more concerned with questions of identity. These questions can be as literal as who is the person who committed the crime? Or who is the real person masquerading as such and such character? But with these questions often come more complex inquiries about social identity. John Bowen points out that there is a certain kind of “vulnerability of human identity” in these novels (42), a breakdown of what Lyn Pykett calls the “traditional ‘knowable community’” (“Collins and the Sensation

Novel” 52). Along with Pykett, Tamar Heller, Winifred Hughes, Ann Cvetkovich among others have cited the blurring of class and gender boundaries as one of the most common manifestations of this vulnerability.15 And indeed, this blurring was not confined to the storylines themselves either, as middle class readers became obsessed with unsavory delights of lower-class plots,16 or as one reviewer described, “the literature of the Kitchen” became “the favourite reading of the

Drawing room” (Rae 204).17 More recently, scholarship has not only focused on these novels as

“complicat[ing] and at times defy[ing]” all “essentialist notions” of class and gender, but also undercutting assumptions about race, religion, nationality and so forth (Harrison and Fantina xxi). In short, the critical consensus seems to be that sensation fiction tantalizes readers by endorsing identities that are fragmented, fluid, and impossible to pin down.

15 See Tamar Heller’s The Female Gothic, Winifred Hughes’s The Maniac in the Cellar, Ann Cvetkovich’s Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism, as well as Lyn Pykett’s The ‘Improper Feminine’: The Women's Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing.

16 Winifred Hughes points out that the “threat to social distinctions” would probably not have “raised such a vociferous outcry if the fashion had spread in the opposite direction—from the middle class downwards” (42). Graham Law’s more recent work, Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press, deals at length with the class-crossing dynamics of the genre catalyzed by the change in periodical publishing.

17 Fraser Rae is specifically describing Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s work here; he is critical of her widespread readership.

142 Partly how sensation novelists like Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Wood, and Wilkie

Collins effectively explode essentialist assumptions about identity is through the labyrinthine plots they create. These are long, complicated plots that stretch over many months of serial installments; they narrate thrilling stories of mistaken identity, hidden secrets, and people who are just not what they seem. These narratives frequently embrace supernatural moments but are not content to let the mysteries of the text hinge on them in the way they would if they were short ghost stories. As Lyn Pykett has said, “like many sensation novels, The Woman in White domesticates the Gothic and makes use of the natural supernatural,” and she is spot on in her observation that “the ‘ghosts’ and ‘spectral presences’ in the novel are always still living”

(“Collins and the Sensation Novel” 56). Part of the implication in using a term like the “natural supernatural” to explain how a novel like The Woman in White works to create such visceral emotional and bodily response in readers is that the ability of these authors to destabilize assumptions about human identity is somehow inseparable from a discussion about the supernatural. In many ways, the plot itself takes on a kind of supernatural characterization.

Indeed, in these novel-length works there are always skeletons in characters’ closets that testify to hidden pasts and hidden selves. The spectral shape-shifting of the characters’ identities is possible because of the lengthy plot that “stands in” for literal supernatural invention.18

Although, as I have already mentioned, these narratives of sensational secret-outing were applauded by some critics for their ingenuity in storytelling (that is, for their heavily plotted framework woven without the tools of true supernatural intervention),19 other critics have

18 In short sensation stories, as I discuss in Chapter 5, intuition—which in itself has a distinctly supernatural element to it—frequently catalyzes investigations of identity.

19 Oliphant says that with The Woman in White there is a “new beginning in fiction” (42), a kind of newfound authenticity to the plot that stems from its departure from supernatural contrivances. In a rare complimentary moment, she explains how it is in many ways a more complicated form: “a writer who boldly takes in hand the

143 pointed out that there is nothing “natural” at all about the way the events in the story play out.20

Responding to Richard Holt Hutton’s 1868 critique of sensation novels’ preposterous assemblage of coincidences,21 for example, Andrew Radford writes that in these novels “the freakish and the fantastic . . . become the norm” (75). What Radford insinuates here is that even though the sensational events that take place in these works are not technically outside the

“normal” range of possibilities, the extraordinary unlikelihood of their occurrence gives the impression that this breed of realism is haunted by the fantastic. Per mid-nineteenth-century expectations about genre boundaries, novels that failed to move seamlessly between a single generic standard were often censured for the improbability of their narratives (Keen 68).22 Of course, much of the criticism rallied at The Woman in White and other sensation novels of its kind cited immorality as the offending culprit; however, the extraordinary problems and resolutions in otherwise realistic narratives were clearly off-putting for some reviewers as well.

No one in these stories is ever quite who they seem. Appearances are always at odds with the

“truth,” and the defining line between truth and fiction is continuously blurred. Jenny Bourne common mechanism of life, 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 of lawless genius or violent horrors of crime” (41-42).

20 Some critics, like one anonymous reviewer of The Woman in White in The Saturday Review, saw sensation novelists as endowed with a special kind of “mechanical talent,” a metaphor that reduces the “art” of the sensation novel to the industrial task of “cabinet-making and joining” (qtd in Heller 110-111). These authors were deemed “manufacturers of stories,” which hints at the artificiality with which the stories were thought by some critics to be produced and marketed for public consumption.

21 In his piece in The Spectator, Hutton writes, “to heap together startling and exceptional incidents in defiance of all probability is the obvious resource of inferior artists. Such incidents do doubtless occur in modern life, nor is there any reason why they should not be introduced […] in the novels which undertake to represent it. But our sense of the fitness of things is offended by the continual recurrence of what ought to be most sparingly employed to bring about catastrophe or to disentangle a plot” (931-32).

22 Nineteenth-century literary critic and philosopher G.H. Lewes encapsulates this desire in his review of Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley in The Edinburgh Review: “We are by no means rigorous in expecting that the story is to move along the highway of everyday life [; however,] if we are to travel into fairy-land, it must be in a fairy equipage, not a Hansom’s cab” (166).

144 Taylor has gone as far as to say that Collins’s writing “depended for its uncanny effects on everything that eroded . . . unified subjectivity: masking, doubling and performativity; the slippery line between ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ selves” (83). Selfhood is systematically othered, multiplied, fragmented, and hidden through a “natural supernatural” narrative that addresses real social anxieties.

Part of Collins’s project in The Woman in White is to complicate the normalcy of everyday life, so it is not surprising that Walter Hartright’s opening narrative begins somewhat ordinarily for a realist novel of the mid-century. We learn that he comes from modest roots, that he has the opportunity to take a position in a gentleman’s home teaching watercolors to young ladies, and that he is on the cusp of his manhood as a single, twenty-eight-year-old drawing master whose income is about to improve significantly. Readers know trouble is at hand, however, when Hartright experiences an “inexplicable unwillingness” to venture to Limmeridge

House, his future place of employment that should generate excitement rather than dread, as he himself admits the terms of his employment would be “easy,” “agreeable,” and “surprisingly liberal” (16). Hartright’s sense that something is not quite right with the situation, his nagging intuition that he would be better off searching for work in dreary London than in a pleasant country estate with young ladies and liberal wages, introduces a narrative rebuke of the terms, the facts, and the rational that will pave the way for the sensational storyline that will follow.

Although Hartright’s premonitions may be logically unfounded, Collins seems to suggest that they should not be taken lightly. His “unreasonable disinclination” to go to Cumberland is only unreasonable insofar as the Pandora’s box of troubles that will occur as a result of him going cannot, theoretically, be known. But the narrative insists that his disinclination is not unreasonable—it is believable foreshadowing, and ultimately, spot on. This preternatural ability

145 to be mentally “in tune” with the immaterial world, to “sense” when something bad is going to happen was not only a staple of supernatural fiction, but also a hotly debated issue in nineteenth- century scientific and religious discourse as well. According to Nicola Bown, the human mind became a site for discussions about the supernatural because, in its supposed resemblance to

God’s, it was itself a site of the supernatural (163-64). Nineteenth-century journalist and editor

Joseph Hatton, for example, writes that there is “‘delicate machinery planted in the human brain by the Divine hand,’ which enables us to perceive and respond to the invisible and material world around us” (462), while materialists, on the other hand, took these premonitions and dreams as the stuff of the superstitious and under-educated (Bown 164). The publication of The

Woman in White in 1859 comes at a relevant moment in this psychological history, as these debates became particularly contentious with the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species that same year given its implication that the human brain was the evolutionary bi-product of the animal brain and not an intuitive organ handed down by the Divine.

Collins was certainly intrigued by the psychological theories of his day, and his fascination with unconscious motivations is reflected in the supernatural elements that underpin his works. Indeed, a number of scholars have made note of his interest in studies of the mind, and many see the sensational effects of the stories as the direct consequence of this ongoing interest23:

For all his hostility towards doctrinaire evangelicalism, Collins never completely repudiated the idea of the individual soul, that immaterial core being that many faculty-based psychologists continued to support through the century. . . . [S]ince the early 1850s Collins had played on precisely those psychological theories that stressed the unpredictable and unconscious workings of the mind as a key method

23 Maria K. Bachman and Don Richard Cox cite “the nature of insanity, mesmerism and other states of consciousness, and the analysis of dreams” as theories of particular relevance to Collins’s fascination with “mental physiology,” but they also acknowledge that “his familiarity with a wide range of contemporary discussions of psychology contributed quite ‘creepily’ to the multiple narrative strands of The Woman in White” (18).

146 of creating anxiety, suspense and cognitive uncertainty in his narratives. (Taylor 82-83)

According to John Bowen, Collins’s works have a uniquely “uncanny” dimension to them rather than just gothic overtones in that the sensation is produced by familiarity in the unfamiliar and the dissolution of distinctions between living and dead, animate and inanimate (38-39). Certainly

Hartright’s strange sense that something bad is about to happen at the beginning of The Woman in White is a play between the supernatural and the psychological, a testament to the scientific in the occult. The balance struck is the same one that made ghost stories thrive in a competitive literary market by appealing to readers in a world enamored with facts.24 Schooled so in the class of supernatural literature, readers know better than to mistrust a character’s intuition, and they read on to see just how bad the things in Hartright’s future will actually be.

Prompted by his duty to his family and fear of upsetting his dear friend Professor Pesca who found the employment, Hartright pushes through his “unreasonable disinclination” to attend to Mr. Fairlie’s young ladies at Limmeridge House, and begins his journey in a setting better fit for a ghost story than a realist novel: a lonely, deserted path at midnight. Hartright’s mindless wandering in the “mysterious light” of the moon violently ends when Collins interrupts the scene with an uncanny moment of surprise:25

I … was strolling along the lonely high-road—idly wondering, I remember, what the Cumberland young ladies would look like—when, in one moment, every drop

24 For more on the Victorians’ fascination with ghosts in an age of facts, see “Ghosts of the Victorians” in Vanessa D. Dickerson’s Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural.

25 Moonlight settings were apparently rich for moments of supernatural foresight in Collins’s work. In “John Jago’s Ghost,” Mr. Lefrank has a “vague mistrust” of a moonlight meeting. The narrator says, “Our presentiments are sometimes, in certain rare cases, the faithful prophecy of the future.” When LeFrank asks himself, “Will mischief come of it?” We are immediate told, “mischief did come of it” (51). In “A Terribly Strange Bed” moonlight is the catalyst for finding lost memories and “reminding us we are immortal” (39). In “The Nun’s Story of Gabriel’s Marriage,” the moonlight is described as being inherently “ghastly and horrible” (253). Even later in the Woman in White, Hartright is unsettled by the ghostly appearance of Laura Fairlie to Anne Catherick in the twilight hours, exclaiming, “Call her in, out of the dreary moonlight—pray call her in!” (61).

147 of blood in my body was brought to a stop by the touch of a hand laid lightly and suddenly on my shoulder from behind me. I turned on the instant, with my fingers tightening round the handles of my stick. There, in the middle of the broad, bright high-road—there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven—stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments; her face bent in grave inquiry on mine, her hand pointing to the dark cloud over London, as I faced her. I was too seriously startled by the suddenness with which this extraordinary apparition stood before me, in the dead of night and in that lonely place, to ask what she wanted. (20)

Andrew Mangham has remarked that Walter’s reaction to the solitary woman appears

“unnecessary and exaggerated,” as the woman in white has an ability to “make his blood run cold” even though he is not yet aware of her escape from an asylum (“What Could I Do?” 119).

But if we consider the scenario as one indebted to supernatural fiction, his reaction seems quite typical of character involved in a ghost sighting. She is not to him simply a forlorn woman alone on a dusty road; she is a “figure” of a woman, a form without a being. The face of this figure is aptly bent to his in “grave inquiry,” a pun that reveals the uncanny dimension of the meeting, as well as Hartright’s assessment of her as a figure set free from its grave.26 This spectral being says nothing, but instead, like the silent shrouded figure of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, simply points toward an ominous cloud that hangs over London.

In this particular moment in the novel, Collins seems to be taking full advantage of his readers’ knowledge of ghost story tropes of the period in order to destabilize the realist coming- of-age plot he has hitherto developed. The sudden, unexpected touch on the shoulder assaults readers in the same way as Hartright is violently stopped cold in his “idle wondering” about the

Cumberland young ladies. There is a momentary shift from thinking about what adventures await the young drawing master at his new place of employment, to the possibilities of what the

26 Characters are frequently “grave” in ghost stories—from their facial expressions to the tone of their voice. The word is such a well-worn descriptor in supernatural fiction that we might wonder to what extent it served as an overt signal to readers of the strange and startling things that were certainly to come.

148 “extraordinary apparition” may signify. Is she, to use Ellen Wood’s short ghost story title, a

“reality or delusion”: a strange psychological projection of Hartright’s inexplicable concerns about his trip or a real ghost with otherworldly powers of foresight sent to warn him about the dark storm really brewing in his future? In either case, the presence of this seemingly spectral being at this moment in the novel seems more significant for what it can reveal about Hartright and his fate than the actual ghost itself, which falls in line with the observation Terry Castle makes in The Female Thermometer that nineteenth-century ghosts were ghosts of the mind rather than the castle.

What is telling about this moment in the novel, the first “encounter” with the woman in white, is that the “extraordinary apparition” surprises Hartright to such an extent that he loses all power of speech and is struck dumb and helpless in her presence. Hartright, we are told, is “too seriously startled” to know how to make inquiries or even what inquiries he should make (20), and his inability to react in any direct, rational way is a typical response to ghostly encounters in short tales of period. Indeed, the ghost story genre insists that the mundane reality of everyday life could be at any moment thrown into chaos by forces unseen and challenges the perception that the Victorian middle classes were safe in a quiet, orderly world. That the characters fail to act at the moment when the supernatural encounter happens testifies to a failure to process and comprehend phenomena ungoverned by rules.27 After all, a tap on the shoulder may incite

Hartright to “tighten round the handles of [his] stick” (20), but perceiving the presence of the ghostly woman who did it, checks him from using it.

27 In The Victorian Supernatural, Bown, Burdett, and Thurschwell explain that the supernatural goes “above and beyond the power of natural causes,” but they clarify that “nature” means not only the material world that surrounds us, but also the “immutable laws governing it” (4).

149 Although Hartright is unable to articulate at the moment of his encounter,28 his body seems to have an unavoidable perfunctory reaction. His fingers immediately “tighten” around his walking stick, he “turns [his body] on an instant,” and “every drop of blood in [his] body [is] brought to a stop.” The experience is “felt” not understood; it is processed through the body, not the mind. Charles Dickens called this scene one of the two most thrilling moments in English literature, and his reason for doing so (which he did not expand on) probably had a lot to do with precisely the way this moment is translated bodily.29 I agree with Andrew Mangham’s sense that there is “no objective reason” for Hartright to react the way he does, but I am less willing to believe his supposition that the “dangers” of woman in white are “the illusory fabrications of

[Hartright’s] own invention” (“What Could I Do?” 120). Collins is working within a ghost story tradition that uses the body as a barometer for what is centrally important or relevant to the story.

While there may be no “objective reason” (i.e., no logical reason) for reacting the way he does when he sees the woman in white on the open road, Collins establishes her significance in

Hartright’s intense bodily reaction, a reaction that will in turn be shared by readers.30

Examples of characters who lose the power of speech while boasting violent bodily reactions to paranormal activity are not hard to find in a sampling of short ghost stories. For example, in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s “At Chrighton Abbey” (1871), Sarah, a visitor at her

28 Later in the novel, Laura has a similar inability to speak when she realizes the uncanny resemblance between herself and Anne Catherick, the woman in white: “While I was looking at her, while she was very close to me, it came over my mind suddenly that we were like each other! Her face was pale and thin and weary—but the sight of it startled me, as if it had been the sight of my own face in the glass after a long illness. The discovery—I don’t know why—gave me such a shock, that I was perfectly incapable of speaking to her for the moment” (282).

29 Dickens’s other most thrilling moment was the march of the market women on Versailles in Carlyle’s The French Revolution. For more on this topic, see Sir Henry Dickens’s The Recollections of Sir Henry Dickens, K.C. p. 54.

30 The shared bodily excitation is partly what nineteenth-century reviewers found problematic about sensation novels. Andrew Radford, for example, sees Henry Mansel’s primary dislike of sensation fiction rooted in the fact that it triggered “the same embodied nervous responses in its readers that the protagonists registered” (10). In this way, readers could begin to sense within themselves when something significant was about to happen.

150 cousin’s home, is incapable of responding when she sees a hunting party late one evening occupying the stables even though no hunting has occurred at the abbey for many years: “a cold sweat stood out upon my forehead, and I trembled in every limb . . . For some minutes I stood by the window, statue-like, staring blankly into the empty quadrangle” (178). Shortly after the incident, an intuitive housemaid reads Sarah’s encounter all over her body, her person being “all of a tremble” and “looking pale as a ghost” (179). Like Hartright, Sarah attributes her reaction to the fact that she had “been startled, that’s all,” and although she tells the maid that she is not a

“believer in visions or omens,” her involuntary bodily reaction speaks to some consciousness that she is not able to understand. Her assertion that the ghastly hunting party still had an unshakeable effect on her nerves that was “not the less powerful . . . however rationally [she] might try to think of what [she] had seen” testifies to this consciousness (181). Ultimately,

Braddon endorses the idea that the body can sense what the mind is unable to process, as the housemaid’s proclamation that the pack “is a warning of death to this house” eventually does come to pass.31

“The Story of Clifford House,” an anonymous story published in the 1878 Christmas edition of Mistletoe Bough, demonstrates a similar situation in which the characters’ bodies communicate what they otherwise cannot verbally express. The story tells the tale of George and

Helen Russell and their purchase of what will turn out to be the haunted Clifford House. After just a day at their new residence, Mr. George Russell’s jocular teasing of his wife is cut suddenly short when he “springs aside suddenly,” “grow[s] quite white,” and “stare[s] about him wildly”

(221). When his wife asks him what has happened, he can only respond, “I don’t know—

31 In the past, the haunting party has always been seen before the death (often violent death) of the eldest unmarried male heir before coming into his fortune. The case is no different after Sarah’s encounter. Her soon-to-be-married cousin is killed on a hunting expedition in Wycherly shortly before his marriage when his horse balks over a leap and his head collides with a heavy stone roller.

151 Helen—something . . . I struck myself against the door, I suppose!” (221). Not only can he not say what it is he has seen (“something”), but he can also only process the encounter as physical trauma (“I struck myself against the door, I suppose”). He “supposes” that his reaction must have been a reaction to some sort of physical stimulus rather than the result of an otherworldly encounter because that is the only “logical” explanation for phenomena that cannot otherwise be logically understood. But trying to convince himself of this rationale is ultimately counterintuitive to the maintenance of his mental health: “I never told you, Helen . . . although I told Dr. Winchester, that from the first evening I led a haunted life in that dreadful house, and the more I struggled to disbelieve the evidence of my senses, and to keep the knowledge from you, the more unbearable it became, until I felt myself going mad” (237). As with Braddon’s story,

“The Story of Clifford House” suggests that there is no rational way to explain or understand what defies the rules of science; there is only the fact of the body’s reaction.32

Of course, in the most severe cases, the body’s reaction is the first and final testament to the encounter, as some stories take up the saying “scared to death” quite literally. Obviously

Rhoda Broughton’s “The Truth, The Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth” is a prime example in that Ralph Gordon never gets the chance to go back and try to explain to his friends what he has seen because he immediately dies upon seeing “it.” After playing the part of witness to a thing ungoverned by the rules of nature that supposedly order it, Gordon is not able to re- enter that world. The housemaid, who does not die from seeing the same specter as the unfortunate Gordon, must still be physically removed to an asylum where both she and her testimony will be lost in “hopeless silence” forever (80). In this story, the only “evidence” left

32 As I discuss in Chapter 5, affect also takes on important symbolic force in sensational short stories, which tend to privilege the body, rather than the mind, as the most effective gauge for determining deviance within the abbreviated narrative frame.

152 behind is the body of the beholder, and it is through the body that the incomprehensible acquires meaning, or at least leaves its trace.

The bodily reactions of these characters—from chills and trembles to the complete demise of the body—testify to the existence of phenomena beyond the capacity of human understanding in ghost stories, but the woman in white does not visit Hartright from the grave and, as we soon find out, possesses a perfectly reasonable excuse for being on the open road alone at that time of night as an asylum escapee. Still, she is a mystery to both Hartright and the reader—a mental plague. Although he wishes to “lift the veil” that hangs between himself and her,33 she is woman “whose name, whose character, whose story, whose objects in life, whose very presence by [his] side . . . [are] fathomless mysteries” that make him begin to question reality as well as his own identity: “It was like a dream. Was I Walter Hartright?” (23). She keeps Hartright’s mind in a “disturbed state,” as he wonders, “What had become of her now? . . . was she still capable of controlling her own actions; and were we two following our widely- parted roads towards one point in the mysterious future, at which we were to meet once more?”

(29). No matter what he does, the question of the woman in white’s identity—not only as it relates to her name, but also her position in life, family history, and motivations—is one that is never far from Hartright’s mind. Like the problematic ghost that haunts, the woman in white is perpetually a figure of a woman, a façade without a discernible interior, mysteriously enshrouded in “its own appropriate midnight darkness” (47).

33 Elizabeth Bronfen argues in Over Her Dead Body: Death Femininity, and the Aesthetic that the detective plot that ensues stands in for the erotic suggestion of lifting the veil between Hartright and the woman in white. She also suggests that the romance plot between Hartright and Laura stands in for the illicit “necrophiliac” thrill of his initial encounter with the ghostlike Anne Catherick. For more information see Part IV, “Necromancy, or Closing the Crack on the Gravestone.”

153 If physical appearances are one of the primary ways that the identity of a person can be confirmed, the spectral shape-shifting at play in the novel consistently undermines this assumption. Although we see no kettles transform into teacups, the problematic nature of appearances does indeed arise in the story as frequently as Mr. Fairlie has something to say about his nerves. And for a young drawing master trained in the art of the appearance of things, observation can be as disorienting as it is illuminating. Just as Hartright is shocked by the realization that Marian Halcombe’s face does not match her enticing womanly figure —“the lady is dark . . . the lady is young . . . The lady is ugly!” (31)—so too is he thrown by the strange resemblance of his beloved Laura Fairlie to the woman in white:

There stood Miss Fairlie, a white figure, alone in the moonlight . . . the living image, at that distance and under those circumstances, of the woman in white! The doubt which had troubled my mind for hours and hours past, flashed into conviction in an instant. That ‘something wanting’ was my own recognition of the ominous likeness between the fugitive in the asylum and my pupil at Limmeridge House . . . To associate that forlorn, friendless woman, even by an accidental likeness only, with Miss Fairlie, seems like casting a shadow on the future of the bright creature who stands looking at us now. Let me lose the impression again, as soon as possible. Call her in, out of dreary moonlight—pray call her in! (61)

In having Marian respond to Hartright’s outcry with a wry jab at his masculinity—“I thought that men, in the nineteenth century, were above superstition” (61)—Collins reifies the juxtaposition of the fantastic and the realist plot that he has been working to develop, as “real men” of this century should apparently be above the feminine superstitions of the past. In the “dreary moonlight” Laura is reduced (like Anne Catherick) to a “white figure” that calls for interpretation, however problematic such interpretation may be. The likeness is “ominous” because, as Elisabeth Bronfen points out, the woman in white is a “figure of death in the realm of the living” (300), or in other words, a walking reminder of what Laura could be in declining

154 health on her way to the grave.34 Hartright’s response to Marian’s mocking question—“Pray call her in!” (61)—reveals that he is not only “superstitious” but seriously disturbed by her shifting identity before his own eyes.

Collins’s “white figures” are markers of the unknown, spectral beings that blur all physical and social markers of identity. Importantly, though, “whiteness” does not represent an absence of identity. Indeed, as Tamar Heller has said, “Far from being simply the blank page that her ‘whiteness’ evokes, Anne is a palimpsest on which are inscribed the traces of symbolic meanings that encompass not only gender but also class and history itself . . . [she is] a figure for the confusion of gender and class boundaries” (119, 112). Whereas ghost stories are centrally concerned with the existence (or not) of things beyond natural law and human comprehension,

Collins’s figures are flesh and blood ghosts that throw the social order into a chaotic jumble. Not only do Anne and Laura share a strong resemblance to one another, but they are literally interchanged when Anne is buried in a grave bearing Laura’s name, and Laura is “returned” to the asylum. Removed from her social position, Laura is not even recognizable to her own uncle.

In some ways, she is not even recognizable to herself, as her insistence that she is “Lady Glyde” in the asylum is actually false since Sir Percival usurped his title and “Lady Glyde” never truly existed at all.

The likeness between the two women, according to Ann Cvetkovich, is coded in the novel as the calamity of circumstance or the fulfillment of providential inevitability, even as it destabilizes the idea of a fixed essential identity: “Their resemblance is a reminder that identity is a product not of intrinsic qualities but of social determinations which mark the body sufficiently

34 In this way, Anne Catherick (the woman in white) serves as a classic doppelganger for Laura Fairlie, which Valerie Pedlar defines as “the ghostly or spiritual double of a living person, the appearance of which usually presages death” (300).

155 that identical women can have different appearances . . . However, the text is structured so as to make this even seem to be the mysterious product of ‘chance’ or ‘fate’” (41). Of course, the confusion between Anne and Laura is the not the only example of ghostly identity confusion.

Both the cultured, corpulent Italian villain Count Fosco and the impetuous scoundrel Sir Percival

Glyde, too, have what Cvetkovich terms “personal ghosts” (37), and even the good-natured, boisterous professor Pesca has a past in the Brotherhood. Adopting the term “personal ghosts” to talk about characters who transform into different people and transcend social casts (Count

Fosco is a rogue member of the Italian Brotherhood and Sir Percival Glyde is the illegitimate son of an aristocrat) reveals the extent to which talking about unstable identities lends itself to the language of the supernatural.

***

As I have shown, Collins makes use of otherworldly tropes, ghosts, and omens to excite readers with the prospect of extraordinary possibilities in hum-drum everyday life. Punctuating this new kind of novel with sensational moments that walk the line of the natural supernatural allows Collins to garner the emotional, psychological, and physical responses needed from readers to sell magazines. As a writer of ghost stories himself, he would have had an acute understanding of how desirable these tales were for readers as well as the cultural currency they held. Setting his novel up very much in the style of a ghost story—complete with Hartright

“doubting the reality of [his] own adventure” after his moonlight encounter with the woman in white (27)—only to show how the real unknowns are the supposed “givens” of society, produces an uncanny effect all the more terrifying for its proximity to the modern British world. Readers do not need to believe in ghosts to get the message, but on some level, buying into the project of the ghost story is necessary.

156 Collins accentuates the importance of readers’ investment in the ghost story narrative in the metanarrative he creates about reading ghost stories within the text of The Woman in White.

Within this narrative, Collins shows how ghost stories can offer important insight for understanding the meaning of things, as it is only through them that the characters can move forward in their investigation of the mysterious eponymous heroine. Shortly after Hartright’s arrival at Limmeridge House, Laura receives an anonymous letter warning of her of her impending marriage to Sir Percival Glyde. The sender details an ominous dream she had in which the man Laura intends to marry causes her so much pain and misery that she awakens from the dream with her “eyes full of tears and [her] heart beating,” for, as the sender says, “I believe in dreams” (79).35 When Marian and Hartright begin their detective work to discover the originator of the letter, their search leads them to the village school where a heated discussion about ghost seeing has brought a young school boy to the brink of corporeal punishment at the hand of his increasingly impatient teacher. As Marian and Hartright look on, the reader bears witness to a moment that brings to a crux contemporary debates about science and the supernatural, appropriate and inappropriate reading, legitimate and illegitimate knowledges.

The scene sets up these dichotomies in the characters of the frightened but impenitent ghost-seer Jacob Postlethwaite and the angry legionnaire of logic Mr. Dempster. As the

“schoolmaster” (master of what, we might ask), Mr. Dempster represents the learned, adult,

“legitimate” view of the supposed supernatural occurrence: that it is nothing more than an

35 The letter begins by asking Laura, “Do you believe in dreams?” and is directly followed by three Biblical citations that endorse dreams as meaningful keys to unlocking future mysteries. The first is Genesis 40:8: “We both had dreams,” they answered, “but there is no one to interpret them.” Then Joseph said to them, “Do not interpretations belong to God? Tell me your dreams.” The second is Genesis 41:25: Then Joseph said to Pharaoh, “The dreams of Pharaoh are one and the same. God has revealed to Pharaoh what he is about to do.” The last and longest of the three is Daniel’s unfavorable interpretation of King Nebuchadnezzar’s dream (that he will fall out of power and live with the animals) in Daniel 4:18-25. These Biblical references are another good example of how religious and supernatural discourses often blend.

157 “absurd story” concocted by Jacob to frighten the other children at the school (85). Jacob

Postlethwaite, on the other hand, represents the uneducated, childish, “illegitimate” view of the subject: “I saw t’ghaist,’. . . T’ ghaist of Mistress Fairlie” (86-87). Rather than let the boy have his story, setting it aside as innocuous childish fancy, Mr. Dempster is brought to arms:

If I hear another word spoken about ghosts in this school, it will be the worse for all of you. There are no such things as ghosts; and, therefore, any boy who believes in ghosts believes in what can’t possibly be; and a boy who belongs at Limmeridge School, and believes in what can’t possibly be, sets up his back against reason and discipline, and must be punished accordingly. You all see Jacob Postlethwaite standing up on the stool there in disgrace. He has been punished, not because he said he saw a ghost last night, but because he is too impudent and obstinate to listen to reason; and he persists in saying he saw the ghost after I have told him that no such thing can possibly be. If nothing else will do, I mean to cane the ghost out of Jacob Postlethwaite. (84)

The fact that boy has set “up his back against reason and discipline” by persisting in his story is infuriating to his schoolmaster because it is a bold refusal of himself and the institutional knowledge he has to impart. To “cane the ghost out” of the boy is the only way that Mr.

Dempster can retain his clout because the supernatural occurrence has shattered the system of logic he endorses.

When asked by Marian to describe the conditions of the ghost sighting, Jacob’s answers bespeak a history of ghost story reading that has obviously shaped the way he perceived the encounter. He explains to her that the ghost was “‘Arl in white—as a ghaist should be,” and that it was “Away yander, in t’ kirkyard—where a ghaist ought to be” (86, my emphasis), as if to say that even in its unnatural appearance in the churchyard, the specter is still a product of the page and must subscribe to the “rules” or tropes established in the stories that have given it its shape.

Marian, of course, is critical of the boy’s answers, responding, “As a ‘ghaist’ should be—where a ‘ghaist’ ought to be—why you little fool, you talk as if the manners and customs of ghosts had been familiar to you from your infancy! You have got your story at your fingers’ ends, at any

158 rate” (86). Marian’s suggestion that Jacob has his story at his “fingers’ ends” is probably meant as a reference to the fact that the boy has a consistent version to impart to others. And yet, her observation that the “manners and customs of ghosts” appear to be something Jacob has been familiar with his entire life, gives the impression that the story at his fingers’ ends is one located in a periodical.36 Strangely enough, in this moment, the story of the periodical (with all its tropes and truisms) is the same story being told by Collins: there has been a sighting, and it is still unclear whether that sighting is a reality or a delusion.

Since the investigation of the woman and white and the progenitor of the portentous dream of Laura’s fate are the primary novelistic concerns at this moment story, the fact that

Jacob’s story will directly put Hartright in contact with both in the person of Anne Catherick reveals just how important his supernatural narrative is. Hartright, who was himself in a very similar position as Jacob only fifty pages earlier, does not share Marian’s “stuff and nonsense” view of the boy’s confession (86); we are told that he “st[ands] apart,” “listen[s] attentively,” and draws “his own conclusions” (88). The conclusion to which he ultimately comes is a “very strong opinion” that “the boy’s story has a foundation of fact” (88). His own perusal of Mrs.

Fairlie’s grave, the place where Jacob claims to have seen the ghost, is what eventually brings

Hartright into contact with the elusive woman in white and pushes the narrative forward.

Jacob’s experience with the supernatural in print provides him with a way to codify his experience at the graveyard, allowing him to formulate his own supernatural narrative with a

36 As Michael Cox reminds, Victorian ghost stories are “inherently limited in form and dynamic potential” (xi). With ghost stories maturing and flourishing in the middle decades of the nineteenth century by way of a new magazine culture and burgeoning middle-class readership, consumers came to harbor certain expectations about the kind of things they would encounter at the outset of their reading. Some of the most fundamental of these expectations are an interaction between the living and dead, events that would challenge scientific rationale and explore the unknowable, domestic settings, and relatively short narratives. Readers expected to be engaged in a story, to have their imaginations run wild, to be entertained in their moments of leisure with an agreeable shiver when things start to get a little strange.

159 “foundation in fact.” Although it is no literal ghost weeping over Mrs. Fairlie’s grave, believing the boy’s story is the only way that truth can out. Given the fact that the schoolmaster “had not set eyes on the stranger of whom [Hartright and Marian] were in search,” his narrative dies off, and he joins the “mass of . . . unhelpful and unobservant neighbors” who follow the “rule of total ignorance” in the village (83). In contrast, Jacob’s narrative lives on as the productive, more

“intelligent” version of events that leads the way to solving the mystery. In legitimating the ghost story narrative, Collins ostensibly reverses the role of teacher and pupil, and in turn, legitimizes the subversive marginal voice. If Collins did indeed have an ambivalent attitude about his own connection to a feminized literary form, as Tamar Heller contends he did, certainly this metanarrative bears witness to his desire to justify the merits of his novel, and indeed, his career as a popular fiction writer as well.

***

As the novel approaches its close, long after the woman in white (now truly dead) has been discovered to be Anne Catherick, the illegitimate daughter of the late Mr. Fairlie imprisoned in an asylum to keep the secrets of wicked men safe, Hartright reflects that the effect she had had on his mind as well as the events of the narrative were very much like a haunting.

He pays tribute to her sad life and death with remorseful language that speaks to the loneliness of her spectral existence in his final requiem: “So the ghostly figure which has haunted these pages as it haunted my life, goes down into the impenetrable Gloom. Like a Shadow she first came to me, in the loneliness of the night. Like a Shadow she passes away, in the loneliness of the dead”

(569). With no more unfinished business, the specter can find peace in death, and the narrative can come to an end. With the ghost being put to rest, Laura can finally be Laura Hartright (the expected outcome for a realist courtship plot), Hartright acquires Laura and an heir to the estate

160 of Limmeridge, Sir Percival and Count Fosco die, and Marian gets to be the “good angel of

[everyone’s] lives” (643). The “Shadow” cast by the “ghostly figure” can no longer obscure identity and muddle the social order from “the loneliness of the dead.”

Despite the ghost story’s haunting influence on the sensation genre and its discursive participation in obscuring the fictionalized “reality” of the text, Henry Mansel lamented that the sensation genre was nevertheless a “great fact” of the day (512). Indeed, it was highly sought after, widely read, and unfortunately for him, showed no ostensible signs of going away. Oddly enough, the cultural implications of the genre in the 1860s and 70s were so vast and so thoroughly influential that critics often commented on sensation’s seemingly supernatural possession of Victoria’s subjects. Mansel likens the “market-law of demand and supply” to a

“divine influence” (495), for example, while Henrietta Keddie stresses without pause the need for a complete exorcism: “exorcise this evil possession of our literature, that we may not have the sorrow and shame of knowing that the reign of good Queen Victoria, our true woman and wife, will be identified in after generations with the reign of female criminals in English literature” (524). Although the ghosts of sensation fiction are ultimately just flesh and blood people (as much as a character in a story can be flesh and blood, I suppose), they are ironically all the more terrifying. This fact, along with the unstoppable force of sensation’s supernatural influence, makes the genre far more frightening for nineteenth-century moral crusaders than a specter could ever be.

161 CHAPTER 5 COMPARING LONG AND SHORT SENSATION FICTION: AFFECT, INTUITION, AND APPEAL

An affluent, spirited young woman enters into a marriage with a man whose complexion is “naturally dark and swarthy” after the passing of a husband who was twenty-five-years her senior. This not-affluent new husband is strongly disliked by the family’s most loyal and senior servant (who serves as the story’s first-person narrator) for inexplicable reasons other than that he perceives in the man a “rakish, unsettled look” and a “bounceable way of talking.” The new husband proceeds to buy a yacht with his wife’s fortune, and shortly thereafter, he departs to no- one-knows-where after an intense verbal altercation with his wife over what is made clear to readers is a platonic relationship between her and the village clergyman. An anonymous letter arrives. The mistress of the home and her lawyer confide in the faithful servant the secret of the letter, which reveals that the husband has taken another wife, a fact witnessed by the writer’s own eyes. A seemingly omniscient detective is brought in. A transnational pursuit takes place.

Clues are gathered. The detective knows what happened and predicts—to the loyal servant’s amazement—what will happen with the case in the future. Bigamy, an accidentally-staged murder, revenge, swooning, false imprisonment, asylums—but in the end, order and truth restored.

While this sensational plotline has all the makings of a 1860s triple-decker novel, all of its mysteries are established and solved in a mere fifty-five pages. The story in question is Wilkie

Collins’s “A Marriage Tragedy” (1858),1 and it is a significant one because it offers an example of how writers of the mid-nineteenth century were producing thrilling narratives of modern times in shorter forms that were raising the same kind of economic and social concerns as longer

1 The story originally appears in the February 1858 edition of Harper’s. The story is later republished under the title “A Plot in Private Life” in Collins’s short story collection Queen of Hearts (1859).

162 sensation novels. As I have discussed at some length in the introduction, even though the term sensation fiction is frequently adopted in studies of the genre, the term has often been used at the exclusion of fiction outside of the novel, and here, I make an effort to change that by offering several examples of stories that are thematically quite similar to the serialized and three-volume novels that have defined the genre. Of significance is the fact that when nineteenth-century critics rallied against the popular works of crime and deviance then being devoured by the middle class, they aimed their criticism at sensation novels and novelists, and it was not until sometime in the mid-twentieth century that a slippage of the terms novel and fiction began to take place when describing these works. The extreme visibility of the sensation novel, as discussed at great length in Chapter 2, offers some insight as to why the Victorians would set their sights on the novel as the “thing of consequence,” to use Brander Matthews’s term, in the perceived state of decline in literary taste; however, it is also evident that scholars have never been fully satisfied with the term “novel” in designating the genre, and increasingly, titles of criticism have mostly moved away from the term “sensation novel” to more inclusive terms like

“sensation fiction,” or more simply, “sensation,” even though these studies still largely focus on novels. Given the centrality of the novel in studies of the genre to date, this chapter explores thematically comparable short fiction and advances some observations about the similarities of the forms, while also acknowledging the divergences necessarily created by formal considerations of length (differences that have consequences for not only the narratives but also for readers’ engagement with those narratives).

Sensation novels and short stories actually have a lot in common, even though these novels are known for their long, labyrinthine plots. Both focus on incident as a way of calling into question social hierarchies and institutions, the role of women, and the belief in the family as

163 the solid foundation upon which British life could be comfortably situated. Both are also centrally concerned with questions of identity—if people are not who they appear to be, then who are they really? The plots, which generally move toward a climactic revelation in response to the text’s mysteries, habitually focus on policing deviant agents, and often, this process includes an investigator of some sort (usually an amateur detective who is associated with the family in some way, although professionals do sometimes play a role too). Though formal investigations are a hallmark of the genre, behaviors are policed and disciplined using all sorts of mechanisms in these stories, and, as I highlight here, shocking crimes, excessive passions, and cruel schemes—all taking place right at home on the domestic hearth—characterize the sensation novel as well as sensational short stories.

Understandably though, for short stories, fewer staged moments of “mini climax” serve to move the plot towards its inevitable denouement, making the trajectory of revelation more direct in these stories. While both sensation stories and novels offer narratives that suggest that there are deviant persons at hand who need to be watched and decoded (short sensation stories, like the novels I discuss in Chapter 4, frequently make use of ghost story paradigms as a way of introducing problem “flesh and blood” characters), unlike the novels, these stories are considerably more deliberate in alerting readers to underlying corruption. These differences—a more direct path to revelation, which is made possible by (ultimately) sound assumptions about who the deviant agent is— are significant for what they suggest about how people can access knowledge about others and the world in which they live.

Intuition and “gut reactions” feature prominently in both sensation novels and stories, but where one is a “puzzle” in need of a careful collection and examination of clues to rationalize the

“solution,” the other suggests the solution lies in one’s feelings. Because of the shorter length of

164 these stories, the plot is often activated by a character’s (often the first-person narrator’s) intense feelings of mistrust or dread toward another character or situation, and his or her emotional reactions imbue otherwise ordinary circumstances with meaning. I argue that sensational short stories diverge from novels in their suggestion that deviance is best discerned through the body rather than the mind. Plotting these affective cues within a limited narrative frame propels readers towards a foreseeable end, and in doing so, also models to great benefit how the kind of morbid suspicion feared by critics like Henry Mansel could serve as effective policing.2 These stories insist that the way one parts one’s hair, the manner and tone of one’s laugh, or any other innocuous detail of one’s personal appearance very likely signifies an evil heart—if one feels like it does.3 As Mansel writes, “there is satisfaction in exposing an imposter” (513), and these stories promise readers this satisfaction by engaging them in a fantasy where first impressions point to some sort of truth, for as Susan Lohafer has convincingly argued, “short fiction . . . is the most

‘end conscious’ of forms [and] readers of short fiction are the most ‘end-conscious’ of readers”

2 Mansel intimates that part of the (immoral) appeal of sensation fiction is that it turns the common scenes of everyday life into a sensational stage where the pleasant exteriors of one’s friends, neighbors, and acquaintances mask the darkest of secrets. He worries that good citizens, particularly women, would be ill-fed by the pleasurable “horror” they experience in imagining the members of their community as sinfully duplicitous: “We are thrilled with horror, even in fiction, by the thought that such things may be going on around us and among us. The man who shook our hand with a hearty English grasp half an hour ago--the woman whose beauty and grace were the charm of last night, and whose gentle words sent us home better pleased with the world and with ourselves--how exciting to think that under these pleasing outsides may be concealed some demon in human shape, a Count Fosco or a Lady Audley! He may have assumed all that heartiness to conceal some dark plot against our life or honour or against the life or honour of one yet dearer: she may have left that gay scene to muffle herself in a thick veil and steal to a midnight meeting with some villainous accomplice. He may have a mysterious female, immured in a solitary tower or a private lunatic asylum, destined to come forth hereafter to menace the name and position of the excellent lady whom the world acknowledges as his wife: she may have a husband lying dead at the bottom of a well, and a fatherless child nobody knows where” (489).

3 Impressions are important in sensation novels, but they are frequently misleading. For example, Robert Audley is wrong in many of his assumptions about what happened to his missing friend In Lady Audley’s Secret. The Moonstone is filled with faulty ideas about who has stolen the diamond (and notably, the servant class unfairly bears the brunt of this suspicion). And who would have guessed that the good-natured Professor Pesca would be the nemesis of the evil Count Fosco in The Woman in White?

165 (94).4 Indulging in such fantasies, however, could potentially impair, if not fracture, households, communities, and potentially, an entire nation, as anyone and everyone can be a suspect in a society where special talent, tools, and evidence are optional in bringing about “justice.”

In the last section of the chapter, I consider how these short stories and novels could also appeal to readers in different ways—with short stories offering pleasure in bite-sized wholes and novels pleasing with delayed gratification and the promise of more—and how these appeals could carry different weight in a society of anxious consumerism. Although sensational short stories were sometimes even more explicit than novels in depicting physical and emotional violence, and more cutting with their social criticism, their appeal was ultimately less concerning for nineteenth-century critics and moralists than that of novels because it did not directly inspire the thing that was causing so many problems in polite society: more mindless reading. As Anna

Maria Jones writes, sensation fiction “engages the reader in a fantasy of knowingness in which suspense and uncertainty anticipate the pleasures of revelation and explanation—murkiness precedes clarity; messiness invites resolution” (Problem Novels 5). Resolution is at hand when reading short fiction, but novels require readers to endure and relish the suspense plotted in the narrative to reach pleasurable revelation.5 As nineteenth-century metaphors of the “dram” and

4 While the reliance on intuition in these stories may in some ways suggest that the novel was the form better positioned to challenge ideological structures, short fiction, as I discuss in Chapter 2, was a marginalized, “invisible” form that could invite greater risk-taking with endings that challenge the more conventional ones we have come to associate with the very visible Victorian novel. Short fiction also provides more opportunities to use narrative fragmentation as a way of commenting on the vulnerability of social identities and roles. It is important to acknowledge, however, that the novel’s plot does provide a unique opportunity for intellectual critique that extends beyond affective response.

5 By “enduring” a sensation novel, I am referring to a process of reading that requires continued commitment to see a serial through to its end, as well as a process of coping with the pain of the suspense created by this waiting. Patrick O’Malley argues that sensation novels are similar to their Gothic predecessors in that “the physiological experience of the reader . . . is both modeled by and produced as an analog to that of the threatened characters of the narrative itself” (“Gothic” 88). Sensation novels cause readers to get “caught in”—unable to put down, and therefore, “escape”—the narrative. With the serialization of novels frequently spanning several months to a year or more, readers would be willing “victims” to the narrative in ways that would be much more conspicuous and “painful” than they would be for short-story reading, where a narrative could often be consumed in a single sitting.

166 “dose” make clear (Mansel 485), sensation novels were thought to have an addictive quality to them, with bodily cravings overwhelming and controlling cognition so as to keep consumers reading, buying, and longing for more. Not only then would readers be compelled to follow a serialized sensation novel to its completion—after all, as one anonymous reviewer rightfully says of Wilkie Collins’s fiction, “Nobody leaves one of his tales unfinished” (Rev. of The Woman in

White, Saturday Review 84)—their drive for pleasurable revelation could trap them in a new, intensifying consumer market, one where thoughtful consumption of edifying texts does not work as a business model. Serialization and the new market culture that enabled it could then effectively “imprison” readers in a buying cycle by overpowering their minds through control of their bodies—making them the gothic victims of modern British consumerism in a way that short stories could not.

Here, then, I make a case for expanding what kinds of literary works we include in our studies of sensation fiction. In highlighting some of the identifiable characteristics of sensational short stories, I show how this long-neglected genre adopts comparable themes and takes up similar questions as the well-studied novel, but how it also makes greater use of impressions and feelings to resolve the narrative in a limited space, which could in turn promote suspicion and distrust capable of damaging real-life bonds and relationships. Pulling from works by Collins,

Dickens, Braddon, Wood, and Le Fanu, I show how crime and violent passions are a hallmark of these stories, but how even those stories that are very explicit in their handling of violence and depravity present a threat that is less menacing than that of novels, which could ensnare readers in a cycle of consumption capable of destroying Britain’s reputation of intellectual and moral superiority. Comparing sensational short stories and novels thus offers new insight concerning

Kathleen Tillotson points out that there was also a real possibility that an ending of a serial might not get written at all (26), which would effectually leave readers “stuck” in a mystery with no pleasurable out.

167 what was actually so dangerous about those thrilling works of bigamy, crime, and murder: not that middle-class immorality was being depicted in print, but that middle-class immorality was desired intensely, with no foreseeable end in sight.

Differentiating Short and Long Sensation Fiction

Because the sensation paradigm as we know it is identifiable primarily by elaborate, far- fetched plots that “preach to the nerves” with each unlikely twist and turn, it is not surprising that, on the issue of length alone, short stories that serve up the same helping of bigamy, illegitimacy, and other social “secrets” tend to get shelved as crime fiction,6 mystery fiction, or detective fiction. Like sensation novels, however, sensational short stories reinforce the idea that ordinary people hide extraordinary secrets that can make what would otherwise be a very mundane world a sensational one. They likewise respond to and pose questions about human identity and changing social structures, and they do so with narratives that promote excitement and suspense over mimetic realism. Unlike novels though, the background of the families or individuals involved tends to be outlined in mere sentences rather than chapters; indeed, often when we pick up one of these stories, we are dropped immediately into the action.

We should not assume, however, that these stories are merely abbreviated novels—even if sensation stories are thematically similar to them and inspire similar kinds of affective

6 Crime fiction seems to be one of the most common ways to designate sensational short fiction because the parameters of the genre are incredibly murky; indeed, Maurizio Ascari suggests that crime fiction really isn’t a coherent genre at all but rather a “constellation of sub-genres”—the most “traditional” of which include Newgate, sensation, and detective fiction (8). Charles J. Rzepka’s introduction to the Blackwell anthology A Companion to Crime Fiction (2010) offers a good example of why scholars have struggled to define the genre. He says to define the genre as “fiction about crime” is tautological, “beginning with the definitions of ‘crime’ and ‘fiction’” (1). He goes on to say how many works—like Oedipus Rex, Medea, or Tess of the D’Urbervilles—feature crimes, but they aren’t “crime fiction.” Something like The Monk might seem like crime fiction, but it’s actually not; it’s Gothic. The “confessions, testimonies, and court-proceedings” printed in the Newgate Calendar are “true” crime narratives, and therefore not fiction, but yet, they actually can be considered crime fiction. Even many of the ghost stories I have discussed in Chapter 4 hinge on crimes and feature detective figures, but they are generally not considered crime fiction. And so on. Ironically, but understandably, Rzepka never does quite say what crime fiction actually is, but rather, he talks about what can and can’t be included in the genre until he declares “the term ‘crime fiction’ is a bit vague” and then moves on to talk about detective fiction (2).

168 response. These devices had to be uniquely developed within a truncated space, which was often accomplished by focusing on a particular sensational event rather than a series of dramatic twists and turns in plot. In writing about ghost stories, for example, Kate Krueger suggests in her

British Women Writers and the Short Story, 1850-1930 that the plot of short stories is “radically different than a bulky and bulbous novel,” the “narrative momentum of a short story drives the reader, in a condensed narrative, to an ultimate revelation that achieves a kind of narrative weight” (68). Her description seems to echo Edgar Allan Poe’s, who is frequently cited as authoring the first detective story with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841). He wrote at length about the special considerations a writer of short fiction must make: a good short story, he says, must be constructed by a “skillful artist,” because unlike a “bulky” novel in which the effect is wrought by “sustained effort,” it must produce a single “preconceived effect” (255). To succeed in this effort, per Poe, the author must carefully stage incidents that will work toward delivering the desired effect in the end. For sensation writers, the primary objective was always in part to stimulate readers, to engross them in the story and make them want to turn the page.

Though the content of sensation novels and stories ranges from lurid murders, to family drama, to sexual awakening, to excess of all sorts, the effect on readers of both forms is the same—an embodied psychological response that creates a need to keep reading. While one might be hard- pressed to find a nineteenth-century reviewer who would apply Poe’s definition of “artist” to a sensation writer (let alone a “skillful” artist), many of these authors were incredibly successful in producing the effect for which they strived.

If short stories are indeed a unique form with a unique set of considerations from novels, to approach sensation stories with the critical nuance they deserve means calling into question

169 claims like the one Jon Bowen makes that collapses the distinction; in writing about the relationship between Wilkie Collins’s short fiction and his novels, he argues that

Collins is a flexible and inventive writer of short stories, able to use his characteristic subject matter in a wide variety of ways, but his [short fiction] also has significance for the structure and plotting of his longer novels. Indeed, the most distinctive and original feature of The Moonstone (1868) and The Woman in White is that they are told not as unified narratives but as gatherings of narrative fragments or, to put it another way, as collections of short stories. (49)

While it is true that Collins’s short works offered “lower stakes” opportunities for thinking about different narrative devices and plotting structures that might be used and developed in his novels,7 where Bowen seems to miss the mark is in his suggestion that multi-narrated novels like

The Moonstone are simply akin to collections of short stories. It is not entirely clear whether in

“gatherings of narrative fragments” he refers to the serial installments of the novel or to the different narrative voices that chime in throughout the story and offer testimony of the crime; however, in either case, these “fragments” are not like short stories, and Collins’s serialized novels are not like collections of short stories. Even if British writers of short stories in the early and mid-nineteenth century were less intentional in exploring the unique aesthetic possibilities that the form could offer, that does not mean that what they produced was reducible to what literary critic Frederick Wedmore would later call “a novel in a nutshell” (4), nor does that mean a novel can “work” by simply collecting short stories.

7 For example, “The Diary of Anne Rodway” (1856), which is a short story narrated entirely from the diary entries of a young woman in search of her friend’s murderer, is clearly a precursor to Marian Halcombe’s diary narrative in The Woman in White. In both stories, the women’s diaries are used as a way of documenting clues and their progress in tracking down deviant agents. Later, Collins will adapt the form again in Armadale to reveal the diary writer herself, Lydia Gwilt, as the deviant agent. Dickens’s effusive approval of the story likely helped inspire Collins to use diaries in these significant subsequent ways: “I think [‘Anne Rodway’] excellent, feel a personal pride and pleasure in it which is a delightful sensation, and know no one else who could have done it” (“To Wilkie Collins” 73). Another example can be found in the short story “Who is the Thief,” which uses letters between members of the police force to move the plot. Robert P. Ashley writes of this story that “the completeness with which the three correspondents reveal themselves in their letters anticipates Collins's similar success with the epistolary technique in The Woman in White and The Moonstone” (51).

170 A cursory glance at some contemporary reviews, for example, reveals an important distinction between the structure/effect of Collins’s novels and his short story collections: the novels are applauded for their tightly plotted narratives and masterful orchestration, while his collections are critiqued for the arbitrary methods used to tie together short stories that were apparently better off left separate. To illustrate, of The Moonstone, we are told by a reviewer in

The Times that Collins “has built his plot like an iron ship with several compartments combining perfectly (177), by a reviewer in Harper’s that “Mr. Collins possesses the faculty, almost amounting to a genius, of writing a novel” (179), and by a reviewer in Lippincott’s that “He is unrivalled in the construction of an elaborate and intricate plot” (180). Reviews of Queen of

Hearts (1859), a collection of short works previously published individually in periodical format, highlight the contrived nature of the narrative apparatus used to string the stories together, even while offering praise for the individual stories themselves. Unlike Collins’s novels that present a masterful puzzle of a plot when all the pieces are put together, one reviewer from the Saturday

Review suggests that the stories that comprise Queen of Hearts are actually made worse when they are brought together:

There are ten stories in the three volumes which bear the title of the Queen of Hearts. They are held together by a device which is at least as good as such devices generally are. A young lady comes to stay with three old brothers in a lonely Welsh valley, and the son of one of these brothers is in love with her. The lover is away from home, and in order to detain her till he comes, the old men agree to read a story in the evenings. These separate stories are exceedingly well told. . . . Occasionally however, we have to complain of incidents in these stories which are too poor and thin for the occasion. . . .We notice, too, in all the stories a very great similarity of talking, thinking, and acting. . . .The whole group of stories, therefore, seems worse than any one does when taken by itself. (Rev. of Queen of Hearts, Saturday Review 75-76, my emphasis).

Thus, it becomes clear that the commercial pursuit of reissuing short stories in collections was not one that necessarily did any great service to the individual works included, and furthermore, that Collins’s novels are in many respects quite unlike a collection of short stories. We must then

171 look to individual stories to see not only how they really relate to the novel, but also how they create a unique reading experience that changes the delivery of the message as well as readers’ expectations about the pacing of revelation and resolution.

For writers of short stories, building suspense and exciting readers was primarily achieved by zoning in on one sensational situation or moment. Whereas novel writers could spend chapters, indeed volumes, bringing their characters to a moment of crisis or revelation

(often achieved by a series of “mini” revelations throughout the text), writers of short stories had to do it in mere pages. Given that short stories were most often consumed in a single sitting, the process of serialization for novels would also justify more twists and turns in plot to ensure that readers would stay engaged in a narrative that could span beyond a year. Linda K. Hughes and

Michael Lund have emphasized the importance of considering “the impact of reading strategies on the production of meaning” (276), and such a consideration becomes particularly important when thinking about how sensation stories mean differently from sensation novels.

Tracing Themes in Wilkie Collins’s Short and Long Sensation Fiction

In thinking about what constitutes a sensation story, it makes sense to begin with the abundant oeuvre of Wilkie Collins, who is generally regarded as the founding father of the sensation novel. Despite growing interest in Victorian Sensation and increasingly comprehensive studies of its impact on nineteenth-century British society (and beyond), and even with Wilkie

Collins’s reputation as an early architect of the genre, Collins’s short fiction has received only marginal critical attention. His short fiction appears to have become a casualty in sensation scholarship to his well-known novels and in British short story scholarship to the persistent idea that the “real” stories of merit did not emerge until the end of the nineteenth century.

Acknowledging this gap, Jon Bowen writes that Collins’s shorter fiction deals with much

“disturbing or uncanny material that cannot easily be assimilated or found a home” (38), and he

172 suggests that while the stories “share many qualities with his novels,” they are also “significant and distinctive texts in their own right” (37).8 It is worth noting that while Collins produced many short stories over the course of his forty-plus year career, the number of stories drops significantly during the 1860s,9 his most productive decade of novel writing. Still, many of his stories published in the surrounding decades, particularly those of the 1850s,10 bear strong similarities to the novels that helped make him a celebrated author.

In a fascinating unsigned review of Collins’s short story collection Queen of Hearts a key link between sensation stories and novels emerges—the importance of story-telling. What begins as an attempt to review the merit of Collins’s stories repeatedly, and ironically, turns into a treatise on the function of a novel writer, a slippage which has the effect of blurring distinctions between the genres in an important way:

Both in his preface and in the body of work, Mr. Collins invites the reader to observe what is the object which the author has set before him in composing the series of tales collected under the name of the Queen of Hearts. What Mr. Collins aims at is being a story-teller. He wishes to construct a narrative the effect of which shall be to awake, sustain, and satisfy the interest of the reader. There are plenty of novels written in these days to unfold the philosophy or to instil the instruction which finds favour with the writer. There are novels in which the author attempts to

8 After making it clear here that short stories are “significant and distinctive texts,” it is not apparent why Bowen ultimately concludes his article by acting on the reductive impulse to claim Collins’s serialized novels are like collections of short stories.

9 Only three known stories were produced by Collins in this decade, all published in 1861 in All the Year Round: “Memoirs of an Adopted Son,” “The Cauldron of Oil,” and the “Fatal Cradle” (originally published as “Picking up Waifs at Sea” as part of Tom Tiddler’s Underground in the Christmas edition).

10 In Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, Readers, John Sutherland argues in his chapter “Writing The Woman in White” that the novel is “peculiarly a product of the 1850s,” and too, that it is “the formative text in the evolution of the sensation novel as a genre” (41). He cites 1855 as significant for reasons I have already described in Chapter 1, primarily the removal of the so-called “taxes on knowledge” (i.e., the abolishment of the newspaper tax, which bolstered circulation of newspapers and information). The following year brought the Police Act of 1856, which was a bill designed to “mobilize detective intelligence against criminal cunning” (28-9). After that, the Matrimonial Clauses Act of 1857 would establish legal divorce in cases where adultery could be proven. Although Sutherland cites Dinah Mulock Craik’s A Life for a Life (1859) as offering narrative inspiration for Collins’s The Woman in White (Craik’s narrative uses two diaries to tell the story of a love affair gone awry), the novel’s structure seems also indebted to his own early story “The Diary of Ann Rodway.”

173 elaborate character, . . . novels intended to describe states of society which have passed away, or ways of life unfamiliar to the English public. . . . Mr. Collins considers that all these attempts are divergencies from the proper duty of a novelist. A story-teller should have a story to tell, and should tell it. It is his business not to improve or instruct mankind, but to amuse. (Rev. of Queen of Hearts, Saturday Review 74)

While the short story is the form more readily brought to mind when thinking about oral traditions of story-telling,11 the repeated emphasis on the idea that “telling” a story is what

Collins would consider the “proper duty of a novelist” implies the on-going influence of this tradition at the heart of both of these forms, which is one that Henry Orel suggests

“acknowledge[s] the presence of an audience, [while placing] an emphasis on colorful incident and verbal exaggeration” (14). The idea that Collins is primarily a “story-teller” is one that reverberates in reviews of his long fiction throughout his most productive years of novel writing, with write-ups of The Woman in White indicating that “Mr. Wilkie Collins is an admirable story- teller” (Rev. of The Woman in White, Saturday Review 83), of Armadale that “He is a pure storyteller” (Rev. of Armadale, London Quarterly Review156), and of The Moonstone that “He is emphatically a story-writer” (Rev. of The Moonstone. Lippincott’s 180, my emphasis). As the last (and latest) review implies, Collins was able to translate the imperatives of story-telling to a written form in a way that was so successful that it could keep a nation of anxious audience members waiting for more. Sensation fiction, after all, has long been distinguished for this unapologetic emphasis on plot.

As decades of contemporary reviews and scholarship have indicated, incident—over well-developed characters and complex philosophical meditations on the human condition—tend to move the plot of Collins’s novels, and this is a trend that I argue also emerges in his short

11 As I discuss in Chapter 4, ghost stories often draw the strongest association with orality. Frequently, for example, they begin with a narrator engaging with an audience of avid listeners as they gather around the winter hearth.

174 fiction. It is not my intention in the following examples to generalize a list of “essential” characteristics that all stories must possess to be included in the sensation genre, but rather, in heeding Dominic Head’s warning that any definition of a literary form must consider “prevailing tendencies rather than essential qualities” (3), I wish to highlight how these stories—like the novel that has historically defined the genre—could provoke anxieties about shifting roles and hierarchies in an increasingly fast-pasted, automated British society by staging shocking incidents as the cogs through which readers must pass to get through the narrative. These moments of violent crime, extreme passion, mistaken identity, criminal maneuvering, and falsification of various kinds serve as the machinery of the stories that at once promotes the sensational fragility of the British way of life while also normalizing it in such a way as to make such an approach the expected and inevitable technology for “manufacturing” thrills.

To return then to Collins’s story “A Marriage Tragedy,” the resemblance it bears to sensation novels of the 1860s is clear just in the brief synopsis of the storyline in the opening lines of this chapter. Peter Haining has argued that the story bears a resemblance to The Woman in White in that a “complicated family conspiracy” activates the plot, and the villainous husband of the short story, James Smith, bears a “striking resemblance” to the “evil-hearted” Percival

Glyde of the novel (20). It is worth pointing out that Collins might have had “A Marriage

Tragedy” in mind when he began work on The Woman in White, as there appears to be a reference made to it in the early pages of the novel during Hartright’s first encounter on the road with the mysterious woman in white. When she asks him to name the Baronets that he knows,

Hartright responds that one was a “bachelor who had once taken [him] on a cruise on his yacht”

(24). James Smith’s yacht, which he buys immediately after marrying his wealthy wife, is a symbol of greed and excess in the story, one that makes him immediately suspicious to the loyal

175 servant who narrates the story. That he would cruise around on it under the guise of a “bachelor” makes sense for a man in search of an additional wife, and the reference is a suitable one in these early pages of the novel, as Hartright—along with readers—is being asked to speculate about identity for the first time, particularly in associating secrets and vice with people of rank and title.12 The story in some ways helps establish a trope that permeates many sensation narratives: people are never who they seem to be, and those who recognize this point will be best equipped to protect themselves against deception.

Although Haining sees the influence of “A Marriage Tragedy” most readily in The

Woman in White,13 the story also bears several similarities to The Moonstone, which are worth considering at length to get a better sense of some of the larger preoccupations of sensation stories more generally. Not only does the short story feature missing jewels and supply a blood- stained nightgown as a precursor to the novel’s paint-stained one,14 but it also places family secrets at the center of an investigation while making use of narrative techniques that align readers with an amateur detective figure who models for them a desired emotional response. In

“A Marriage Tragedy,” readers experience the events of the story from the perspective of

William, the family’s servant. Much like Gabriel Betteredge, from whose perspective a large

12 The woman in white cues readers to be suspicious of these things when she says of Hartright, “Not a man of rank and title . . . Thank God! I may trust him” (24).

13 Haining goes as far as to say, “If there is ever a short story in a writer’s life that can later be seen to presage one of his great works, then Collins’s ‘A Marriage Tragedy’. . . fits the description perfectly. Apart from being one of his best mystery stories, it is written in a similar style and with similar revelations about the characters as his novel The Woman in White, which would appear two years later” (16).

14 Both Robert P. Ashley and Peter Haining cite the missing jewels and stained nightgown as a direct connection between the story and the novel. While many scholars have pointed to the Constance Kent murder trial as Collins’s inspiration for the paint-stained nightgown in The Moonstone, it is interesting that he makes use of a blood-stained nightgown in his short story before the famous murder (and the trial that followed it), actually took place.

176 portion of The Moonstone is narrated,15 William is down-to-earth and deeply devoted to his mistress, which is why he is a logical choice when it comes to the question of whom to trust with the family secret. Despite his interest in the mystery and growing excitement about finding out the truth and origin of the mysterious letter that accuses his master of bigamy, he has little natural “gift” for detection. His plain spoken ways—“I am afraid I’m not clever enough to be of much use” (163)16—along with his “infernally honest” face suggests that he is an ordinary

Englishman who has somehow found himself trapped in a world of extraordinary mystery (169).

Having him as the story’s narrator thus ensures that each time he encounters a new bit of information or a crazy coincidence, readers, too, will vacillate between shock, incredulity, and anticipation for what might happen next. Collins also makes sure to emphasize William’s embodied psychological response to each new surprise as he encounters it, as if to cue a like response in readers: “My heart began to beat fast, and I felt that I was turning pale” (183), “My flesh began to creep all over from head to foot” (184), “I felt a burning anger . . . I was like a man who had been stunned and whose faculties had not perfectly recovered from the shock”

(185), etc.17 As Betteredge will later teach readers in more explicit terms, William as the story’s narrator reveals that detective fever is indeed contagious and that strong emotional responses are catching.

15 Betteredge’s narrative is longer than any other contributor’s in the novel.

16 Betteredge, too, emphasizes his “unfitness” for the detective role despite his budding “detective fever” in a very similar way as William when he responds to Sergeant Cuff’s request for help with a modest “You don't want me . . . What good can I do?” (184-85).

17 The affective responses of characters in sensation fiction (both long and short varieties) frequently model the sought after response in readers. These responses, in turn, imbue certain events or situations with significance as both important to the plot and “real.” As Ann Cvetkovich writes in Mixed Feelings, “The ambiguity of the term ‘sensation’ novel, which can either refer to the sensational events of the texts or to the responses they produce is not accidental. . . . Emotionally charged representations produce bodily responses that, because they are physically felt, seem to be natural and thus to confirm the naturalness or reality of the event” (23).

177 For both the story and the novel, the servant narrator is guided by a hired expert who makes use of what appears to be a kind of omniscient knowledge in order to execute his investigation, and his deductions are made all the more spectacular when related from the perspective of the humble skeptic. Whereas Sergeant Cuff serves in this capacity in The

Moonstone, In “A Marriage Tragedy,” the role of detective is played by the clerk of the family’s lawyer, Mr. Dark, who consistently predicts events that will later come to pass. Unlike Poe’s

“The Purloined Letter” or later Sherlock Holmes stories, these works are not simply concerned with showcasing the brilliance of their detective figure; in fact, it is not even Sergeant Cuff who is ultimately responsible for solving the crime.18 Rather, they primarily concentrate on how crimes committed within a family are policed from within the family itself. Neither story is really

“about” Mr. Dark or Sergeant Cuff, and yet, because they understand the world of crime, their interactions with members of the family help highlight the extraordinary world of incident and transgression into which the family has descended. Middle-class readers, who probably do not see much theft or bigamy in their daily lives, can thus identify with these average people whose experience of the emerging mysteries is extremely sensational. Their reactions are only heightened by experts who are seemingly unaffected, whose impressive experience allows them only to see the “beautiful neatness of the case” (Collins “AMT” 197).

It is also worth noting that both William and Betteredge’s ignorance in all things related to detection underscores their goodness in a world of deviance, which in turn makes their strange accounts more trustworthy in a narrative that Collins has oriented toward getting at “the Truth.”

Whenever Mr. Dark or Sergeant Cuff comes to some new conclusion (which apparently should

18 Several scholars have acknowledged Sergeant Cuff’s important role in fixing the botched case of the missing diamond after the incompetent local police force failed to make progress on it, but as Ronald R. Thompson notes, “Cuff’s arrival on the scene was just the beginning of things, not the end” (66).

178 be easy for anyone to deduce given how “obvious” the evidence is to them), neither servant has a clue. For instance, in “A Marriage Tragedy,” after Mr. Dark has figured out who the thief of the family’s stolen jewelry is, he asks William: “Why, man alive . . . don’t you see how it is?” (190).

William, as a man of simple knowledge and as an outsider in this world of criminal mysteries, just “look[s] at him in astonishment” (190). These kinds of interactions occur throughout the story, and Mr. Dark takes care to treat William’s confusion as a pleasant idiosyncrasy of his honest nature rather than a display of sheer stupidity, telling him with just the slightest bit of patronization: “Bless your simple heart” (175). Sergeant Cuff interacts with Betteredge in much of the same way, asking him questions like, “You’re not at a loss to follow me, are you?” and

“You can’t guess? Oh dear me, it’s as plain as the stop of light there, at the end of the trees”

(181). But like Mr. Dark, Cuff appreciates Betteredge’s virtuous simplicity. For example, when the two men go for the first time to the Shivering Sands after Betteredge has refused to give the eccentric detective any prejudicial information on then jewel-thief suspect Rosanna Spearman,

Cuff is first surprised and then charmed by Betteredge’s inability to discern why Rosanna could not be held accountable for any part she might have played:

‘Do you mean that my lady won't prosecute?’ [Betteredge] asked. ‘I mean that your lady CAN'T prosecute,’ said the Sergeant. ‘Rosanna Spearman is simply an instrument in the hands of another person, and Rosanna Spearman will be held harmless for that other person's sake.’ He spoke like a man in earnest—there was no denying that. Still, I felt something stirring uneasily against him in my mind. ‘Can't you give that other person a name?’ I said. ‘Can't you, Mr. Betteredge?’ ‘No.’ Sergeant Cuff stood stock still, and surveyed me with a look of melancholy interest. ‘It's always a pleasure to me to be tender towards human infirmity,’ he said. ‘I feel particularly tender at the present moment, Mr. Betteredge, towards you. (181)

Betteredge’s “human infirmity” and William’s “simple heart” serve their families well, for as custodians of narrative, they are not only able to show the family in best possible light, but they can also highlight how the police and the law they enforce can victimize the family as much as

179 the deviant agents from within the family itself do. This ability of the law to inflict “unjust” punishment—mostly in how it exposes the family to an “outsider,” one who D.A. Miller describes as “watch[ing] what is not supposed to be watched” and “constru[ing] what he sees by other rules than the ones this community uses to regulate itself” (38)—seems to be a feature of sensation fiction both long and short.

Although both “A Marriage Tragedy” and The Moonstone are sensational detective narratives, they generate different levels of suspense because of their respective lengths and methods of publication. Although sensation stories were typically published in a single issue of a magazine,19 they still often stage moments where information is purposefully and conspicuously withheld as a way of building suspense just like the novels do. In “A Marriage Tragedy,” for example, Mr. Dark at times withholds information from William for what often seems like no other reason than to pain him (and readers too, for that matter): “Mr. Dark hinted that he had something still left to tell me, but declared that he was too sleepy to talk any more that night”

(173). Patience is espoused as a virtue of successful detection, and staging moments where the gratification of knowledge is delayed (even for a short time) is one way that Collins is able to engage the reader in the narrative. Whereas a novel might contrive Mr. Dark’s sleepiness as a way of engineering suspense at the end of a serial installment, there is no such need for doing so here in a short story that is published entirely in a single magazine issue. With no publishing constraints forcing a break in the narrative, the suspense is short-lived, as the very next line suggests that the two men have passed an entire night from one sentence to the next: “As soon as we were awake the next morning, he returned to the subject. ‘I didn’t finish all I had to say last night, did I?” (173).

19 Deborah A. Thomas has argued that the vast majority of short fiction would have been published in a single magazine number; however, in “rare cases” brief serialization could sometimes occur (4).

180 These conspicuously engineered breakdowns of communication, where disclosure begins but gets cut short for some reason or another, are quite common in sensation stories. Mary

Elizabeth Braddon’s fiction in particular is full of such examples. For instance, in her short story

“The Mystery at Fernwood” (1861), a young woman encounters some mysterious behaviors that revolve around a long-term house guest who lives with her fiancé’s family, but she is unable to figure out exactly what is going on. When Lucy, her fiance’s older sister, finally prepares to tell her the “unhappy secret” of the family, she is stopped by the unwelcomed entrance of one of the servants:

I know that the words which were to reveal all were trembling upon her lips—that in one brief moment she would have spoken, and I should have known all. I should have known—in time; but before she could utter a syllable the door was opened by one the woman-servants. . . . She hurried from the room, and I sank into a chair by the fire, with my book lying open in my lap, unable to read a line, unable to think, except upon one subject—the secret which I was so soon to learn. If she had but spoken then! A few words more, and what unutterable misery might have been averted! (112-113)

The story, of course, is already moving rapidly toward revelation, and the narrator tells the story having already experienced the ramifications of her lack of knowledge. The passage then serves as a way of provoking readers’ affective response in preparation for the “unutterable misery” ahead. Just as the narrator is “unable to think,” readers too “feel” the dread of the impending tragedy. Revelation is thus inevitable and close at hand, and making sure readers know that it is coming is one way Braddon can help build suspense in a form that offers little time to do it.

Truth, as we know, will out, and two pages later it does. The speedy resolution has quite a different impact from something like Marian Halcombe’s final diary entry in The Woman in

White, which cuts off at mid-sentence as her rain-induced illness takes over. In the novel, at nine

181 o’clock20 on June 20th, Marian’s narrative tapers off indefinitely, and the evil Count Fosco takes it over; readers would not only be left without an idea of what is to happen but also without an idea of when it will happen, as the serial can defer revelation and house all answers in an unknown future—and how far into the future, one never quite knows.

Sensation stories, as this example illustrates, are able to cue suspense without making anyone really agonize by waiting. They can threaten to withhold information without having the narrative means to deliver substantively on that threat. Emma Liggins, Andrew Maunder, and

Ruth Robbins have remarked on the short story’s ability to “satisf[y] readers’ need for plots with complete resolutions,” given that it could offer “instant—or almost instant—gratification” (27), which they argue contributed to its commercial appeal. Part of why it is gratifying appears to stem from the fact that readers gain more control over a narrative that has a defined end—the answers are indeed right in front of them. In a serialized novel, as I discuss at greater length in

Chapter 3, the answers to the text’s mysteries are buried somewhere in the (possibly distant) future, and because that revelation can only happen in the future it makes the inevitability of revelation more uncertain. Marian’s cut-off diary entry is cut off in a very literal sense— unprinted and unavailable. Unlike Mr. Dark’s one-sentence anticipation-boosting delay, in The

Moonstone, the seventh installment of the novel ends with Sergeant Cuff making a shocking declaration that he refuses to explain despite Betteredge’s and Franklin Blake’s pleas:21

‘Can you guess yet,’ inquired Mr. Franklin, ‘who has stolen the Diamond?’ ‘NOBODY HAS STOLEN THE DIAMOND,’ answered Sergeant Cuff. We both started at that extraordinary view of the case, and both earnestly begged him to tell us what he meant. ‘Wait a little,’ said the Sergeant. ‘The pieces of the puzzle are not all put together yet.’ (166)

20 The timing of Marian’s last diary entry is significant in that it likely refers to one of Collins’s earlier sensation stories, Nine O’Clock, which is a story of precognition, where a man foresees the time and manner of his own death.

21 15 February 1868 in All the Year Round

182 And wait readers will. A week later, when the eighth installment begins, still no explanation is offered; readers are still just as in the dark about this un-stolen stolen diamond as Betteredge and

Mr. Blake. Ironically, “Mr. Dark” of “A Marriage Tragedy” takes on new symbolic significance in this context, since by name, he represents those mysteries that everyday people cannot fathom:

“‘I have got the whole case here,’ says he, tapping his forehead, ‘the whole case as neat and clean as if it was drawn in a brief’” (170). When he chastises William for complaining about the time it takes to find answers—“You don’t know how to wait, William . . . I do” (168)—Collins offers a glimpse of his larger narrative strategy, one where readers must practice the same patient suffering as the amateur detectives of the story if they are able to unearth any answers in the dark future ahead.

Impressions, Suspicions, and Identity in Sensational Short Fiction

Having pointed out some of the common themes and devices used in short and long sensation fiction, here I focus on how these forms diverge in plot development, and what their differences signify to readers about how effective policing best works. Mystery in sensation fiction is as often tied to the question of who people are as it is to figuring out what happened.

Winifred Hughes, for example, writes that sensation novels “reveal a recurrent preoccupation with the loss or duplication of identity” (21). This preoccupation is easily observable—Lady

Isabel’s disfigurement allows her to return to her home as an undetected visitor in East Lynne,

Lady Audley is simultaneously Helen Talboys and Lucy Graham as the situation warrants,

Charles Reade’s Griffin Gaunt from the novel of the same name has two wives that eventually confront him, Franklin Blake learns he is the thief of the moonstone without ever having known it, and Laura discovers a tombstone bearing her own name secreting the body Anne Catherick

(the woman in white) – and these examples are just to name a few. Such a trend is equally

183 present in sensation stories of the time. For example, in Collins’s “The Lady of Glenwith

Grange” (1856),22 a young woman finds that she has married an imposter with an “extraordinary likeness” to the real Baron Franval whom she thought she was marrying. Braddon’s “The

Mystery and Fernwood”23 features an “idiot” twin who, after being locked in a hidden room in the house for twenty years, successfully escapes and kills his well-loved, able-bodied brother with a pen-knife to the neck just days before his wedding. And stories like Eliot’s “The Lifted

Veil” (1859)24 and Collins’s “The Dream Woman” (1855)25 feature visions of hateful— sometimes murderous—women who materialize as “real” people by the story’s end.

As Laurence Talairach-Vielmas rightly observes of sensation fiction, “secrecy and the body go hand in hand” (31), and while both sensation novels and stories are concerned with reading bodies, short stories tend to highlight “problem” bodies early on by featuring characters who experience “unnatural,” unprovoked suspicion towards them. This suspicion rarely arises as a reasoned response to behavior. Rather, characters are moved by inexplicably strong feelings— feelings that occur in the “gut,” so to speak, rather than the head. These impressions inspire them to question or fear particular people, which then becomes a driving anxiety of the story that demands resolution. Whereas a sensation novel might begin by introducing an event that puts the sensational plot in motion—an escaped asylum patient wandering on the street, a stolen diamond, a missing wife, etc.—a sensation story more often highlights a questionable body, someone who needs to be scrutinized and deciphered.

22 Published as part of Collins’s short story collection After Dark.

23 Published in two parts in Temple Bar (Nov.—Dec. 1861) and later republished in Braddon’s short story collection Ralph the Bailiff and Other Tales (1867)

24 First published in the July 1859 issue of Blackwood’s Magazine.

25 First published in the 1855 Christmas number of Household Words.

184 This unique narrative tendency in sensation stories accomplishes two important things: 1)

It underscores the story’s end at its beginning, signaling a certain inevitability of revelation. For texts in which narrative weight is achieved by consuming them in “totality,” that is, in a single sitting, readers become keenly aware of what Poe refers to as the “established design” of story, and for sensation stories, the narrative is quite often designed around people who are not what they appear to be (and the people who are able to see through their façades). For novels, this design is decidedly murkier. After all, “losing” the novel’s plot was a common complaint for readers of monthly magazines,26 and even for writers, the pressure of deadlines (particularly weekly deadlines) could wreak havoc on a narrative, with the author being potentially “rushed into an extricable muddle” (Sutherland “Two Emergencies” 149). 2) For short stories that do not have the ability to delve into complex family histories and complicated motivations, it reveals the extent to which sensation fiction values impressions, intuition, and affective response in general as “reason enough” for suspicion, investigation, and punishment. Although they are a common device in sensation novels as well, these gut reactions, ironically, make a lot of “sense” in a world designed with these aesthetic and unforgiving formal imperatives of the short story in mind. Readers then, because of the narrative weight given to these strong impressions, are encouraged to fix their attention on particular characters and wait for a resolution that will reward their emotional attachments.

26 While reflecting on Trollope’s announcement that his next novel would appear in serial installments, one anonymous writer in the Publisher’s Circular remarks with skepticism on the drawbacks of such an approach: “for who is not familiar with the complaint that the reader of monthly serials has lost the thread of a story before it is taken up again in the next number?” (qtd. in Brake Print in Transition, 1850-1910 21).

185 Dickens’s short story “Hunted Down” (1859),27 for which he received an incredible one thousand pounds from the New York Ledger,28 offers one example of how sensation stories could generate narrative momentum by fixating on “suspicious” persons from the beginning. The story revolves around a life insurance manager’s attempt to pursue and prosecute—to “hunt down”— one Mr. Julius Slinkton, who he believes to be an unfeeling scoundrel and nefarious poisoner.29

Slinkton, who presents himself as a genteel clergyman-in-training, is no match for Mr.

Sampson’s keen sense of intuition, for as he tells readers, he “conceived a very great aversion to that man the moment [he] saw him” (49). Sampson presents himself as an expert in physiognomy, a role for which he is fitted because of his position at a “Life Assurance Office,” where the most “crafty and cruel of the human race” practice their misconduct (49). Dickens himself was a firm believer in the science of physiognomy, writing in his article “The Demeanor of Murderers” (1856), in which he offers his own physiognomic reading of alleged-poisoner (and

27 “Hunted Down” was republished a year later in All the Year Round (4, 11 August 1860). Although Dickens has largely avoided the label of sensation writer, recent criticism has increasingly acknowledged Dickens’s important contributions to the “sensation school.” Anne-Marie Beller, for example, points out that he “was a key figure in the development of literary sensationalism, both as an important influence on the main practitioners and also as an author who provided a blueprint for sensationalising everyday life and domestic relations” (9). Amused by Dickens’s ability to avoid much of the criticism being leveled at sensation writers of the time, George Augustus Sala’s writes in Belgravia in 1868, “the only wonder is that the charitable souls have failed to discover that among modern ‘sensational’ writers Mr. Charles Dickens is perhaps the most thoroughly, and has been from the very outset of his career the most persistently, ‘sensational’ writer of the age” (454).

28 The sum paid to Dickens for “Hunted Down” is such an extraordinary one that it (along with its ties to infamous poisoner and forger Thomas Wainwright) has dominated discussions of the story by Dickens’s biographers. As John Forester writes with just a hint of incredulity: “its principal claim to notice was the price paid for it. For a story not longer than half of one of the numbers of Chuzzlewit or Copperfield, [Dickens] had received a thousand pounds” (253).

29 The Slinkton character is based off the famous serial poisoner Thomas Griffiths Wainwright, whose notorious killing of his niece was made all the more intriguing for the British public because of his ostentatious fashion choices. Cheryl Blake Price points out that Dickens chooses not to present his poisoner in the “suspect role of the dandy aspiring to aristocratic tastes” but instead “purposefully situate[es] him in the professional middle-class in order to explore fears about these types of criminals emerging at mid-century” (79). The enduring characteristic that middle-class Slinkton shares with the dandified Wainwright who served as Dickens’s inspiration is what William Carew Hazlitt describes as dark hair “rather long over the ears and generally dressed and curled across the temples with studied care and parted down the middle” (xxiii).

186 soon-to-be-convicted poisoner) William Palmer, “Nature never writes a bad hand. Her writing, as it may be read in the human countenance, is invariably legible, if we come at all trained to the reading of it” (505).30 In “Hunted Down,” Sampson echoes Dickens’s sentiment, asserting that there is “nothing truer than physiognomy” (48); the trouble, he contends, only happens when people do not trust their impressions of people, when they allow suspected individuals to talk their way out of warranted distrust:

I confess, for my part, that I have been taken in, over and over again. I have been taken in by acquaintances, and I have been taken in (of course) by friends; far oftener by friends than by any other class of persons. How came I to be so deceived? Had I quite misread their faces? No. Believe me, my first impression of those people, founded on face and manner alone, was invariably true. My mistake was in suffering them to come nearer to me, and explain themselves away. (48-49)

On the one hand, then, physiognomy is presented as a legitimate and credible form of scientific investigation that, when practiced with discipline and acuity, can reveal a person’s true character.

On the other hand, however, in line with sensation fiction’s central preoccupation with artificiality and self-fashioned identity, it is described as an imperfect science in that it is easily subverted through disguise and deception. Indeed, rather than scientific proof of criminal intent, what actually activates the plot to “hunt down” Slinkton is Sampson’s unshakable feeling that the man is “not quite genuine” (52).

The monomaniacal obsessions of amateur detectives are often rewarded in sensation fiction even when only a very thin rationale motivates them, and it is no different here in the case

30 One of the great sensations of the summer of 1856 was the 12-day Old Bailey trial of William Palmer (the “Rugeley Poisoner”), who was convicted of poisoning a man to whom he lost a good deal of money in a racing bet. He was suspected of murdering his wife and brother as well, who both fell ill and died after he had taken out large life insurance policies on them; however, as no trace of poison could be found in their bodies, those charges were dropped. Newspapers frequently reported on Palmer’s calm demeanor, which had what Dickens, who believed his physiognomy was “exactly in accordance with his deeds” (505), felt to be an unfortunate effect of making his guilt look questionable. In a letter to Miss Burdett Coutts, Dickens encourages her to read his self-proclaimed “serviceable essay” “The Demeanour of Murderers” because it would reveal the “truth” about Palmer and the blunders of the paper writers: “It is a quiet protest against the newspaper descriptions of Mr. Palmer in Court: shewing why they are harmful to the public at large, and why they are, even in themselves, altogether blind and wrong” (“To Miss Burdett Coutts” 128).

187 of Mr. Sampson, whose gut reaction is ultimately right despite the fact that his distrust is merely a product of his own biased past: “Coldness and distrust had been engendered in me, I knew, by my bad experiences; they were not natural to me; and I often thought how much I had lost in life, losing trustfulness, and how little I had gained, gaining hard caution” (53). Although Sampson has had to “learn the hard way” in the past by becoming a victim to those who deal in deception, these experiences have taught him to suspect everyone—better, it seems, to be situated as the hunter than the hunted. Physiognomy then becomes a pretext for what is more so a story about visceral, unwavering suspicion,31 for as Cheryl Blake Price rightfully points out, Sampson’s

“reliance on this ‘science’ cannot account for his instinctual distrust” of Slinkton (79). Sampson himself recognizes the prejudicial nature of his impressions, and he begins to question whether or not he is the more fitting villain because them:

As [Slinkton] talked and talked—but really not too much, for the rest of us seemed to force it upon him—I became quite angry with myself. I took his face to pieces in my mind, like a watch, and examined it in detail. I could not say much against any of his features separately; I could say even less against them when they were put together. ‘Then is it not monstrous,’ I asked myself, ‘that because a man happens to part his hair straight up the middle of his head, I should permit myself to suspect and even to detest him?’ (53)

Although Dickens raises the possibility that Sampson’s perceptions might be skewed, and that he might then be the true “monster” in this situation for his reckless deductions, ultimately the logic of the sensation story supports intuitive preoccupation with any person who seems slightly “off,”

31 In some ways, scientific discourse itself pointed to the ways in which instinct—and faith in that instinct—was a necessary part of any inquiry, as the belief that there could be “more than meets the eye” formed the basis of much scientific investigation. Andrew Mangham, for instance, has talked about the role scientific discourse played in helping to develop the sense that “hidden energies lurked beneath false appearances” (“What Could I Do?” 115). He cites an 1862 Cornhill Magazine article that goes as far as to say that “By science, man . . . concedes that the world is not what it seems” (115), meaning that science is necessary precisely because observations alone are imperfect barometers of truth. However, to go in search of truth—to depart from what appears to be—necessarily means acting on conviction. As with many sensational detective plots, the motivation for inquiry develops out of a belief in the possibility that things are not what they appear to be: “The world becomes doubled to us: it is one world of things perceived; one unperceivable. . . . All nature grows like an enchanted garden; a fairy world in which unknown existences lurk under familiar shapes” (qtd. in Mangham “What Could I Do?” 115).

188 and in this case, a straight part down the middle of the head offers such evidence. Sampson ultimately justifies his suspicious reserve with an appeal to readers that will later be echoed by

Robert Audley in his warning to his sinister aunt about “circumstantial evidence”: “An observer of men who finds himself steadily repelled by some apparently trifling thing in a stranger is right to give it great weight. It may be the clue to the whole mystery. A hair or two will show where a lion is hidden. A very little key will open a very heavy door” (53).32 Although Slinkton is clearly a criminal deserving of prosecution, the fact that Sampson’s partner Meltham also participates in similar kinds of “criminal” deceptions throughout process of fighting crime—donning disguises, stealing Slinkton’s journal, feigning drunkenness, etc.—suggests an uneasy tension between the criminal and the detective figure, one that will continue to be explored in sensation fiction throughout the period.

While Dickens’s “Hunted Down” offers one example of how sensation stories could effectively economize plot by using affective response as a mechanism for coding deviant bodies in need of policing, the difference that often emerges between short stories’ and novels’ approaches to exploring the artificiality of identity is perhaps best observed in fiction published in both short and long formats. Both Ellen Wood and J.S. Le Fanu built novel-length works from short works previously published in periodicals, and these examples help show how “clues” about problematic identity in novels work more like overt “warnings” in short stories. Wood’s third-person sensation story “St. Martin’s Eve” (1853) is later developed into the novel by the

32 Although Robert has no evidence to accuse Lady Audley of a crime, he attempts to frighten her into submission by talking about the power of circumstantial evidence: “Upon what infinitesimal trifles may sometimes hang the whole secret of some wicked mystery, inexplicable heretofore to the wisest upon the earth!” (Braddon Lady Audley’s Secret 123).

189 same name in 1866, and Le Fanu’s first-person narrative “The Murdered Cousin” (1851)33 later becomes Uncle Silas in 1864. Although both Wood and Le Fanu’s novels have been embraced as sensation novels, not surprisingly, the stories out of which these novels developed have received little critical attention.

From “St. Martin’s Eve” to St. Martin’s Eve

Only recently has “St. Martin’s Eve” been described as an important precursor to Wood’s success as a sensation writer in the ‘60s, which Anne-Marie Beller effectively argues in her 2013 exploration of 1850s sensationalism. Beller points out that “the sensation fiction produced by

Wood in the 1860s was often not new at all” given that many of her short stories served as “early versions” of her novels (16), and she goes as far as to say that the 1853 story-version of “St.

Martin’s Eve” is “decidedly more disturbing” than any of the fictional crimes depicted in the following decade (16).34 Although the story and novel diverge in some ways, the general story arc of each is quite similar. Mr. George Carlton (George St. John in the novel) makes a promise to his dying wife after she has only just given birth to their son that he will never remarry—

“You, my first and dearest love, shall be the only wife I will take to my bosom. Never shall another usurp your place”—but his proclamation is cut short by her dying words that “to remain faithful to the dead, is not in man’s nature” and that when he “think[s] of another wife” that he should choose one to be a “mother to [her] child” and “be not ensnared by beauty, be not ensnared by wealth, be not ensnared by specious deceit” (328). So of course he is “ensnared” by precisely that kind of woman within his child’s first year of life. Before long, his new wife’s

33 An earlier version of “The Murdered Cousin” appeared in Dublin University Magazine under the title “A Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess” (1838). A final version of the story is published in a posthumous collection called The Purcell Papers (1880).

34 This is another example of my Chapter 2 claim that the short story’s relative invisibility promoted risk-taking beyond what might be attempted in the novel, which could then lead to endings that were more provocative and incendiary.

190 jealousy of young Benja turns into an intense hatred for the little boy, which then leads her to initiate several shocking verbal as well as physical confrontations with him. Vexed by the notion that her own “true” son can never be heir to the estate while Benja lives, she murders her stepson. Ultimately, like Lady Audley, Charlotte is sent to an asylum to live out the remainder of her days and pay penance for her crimes.

While both the novel and story are clearly “sensational” in their focus on incident as a way of working through questions about the stability of the family and women’s place as its foundation, Beller claims that the story is “arguably more sensational” than the novel primarily for two reasons. The first is the manner of Benja’s death, which is brought about by Charlotte locking him in a burning room in the novel but by her holding him with a “firm, revengeful hand, beating him about the head and ears” until the “blaze [catches] his pinafore” in the short story

(337). Thus, in the story, it is only after the boy is first held down in the fire that she then locks him in the room to leave the “ill-fated child to burn slowly away to death” (337). The second is that Charlotte is a “more nuanced” character in the novel than she is in the story (Beller 16), for unlike the story that depicts her as emphatically and conclusively evil, in the novel she has moments when she is actually at times moved to kindness toward her stepson, and the beatings are not so graphic. Here, without quite saying it, Beller picks up on a key difference more generally between sensation stories and novels for which I have been making a case: stories often direct readers’ attention to deviance more quickly and with less deliberation about its roots or gradations, and they chart a clear path to resolution through policing that corrupt agent, using affect (rather than logic) as a guide to action.

As a third-person narrative, “St. Martin’s Eve” doesn’t filter information about the villain through the impressions of a biased first-person narrator in the way that “Hunted Down” or Le

191 Fanu’s “The Murdered Cousin” do; however, the omniscient narrator is still able to evoke a strong feeling of instinctual fear in readers toward Charlotte by introducing her as “beautiful . . . but not pleasing,” suggesting that although she was “tall and finely formed,” in her “jet-black eye and compressed mouth,” there “might be a read an expression strangely disagreeable” (329).

Without yet knowing anything about this young woman or her history, eager readers are invited to read into her character and motivations, and a discriminating reader will certainly take up the cue to recognize evil in those compressed lips if it “might be read” there. It is an example of what

Anna Maria Jones calls the “paradoxical pleasure” of reading sensation fiction, of being

“simultaneously ‘in’ the mystery, invited to follow along and glean clues” and “outside the text, knowing more than a character ‘embedded’ in the narrative” (Problem Novels 5). Although the unsuspecting George Carlton might not know how to read the signs in his future wife, the discerning reader can feel when things are off, even if that feeling is based solely on the characterization of a slight grimace of the mouth. Indeed, the story implies that internal registers of knowledge impact external registers of knowledge instead of vice of versa, as readers believe that Charlotte will be bad even before she has actually done anything bad. Wood offers a quick return on readers’ suspicion, as within two pages Charlotte becomes the wife of Carlton, has a child of her own, and breaks out into a violent, jealous fit at the sight of her husband playing with his first son, still at that point a young toddler. The text confirms Charlotte’s deviance by asserting that “to many a woman this might have been a pleasant sight,” but for she who “during her girlhood . . . had been subject to fits of ungovernable rage, so violent, that they seemed to fall little short of insanity” it produces feelings that trigger a “fiendish expression of face” and move her to the kind vicious brutality that inspires throwing a happy toddler violently on the floor

192 while onlookers watch in stunned, silent horror (331-32). Of course, readers never thought this story was going to end with a happy marriage.

Charlotte’s introduction in the novel, on the contrary, does not signal the inevitable ending of the plot like it does in the story because it is missing clear affective cueing. When

Charlotte is first described in the novel, her expression is not characterized as “strangely disagreeable,” but instead as one that “none could fathom,” a “sort of wild expression of absolute will” (20). While such a characterization signals that she is a person of interest, and while willful female characters are habitually problematic in Victorian fiction, it does not have an overtly negative edge to it, and the reader likely wonders what she might do or what she might be capable of doing—bad or good. After all, given that her mother will spend a good deal of time warning her about the plight of a second wife (even though a large fortune is up for grabs through the union), Charlotte’s “will” to marry George St. John even if she should have to “beg

[her] bread afterwards from door to door” actually seems quite noble in its apparent espousal of romantic love (27). Unlike the story then that creates evidence out of feelings and rewards readers with a pleasurable payoff for trusting their gut, the novel offers little in the way of preparing readers for the shocking violence Charlotte will unleash much later in the text.

Although Charlotte ends up in an asylum in both the novel and story, her guilt hinges on different things: in the story, people in the town only begin to speculate that she committed the crime after her emotional breakdown lands her in the asylum, whereas in the novel, the locked nursery door serves as hard evidence of the crime. Ultimately, not unlike readers of the short story who sense Charlotte will do something terrible based on her grimace, those characters in the story who feel she has committed the crime based on a mental breakdown that occurs a year after the fact access truth through what Srdjan Smajić calls in his study of vision and the

193 supernatural “intuitive knowing . . . supplemented with evidence gathered through the exterior senses” (45).35 Because, as Dennis Denisoff has argued, objects in Victorian short stories “take on greater symbolic force and do so more readily [than novels]” (13), in sensational short stories, affect itself takes on “greater symbolic force.”

That Charlotte’s fate as an inmate in an asylum is the same in the novel and story suggests that the consequences for errant femininity, too, are ultimately identical despite the novel’s more complicated portrayal of her character. Yet, the novel seems to invite a bit more ambivalence about her fate than the story does. Reflecting on the novel, Andrew Maunder has remarked on the competing impulse to read Charlotte’s actions as at once female pathology as well as a logical expression of frustrated maternal protection:

On the one hand, the novel’s narrator views Charlotte’s behaviour as a product of inherited insanity and naturally unstable femininity . . . On the other hand, Charlotte’s insanity can be seen as the behaviour of a woman who is trapped by her economic dependency and caught up in the snares of primogeniture which do not acknowledge her claims or those of her own child. (“Ellen Wood”)

The short story does not preclude viewing Charlotte’s violence as a complex manifestation of both biological and sociological forces; however, it does put much greater emphasis on the fact that Charlotte was “born bad” by the way in which evil is connoted in her physical description and the account of her “fits of ungovernable rage” that took place throughout her girlhood. The choices Wood makes in her expanded version of the story as a full-length novel may point to a possibility that she harbored some dissatisfaction with the heavy-handed stroke of biological determinism in the story; indeed, perhaps it is what encouraged her to create a story that,

35 As Andrew Mangham writes, on the other hand, Charlotte’s “external blankness” in the novel is so effective that it “reflect[s] and refract[s] the interpretive, subjective gaze of her observers” (Violent Women and Sensation Fiction 79).

194 according to Maunder, effectively “highlight[es] the patriarchal and legal obstacles to women’s self-expression” in a way that is a bit side-stepped in the short story (“Ellen Wood”).

From “The Murdered Cousin” to Uncle Silas

Like Wood, Le Fanu significantly alters the way in which he characterizes his villain in the novel-length version of his short story, transforming Uncle Silas—the “inscrutable” entity upon whom the novel of the same name logically centers (229)—from a character whose villainy is a conspicuous and startling truth in short-story form to one where it is a much more subtle possibility in the novel.36 Writing Silas as a more “enigmatic” character in the novel has engendered some unfair criticism of the “The Murdered Cousin,” the story out of which Uncle

Silas evolved, with Audrey Peterson lamenting that it lacks “the rich development of character . .

. achieved in the novel” (143), while Michael H. Begnal further reduces the story to one where

“the point is purely entertainment” (30). These observations clearly echo early criticism of sensation novels (and thus forge a preliminary connection between the story and the genre), while also working to undercut the text’s provocative social commentary. “The Murdered

Cousin” has all of the makings of a sensation novel in just a fraction of the space—murder, mistaken identity, an orphaned heroine, intercepted letters, and an evil, evil uncle—but it also highlights how existing legal and social arrangements can make women most vulnerable to

36 It is worth noting that, in terms of categorization, Le Fanu’s work has posed some difficulty for scholars, with some insisting that his fiction more logically serves as an extension of the gothic rather than an example of sensation fiction (Zuber 74). Le Fanu himself did his best to avoid the label of sensation novelist, going as far as to beg readers in the “Preliminary Word” of Uncle Silas to “limit that degrading term” and see his work as part of the “legitimate school of tragic English romance” (vii); however, instead of likening his work to Walter Scott’s (whom he very much admired), he was deemed the Irish Wilkie Collins by his reviewers and has since maintained an increasingly firm position within sensation scholarship today. Lyn Pykett, for example, acknowledges the novel is a good example of female gothic, but that it also made “common cause with the sensation novel in its British setting” (“Sensation and the Fantastic” 202). Devin P. Zuber claims that with “its secret murders, sexually charged undertones of incest, and doppelganger doubles,” Uncle Silas “contained the classic ingredients of what made sensation so popular” (74).

195 violence in their own homes among their own families.37 The story, like the novel, creates a world where women’s bodies are akin to property,38 and owning or destroying those bodies

(through marriage or murder) are the logical channels of financial speculation for ruined men. If

Silas is a less ambiguously dangerous character in the story, it only serves to highlight the fact that the heroine is victimized by the mistaken belief that sharing a family name will ensure honor, loyalty, and goodwill. That readers can see the threat posed by Silas that the heroine’s own father clearly cannot, and that they must watch as she steadily descends into a precarious trap that she herself might have taken better aims to avoid, makes their feelings of dread a better arbiter of truth than the rational response of those “blinded” by familial attachment and a sense of duty. The novel, in contrast, keeps readers more closely aligned with the heroine and not privy to Silas’s intentions, and too, it creates a tension between instinct and prejudice that makes readers more wary about forming judgments.

While there are some notable differences in the short story and the novel, the general plot of each is quite similar, although the story accomplishes in thirty pages what the novel does in sixty-five chapters and a conclusion. A young woman with a large fortune becomes a pawn in her well-meaning father’s plan to lift the blanket of suspicion that has for many years since enshrouded his ill-fated brother, and in doing so, help redeem the family name. Accused—but not convicted—of murdering a fellow gaming man to whom he owed a large sum of money, the

“reformed” profligate (Uncle Silas) is named as the girl’s guardian in her father’s will, which is revealed upon his death. The most alarming part of all this is that an addendum to the will has

37 Kimiyo Ogawa has identified this as a key departure from the gothic tradition; in making the threat come from within the family unit itself, Le Fanu “renders the gates that are supposed to protect the female victim from the outside ineffectual . . . as she finds danger within” (19).

38 Kathryn White points out that a lead female protagonist is “emblematic of the position of women prior to the Married Women’s Property Act (1872)” (viii), and to be sure, many of the elements of gothic horror in both the story and novel materialize vis-à-vis her lack of rights.

196 been added to assert that if the girl dies before she comes of age, the entire fortune shall pass to her guardian uncle. Thus, believing that his brother is innocent, the judicious father leverages his daughter’s life to prove the integrity of a man whose character has been a matter of public debate since she was a small child. Both the story and novel build towards a moment of crisis that occurs once the heroine becomes her uncle’s ward (what Le Fanu calls the “leading situation” of the works in his Preliminary Word to the novel), which places her at the center of a complicated murder plot after she dismisses a proposal of marriage from her uncle’s vulgar son. Through the narrowly avoided assault on her life, she learns how Silas committed what seemed like an impossible murder so many years ago—the secret to the locked room mystery.

Silas’s transition from a more to a less conspicuous villain is a shift reflected by the change in title Le Fanu gives his works. “The Murdered Cousin” signals an inevitable crime that will culminate in the story, and gives an obvious hint to the “type” of story it is, whereas Uncle

Silas provides only an identity that will need to be explored in the novel to have any kind of real meaning. While readers of the story become acquainted with the suspicion of murder that has fallen on Silas’s head in only the second paragraph, the novel does not reveal any details of that suspicion until the twelfth chapter. Too, the novel is clearly more committed than the story to developing the character of its heroine, Maud Ruthyn,39 focusing for the first third of the novel on her personal history, relationship with her father, distress over a French governess, and misplaced romantic interests. Conversely, the story is mostly concerned with Silas himself and the formidable threat he poses to his niece, with its early pages focusing on details about his

39 Le Fanu changes the heroine from the Countess D— in the story to Maud in the novel and moves the story to England from Ireland as a way of appealing more directly to a middle-class British audience, a change he makes at the suggestion of his publisher Richard Bentley (Rance 157).

197 habits and the logistics of the suicide/murder situation that occurred in his home some years since.

From the start then, “The Murdered Cousin” is a story about how a motherless girl with a large fortune will contend with a familial threat in the form of a rogue uncle. Although the suspicions of murder described in the early story may not have been “sufficiently definite” to lead to formal proceedings at the time of Tisdall’s death, Le Fanu makes it clear that they were indeed “strong enough to ruin [Silas] in public opinion” (18), and the first-person narrator, the

Countess D—, gives us the final verdict of where the story is going in only the third paragraph when she says that it is her father’s sincere trust in his brother’s innocence that ultimately produces “the catastrophe of [her] story” (19). The paragraphs that follow this declaration describe Silas as an “extravagant man,” who, among other vices, was “ruinously addicted to gaming,” “proud,” “vain,” and liable to “dissipation” (19). Readers thus enter into the narrative knowing that the story is moving with reckless abandon toward disaster. It is never really a matter of finding out whether or not Silas has been wrongfully accused and a victim of unwarranted social ostracizing, as it is in the novel, but one of seeing what he will do to his niece when she is inevitably wholly in his power, as well as how he was able to pull off Tisdall’s murder.

Unlike the story that encourages readers to trust in Silas’s villainy from the start, the novel creates a tension between “instinct,” which tends to have a positive correlation with truth

(particularly in sensation fiction), and “prejudice” which is generally correlated with untruth

(particularly in realist fiction). What allows Sampson to hunt down Slinkton or inspires Robert

Audley to scrutinize and ensnare his aunt would be exactly the type of thing that would derail the prospects of an Austen heroine, and in Uncle Silas, the instinctual impulse to calculate a person’s

198 character does not go unchecked. Early in the novel, for example, Maud’s father warns her to

“beware of prejudice” cautioning her that “women are unjust and violent in their judgments,” that her own family has “suffered in some of its members by such injustice” (83). Lady Monica

Knollys, Maud’s high-spirted cousin of “past fifty” years in age, is one of such “unjust” women in his view, as she not only tells him that she has a “great respect for instinct” but goes as far as to say that “it is truer than reason” (67). Indeed, she and Maud’s father, Austin Ruthyn, come to blows over the issue in the chapter “Angry Words,” as Maud overhears a conversation between the two of them in which Lady Knollys heatedly asserts, “I can’t conceive how you can be so demented, Austin. . . . Are you blind?” (73). His retort wields the weight of realist logic, “You are, Monica; your own unnatural prejudice—unnatural prejudice, blinds you. . . . I’m no Quixote to draw my sword on illusions” (73). Of course, it is Mr. Ruthyn’s refusal to cultivate a healthy suspicion of his brother that leads to his daughter’s near-murder at that brother’s hands in the closing chapters of the story, and it is Lady Knollys who shares with her young cousin the best unheeded survival advice offered in the novel: “no matter how wicked [people] may be, you may defy [them] simply by assuming [them] to be so, and acting with caution” (76).

As Elena Maria Emandi points out, Silas appears at “quite a late point” (Chapter 32 to be exact, approximately halfway through the novel); before that, Le Fanu “chooses only to hint at him,” having the reader first presented with a portrait of him, which creates a “deep impression upon his naïve young niece” and produces a tension that “enrich[es] the atmosphere required

[for] a Gothic heroine” (278). Though we hear of Silas sporadically before he officially enters the narrative as a character, no one is quite able to make him out. Lady Knollys, despite being a particularly quick and observant kind of companion, can only say “Silas Ruthyn is himself alone, and I can’t define him, because I don’t understand him . . . he always bewildered me, like a

199 shifting face” (157). When Maud meets her uncle for the first time, she confesses that she “can’t convey in words an idea of this apparition,” with its “singular look” and an “expression so bewildering” (188). Throughout her stay at Bartram Hall, Maud is never really able to say whether or not her uncle is good, evil, or something in between; she calls him “unearthly” and

“inscrutable” (223), an “intangible character” (344),40 and indeed, Silas never behaves in a way that allows anyone to make a definite judgment one way or another. Unlike the short story in which Silas reveals without equivocation the extent of his malevolence by threatening his niece weeks before he actually attempts to take her life—“A single blow . . . would transfer your property to us!” (33)—Maud of the novel has no idea of her uncle’s design until she is literally locked in the room, no longer able to take her cousin’s good advice.

Although Lady Knollys’s wisdom is written off as the “unnatural prejudice” of a capricious woman, as an “unjust and violent” judgment, it is precisely what would have been needed to prevent the terrible ordeal Maud suffers at Silas’s hands. As Maud later realizes in the novel, “In the case of one we love or fear intensely, what feats of comparative anatomy will not the mind unconsciously perform? Constructing the whole living animal from the turn of an elbow, the curl of a whisker, a segment of a hand. How instantaneous and unerring is the instinct!” (356). Though Silas is “inscrutable” for much of the novel, that alone is “reason” enough, as Lady Knollys advises, to assume he is wicked and take appropriate caution, which no one does. The novel ultimately narrates what happens when instinct is mischaracterized as prejudice and when one acts only on logic instead of feelings. The unwavering belief in the unfailing strength of blood ties and honor—whether the deviant agent is an obvious one (as it is

40 The “unearthly” Uncle Silas offers another example of how the supernatural permeates sensation fiction as a way of underscoring the “incomprehensible” dimension of identity. Although Silas may get characterized as a spirit from the great beyond, his motivations for desiring his niece’s death are indeed quite “worldly.”

200 in the case of the story) or possibly one (in the case of the novel)—is, as sensation fiction of all lengths proves again and again, an imprudent and ultimately dangerous worldview.

The Appeal and Danger of Short and Long Sensation Fiction

The sensation novel’s preoccupation with social disorder and the collapse of the family in the form of secrets, crime, excess, and violent passions is thus not actually unique to the novel, a form which has nonetheless served as the hallmark of the genre for some time. Sensational short stories not only engaged similar themes and made comparable social commentary as the novel, but they could also, as in the case of “St. Martin’s Eve” for example, be at times even more explicit in their treatment of incident than the novels that were so frequently attacked for their moral ambiguity and questionable literary merit. The novel, of course, drove sales in Britain; it was the more “visible” genre, and so it follows that the novel would take the brunt of the criticism. Still, as I have already discussed at length in Chapter 2, sensation stories were everywhere and yet were rarely debated publicly. Even collections of very sensational short stories by very famous sensation authors like Collins and Wood mostly avoided censure.41

Though the short story was not a highly theorized form in Britain at this time, it was a staple of middle-class weeklies and monthlies, but still, mostly the stuff of careless consumption. I have argued already that British short fiction was critically linked with Sensationalism in the Victorian period because of the way the burgeoning form testified to a new economy of reading that increasingly valued momentary entertainment over deep, serious literary effort. I have suggested that the cultural status of the short story during this period validated concerns about mindless, indiscriminate reading in a way that had larger implications for Britain’s moral and intellectual hubris. Here, I suggest that even short stories that were quite scandalous and violent were largely

41 Short story collections were much rarer to see in publication than novels, and they generally received fewer reviews overall. The first of Wood’s Johnny Ludlow collection did receive several very positive reviews (Flowers).

201 able to avoid public condemnation because their appeal to readers was ultimately—and ironically—perceived to be less dangerous in the crisis of unthinking consumption than novels’.

Indeed, the fact that these stories were perceived as less dangerous despite their unflinching engagement with crime, violence, madness, bigamy, and other social ills all amid a backdrop of good middle-class life, suggests that sensation novels were dangerous for reasons that extend beyond the sensational content of their pages.

Short and long sensation fiction had different appeal for nineteenth-century readers.

Liggins, Maunder, and Robbins, Winnie Chan, and others, for example, have commented on the ability of short fiction to satisfy readers’ need for complete plots (which the trend of serialized fiction had in large part created), while novels resisted this satisfaction. These alluring novels had an addictive quality to them that kept readers always in anticipation for more. Pamela K.

Gilbert confirms this logic, arguing that

The hermeneutic logic of the sensation form is obsessional: although one constantly discovers something surprising, the climax of ultimate discovery and closure in each case is deferred, demanding that the next revelation will be even more surprising. Obsession itself is structurally similar to addiction: both involve a craving that cannot be satisfied and indeed, that is only increased by being fed. (“Sensation and the Medical Context” 185)

The novels’ labyrinthine plotting punctuated with moments of exciting revelations could keep readers waiting always for the next installment, and with serialization often spanning a year or more, plot doled out by the spoonful offered just enough to gratify a craving while keeping the appetite whet for more—and whet for quite a long time. Stories, which most frequently arrived intact in a single issue of a periodical, offered an entire meal. There was no waiting (or very little of it), no intense craving for more; they didn’t drive the consumption of magazines, and there was very little protracted anxiety about the plot because it was over nearly as soon as it was begun. Thus, because the content of short and long sensation fiction is so similar, it is not just the

202 bigamy and secrets that make sensation fiction a matter of public disapprobation. Novels ensnared readers in a system where the drive for pleasurable revelation—a drive too bodily to be godly—was thought to be making them increasingly helpless in an intensifying consumer market. Serialization, lending libraries, and the new market culture that supported them could then effectively “imprison” readers in cycles of buying by overpowering their minds through control of their bodies, and sensation novels in particular promised to feed this problem.

The end of Uncle Silas offers interesting meta-commentary on storytelling and reading that highlights Le Fanu’s desire to keep readers in a state of pleasurable suffering throughout their reading of his novel in a way that cannot be accomplished in his short story. Maud, who has spent the first four hundred pages of the novel wondering about her uncle and resisting

“prejudicial” thoughts concerning him, has a growing fear that he might really be planning to harm her, which is brought to a brutal realization when Meg Hawkes, a “rudely” constructed young woman who was once something of an antagonist to her, sneaks up to her locked door to warn her about a potential poisoning attempt: “don’t ye eat nor drink nout here” (399). Although

Meg has confirmed the fears Maud has been trying to suppress, she is actually grateful for the speedy delivery of her friend’s candor:

[Meg] had delivered her frightful warning, and told her story coarsely and bluntly, which, in effect, means distinctly and concisely; and, I dare say, the announcement so made, like a quick bold incision in surgery, was more tolerable than the slow imperfect mangling, which falters and recedes and equivocates with torture. (399- 400)

Uncle Silas the novel is itself a study in storytelling that “falters and recedes and equivocates with torture,” as readers, like Maud herself, can never definitively determine at each new point of crisis in the novel whether or not Silas is actually evil. “The Murdered Cousin,” however, is not only “distinct” and “concise,” but it also offers an actual “announcement” right in the opening paragraphs of Silas’s contribution to the unavoidable “catastrophe” toward which the story is

203 moving. Silas also boldly announces his own intentions by warning his niece that the transfer of her property is a simple matter of a blow to the head. Knowing that something terrible is forthcoming is not “painless” for readers, meaning that it does not effectually kill the suspense, but the expectation and the proximity of revelation does make it more “tolerable” than having to wait several months in uncertainty to find out what happens, even if novels offered pleasure in being a voyeur and disciplinarian, or as Anna Jones argues, even “masochistic identification with the hunted . . . transgressive subject (Problem Novels 22).

Several critics have pointed to the fact that “The Murdered Cousin” offers an early example of the “locked room mystery” story popularized by Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue

Morgue” (1841),42 and while the “impossible” murder scenario described in the story lends itself to such a description, the concept is also rhetorically useful for thinking about Victorian sensation stories as a closed, structured form that invites “working out” within a controlled structural context. As Michael Cook points out, “The locked room mystery is a form which . . . gives the fullest expression to the elements of closure and enclosure” (6), and the room can only

“open up” through the process of reading. Because the plot centers on figuring out how the crime was committed, the text itself signals both confinement and escape—closure, ironically, is the way the out. This is also the case for sensational short stories, where the solution to the mystery, the identity of the villain, the final shocking surprise is always close enough at hand to bring closure to and escape from the text relatively quickly. Conversely, rather than promising closure in the form itself, serialized novels promise only more. Readers might “finish” an installment but would ultimately find themselves stuck in a narrative where closure is habitually deferred, and

42 The “locked room mystery” is a subset of detection fiction that presents a situation where a crime (usually a murder, but not always) has been committed in under what appear like impossible circumstances. The “locked room” refers to a crime scene where it would be impossible for the criminal to have escaped.

204 editors would also exert great effort in promoting whatever new serial would follow to ensure that readers would remain loyal buyers.43 Too, not only did serialization “elongate” narratives— to use Julia McCord Chavez’s phrasing (798)44—and guarantee recurrent purchasing, serials also promised to be reissued in triple-decker forms that could then be bought, shared, and cycled through Mudie’s unyielding turnstile. While short stories might be republished in a collection, there was virtually no end to the novel, of which we can readily find evidence in the preoccupations of our own scholarship.

Sensation novels were thus thought of as more dangerous in the larger crisis of problem reading and consumption while short stories were apparently “tolerable,” and this difference has everything to do with the perceived agency of consumers. Even though, as I argue earlier, magazine stories represented a more significant lack in consumer agency than novels in that they were a product that was frequently bought but not sought, there was clearly a sense among the public that these addictive novels were creating buyers who lacked the ability to stop buying. As one reviewer in an 1864 article in the Christian Remembrancer puts it, “Sensationalism . . . drug[s] thought and reason, and stimulat[es] the attention through the lower and more animal instincts” (“Our Female Sensation Novelists” 210). As Ann Cvetkovich has argued, there was a pervading fear at the time that the sensation novel was controlling the reader instead of vice

43 Using Dickens’s practice in AYR as an example, Catherine Delafield points out that editors of Victorian periodicals at mid-century had to take great care to ensure readers always had a notion of which serials were on the way; she writes, “Novels still unwritten were presented to be interwoven into readers’ and potential purchasers’ lives for well over a year in advance” (65). At the end of the serial run of Great Expectations, Dickens announces to readers in an 1861 column in AYR the forthcoming publication of a “new serial story by MR. WILKIE COLLINS.” Although the run of Bulwer Lytton’s A Strange Story had not yet even begun, as an editor whose job it was to “hold the public’s attention and occupy a space within their lives” (Delafield 65), Dickens recognized the importance of creating anticipation for a serial long before it actually appeared in the pages of the magazine.

44 McCord Chavez sees serialization as a gothic mode because it “elongates a narrative, allowing for its development over time,” which creates a “wandering, meandering structure,” an “inherently paradoxical form” that on the surface “seems regular and ordered—a vehicle for disciplining the reader” but one that masks an “irregular, wandering, and potentially subversive side just waiting to emerge during the process of reading” (798).

205 versa, that “the reader becomes passive in the face of the violent mechanics of the novel” (21).

An unsigned review of East Lynne in John Bull, for example, testifies to the ability of the sensation author to ensnare readers in a storyline even when it is a disagreeable one that is clearly not moving toward a happy result: “[East Lynne] is not a pleasant story and it does not promise a pleasant development; and yet it always attracts us” (707). In the same vein, so many critics have remarked on Collins’s ability to captivate readers, that reviews of his work often present like gothic novels where the conjurer practices mind control over a helpless heroine. He exercises “fascination . . . over the mind of his reader” (Rev. of The Woman in White, Saturday

Review 83), and indeed, it is an “extraordinary fascination” (Rev. of The Woman in White,

Spectator 93); The Woman in White “lays her spell” on the “sympathies of the readers” (Oliphant

“Sensation Novels” 113), there is “no chance of laying it down until the last page” (Rev. of The

Woman in White, The Times 95), “so long as you have the book open, you are spell-bound”

(Smith 184), an “importunate desire . . . possesses [the reader] to go through every line of [the novel]” (Spectator 92, my emphasis). And with Lady Audley’s Secret, Braddon “betwitch[es]” the public, and regretfully, few have been “blind to her charms” (“Sensation Novelists: Miss

Braddon” 180).

Perhaps critics so ardently insisted that sensation novels were capable of impairing readers’ mental faculties because the alternative was too scary to consider. After all, what if readers actually were fully in control of their buying choices? Not drugged, but deliberate in their purchases? Short stories, at least, no matter how sensational, always promised contentment to “end-conscious” readers (Lohafer 94). These stories could be thrilling and dangerous for the way in which they promoted first impressions and intuition as the most effective mechanisms for policing one’s family or community, but they did not cultivate the intense desire for more

206 reading that novels of the time were so successful at fostering. So while critics and moralists might regret the content of these stories, their appeal might ultimately be preferable to sustained immersion in a novel over several months. The villainy and social ills depicted in sensation novels, in contrast, had no end in sight, to which Margaret Oliphant testifies in her criticism of

The Woman in White’s depraved Count Fosco character: “Fosco is, unquestionably, destined to be repeated to infinitude, as no successful work can apparently exist in this imitative age without creating a shoal of copyists; and with every fresh imitation the picture will take more and more objectionable shades” (“Sensation Novelists” 115). On the one hand, Oliphant is likely suggesting that “more and more objectionable shades” in reference to the copyists’ work means that the villainy depicted will become increasingly worse in terms of how explicit it is with little redeeming value. Yet, on the other hand, in this “imitative age” each act of reproduction is itself enough to make these texts objectionable.

Expanding our study of sensation fiction to include shorter varieties of the genre is promising for future studies of the genre. The sensational content of these stories could push boundaries that novels couldn’t while contributing in a significant way to a culture in which production and automation—rather than “taste”—increasingly informed consumption practices.

Although sensation stories could do this without much garnering much notice, it is essential that we as scholars recognize them as a meaningful and important part of the genre if we are to do justice to the scope, forms, and impact of sensation fiction.

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CHAPTER 6 CONCLUSION

When Margaret Oliphant wrote in her 1858 article “The Byways of Literature: Reading for the Million” of the problem reading she perceived to be taking place among the newly literate

“unfortunate masses” (203), she could not foresee the degree to which the middle class itself would clamor for “a story for a story’s sake” (205). Likening “the million” to children, she regrets that “merit” in their literature is “quite a secondary consideration, that “it is the narrative which is the thing”; after all, she resentfully asks, “what does a child care for the probabilities of fiction, for the wit of dialogue, or the grace of style? It is likely they bore him” (205). At that time, a wide divide was thought to separate this class of people who were still in the infancy of their reading from more discerning, “mature” middle-class readers. Even Wilkie Collins, who would only a year later catalyze sensation mania with The Woman in White, writes of this assumed great gulf between these groups of readers in his 1858 Household Words essay “The

Unknown Public,” pitting one class—“the mysterious, the unfathomable, the universal public of the penny-novel-Journals”—against the other—“the subscribers to this journal [Household

Words], the customers at publishing houses, the members of book-clubs and circulating libraries, and the purchasers and borrowers of newspapers and reviews” (217). Yet, Nicholas Rance rightly asserts that Collins was to have his own reputation for “recruiting readers from the ranks which otherwise supplied the unknown public” (108), and as Graham Law points out, critics would soon be outraged that that sensation novels were “encouraging a dangerous narrowing of the gap between bourgeois and proletarian tastes” (Rev. of The White Phantom). Before long, sensation novels “succeeded,” as North British Review critic Fraser Rae laments, “in making the literature of the Kitchen the favourite reading of the Drawing-room” (204), and such was an apt metaphor given the way these texts were thought to ill-feed the middle class. To devour texts for

208

the mere pleasure of it had a hedonistic quality to it that was neither moral nor improving to the intellect, and while nineteenth-century critics and scholars alike have pointed to the novel as the centerpiece of debates about unthinking consumption, literary production, and the crisis of middle-class taste and principles, short stories played a significant role that has not yet been fully acknowledged in exacerbating these concerns at this very sensational moment in history.

In Sensation Stories: The Life of British Short Fiction in the Age of Sensation, I have emphasized how indebted the growth and development of British short fiction was to the genre of sensation fiction and the cultural changes that inspired it, as well as how indebted the genre of sensation fiction was to short stories. Not unlike the sensation novel that privileged exciting narrative over character development while stressing the superficial and unstable nature of middle-class life, short fiction as a marginal periodical form at mid-century centered on entertainment for a moment over lasting artistic impression, while also offering an opportunity for marginalized voices to participate in and even direct conversations about social and political injustice. Although writers of short stories could sometimes take up sensational themes like family secrets and mistaken identity in their work, the extraordinary conditions surrounding the publication, reception, and circulation of these works make it a sensational form whether the content is shocking or dull. Thus, regardless of whether or not narratives boasted cruel villains, shocking reveals, and unchecked passion, the life of the British short story in the middle decades of the nineteenth century was indeed a sensational one.

As such, short stories are vital to understanding the nexus of consumerism, mass marketing, social anxiety, and literary production that peaked in the 1860s, and so this dissertation advocates for a more inclusive use of term sensation fiction. Despite many recent efforts to expand what kinds of works we include in the genre of sensation (particular effort, for

209

example, has been exerted to expand the timeline beyond the “sensational sixties”), the novel has nonetheless prevailed as its defining symbol. Ignoring the influence of short fiction on this age of rapid change and “unthinking consumption” is extremely short-sighted, for as Dennis Denisoff has suggested, “readers who wanted a quick fix of excitement or sensationalism would have found that short stories fit the bill more readily than the more discursive novels” (16). These sensation stories, which is a term I have adopted throughout this dissertation not simply to draw attention to a particular genre of story but to signal the short story’s implied relationship to industrial print culture and the market economy, were powerful and influential in many different ways. Although these stories published before the final decades of the nineteenth century are often disparaged for their failure to live up to the “American standard” of aesthetic quality by which scholars have largely measured the success of British short fiction, this says nothing of their popularity or significance to the culture and politics of the time. For scholars of sensation fiction, these stories are mostly still an untapped resource; as I have shown here, they offer a lot in terms of thinking about market culture and its influence on the reading public, and beyond the entertainment these stories could bring to readers in moments of leisure, they are perhaps the first example of literature that was bought on a large scale but not intentionally sought out and selected for consumption. Although the increasing number of magazines for sale provided more opportunities than ever of finding something to suit one’s fancy, in some ways, the short story itself dramatizes the tension that emerges when new kinds of purchasing power simultaneously means relinquishing some control over that which is bought.

What Sensation Stories makes clear is that short stories, moving forward, must become a consistent part of sensation scholarship; indeed, any discussion of sensation fiction that ignores them not only discounts a significant portion of middle-class “pleasure reading” but also

210

threatens to perpetuate problematic hierarchies of power that advance one literary form as the dominant and “important” one while relegating others to the margins. Because short stories did not receive the critical scrutiny that novels did in the mid-nineteenth century, and because the writers of these stories were frequently women who were ill-paid and in need of opportunities to support themselves and their families, the study of short fiction has a lot to offer in terms of understanding how otherwise voiceless citizens found a forum of expression that could reach a wide audience. Although I have spent some time here showing how popular sensation novelists like Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Ellen Wood used short fiction to offer more provocative social commentary with “riskier” endings than we might see in their novels, there is still much work to be done on this front. So many contributors to these magazines and journals remain unknown, which, on the one hand, testifies to the protection short fiction could (and continues to) offer writers of the time, but on the other hand, persists in impeding recovery projects. Digital archiving, however, promises a new frontier for those interested in this exciting work, as access to more and more periodicals means a better sense of what, how, and who the Victorians were reading in a world where so many things were vying for their attention.

New voices always introduce complications to existing assumptions and paradigms, and the study of short fiction is perhaps the most significant way to invite them in. While it may be true that the “novel with a secret” boasts plots filled with titillating mysteries and shocking disclosures, perhaps its biggest secret is the way in which it has concealed the influence of other forms of fiction. The idea that the Victorians were “novel reading people,” to use Anthony

Trollope’s phrasing (108), is one that has persisted in shaping our understanding of the nineteenth-century reading economy at the exclusion of other forms and other voices. As digital

211

technologies improve, and with interest in sensation fiction in full force, there is no better time to begin a new story.

212

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Brittany Roberts is an Assistant Professor of English at Broward College and a mother of two. She received her bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Central Florida in

2005, where she graduated summa cum laude. As a Kirkland Fellow, she completed her master’s degree in English at the University of Florida in 2007 and her Ph.D. in English with a specialty in Victorian literature from the University of Florida in 2016. Her research interests include nineteenth-century reading practices, sensation fiction, short stories, and periodical studies. She has works appearing in The Blackwell Companion to Sensation Fiction and Nineteenth-Century

Literature.

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