1 Serializing Sensation: the Dynamics of Genre in Victorian

1 Serializing Sensation: The Dynamics of Genre in Victorian Popular Fiction Julie Ann Bizzotto University of London, Royal Holloway Department of English PhD Thesis 2 3 Abstract ‘Serializing Sensation’ examines the correlation between two major trends of the mid- nineteenth century: sensation fiction and periodical serialization. The project studies five popular novels published during the 1860s and early 1870s within the original periodicals in which they were first published, evaluating how periodical location influenced contemporary readings and interpretations of the texts. Specifically, the study examines how the distinctive structure and identity of a periodical – its range of articles, the type of fiction it published, its readership – heightened, augmented, subverted, or enhanced the sensational attributes of the serialized novels. By doing so, the study endeavours to reconsider standard interpretations of the sensation genre and develop new methodological approaches to studying and evaluating the sensation novel. Overall, in reading the novels intertextually with the periodicals, the project aims to gain a more developed understanding of how the sensation genre engaged with some of the major cultural discourses of the period. By incorporating a mix of well-known novels and lesser-known texts, as well as a range of journals spanning from the popular to the political, the cross-sectional, comparative approach of the study allows the project to extend beyond authors, novels, and periodicals characteristically associated with the sensation genre. The variety of novels also provides a concentrated scrutiny of the sensational narrative techniques popularized in the 1860s, as well as the scope to examine how sensational methodology was rewritten and revised as the sensational sixties gave way to the 1870s. 4 Contents Introduction: Sensation Fiction: From Scandalous to Scholarly 5 1 Class, Gender, and the Nation: Ellen Wood’s East Lynne in the New Monthly Magazine 32 2 Circumstances Can Lie!: Questioning the Evidence in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd 65 3 Shifting Places, Shifting Genres: Mobility, Sense of Place, and the Everyday in Margaret Oliphant’s Salem Chapel 100 4 Sensational Sermonizing: Ellen Wood, Good Words , and the Conversion of the Popular 146 5 Rewriting the Sensation Narrative: Detection and Gossip in Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds 179 Conclusion: Conceptualizing the Victorian Periodical 217 Bibliography 221 5 Introduction Sensation Fiction: From Scandalous to Scholarly In 1862 Margaret Oliphant commenced her review of the ‘new school in fiction’, the sensation novel, by comparing the 1862 International Exhibition to the Great Exhibition of 1851, remarking, ‘We repeat the celebration with very different thoughts. It is a changed world in which we are now standing’. 1 Oliphant’s comparison registered the shift from the hopeful idealism of the 1850s, embodied in the Great Exhibition, to the febrile environment, one obsessed with ‘excitement too high pitched for comfort’, that marked the early 1860s (565). With the onset of such events as the Crimean War (1853-1856) and American Civil War (1861-1865), the British public, in Oliphant’s estimation, became inured to the ‘distant sound of guns’ that formed a ‘thrilling accompaniment’ to daily life (565). Oliphant subsequently notes that ‘it is only natural that art and literature, should, in an age which has turned to be one of events, attempt a kindred depth of effect and shock of incident’ (565). Oliphant’s assessment links the emergence of the sensation novel with the restless mood of the early 1860s, averring, ‘In the little reflected worlds of the novel and drama the stimulant has acted strongly’ (565). To Oliphant, the excitement, instability, and anxiety of the period are reflected and captured in the sensation novel, marking it as a sign of the times. Oliphant, one of the first of many critics in the nineteenth century to analyse and dissect the literary phenomenon of the sensation novel, deftly articulates the literary and social temperament of the 1860s, a decade in which ‘sensational’ became the modifier of the age. 1 Margaret Oliphant, ‘Sensation Novels’, Blackwood’s Magazine , 91 (May 1862), 564-84 (p. 564-65). 6 The nineteenth-century critical reaction to sensation fiction is relatively well- trodden territory, with Henry L. Mansel’s 1863 review in the Quarterly Review and a mass of other articles all condemning the genre in no uncertain terms, and all citing similar criticisms: plot development over that of character; mass-market appeal and lower-class origins; use of mystery and shocking incidents, which in turn created corporeal rather than cerebral responses in readers; the depiction of transgressive women; and the genre’s general moral ambiguity. 2 The derogatory judgment passed on sensation novels by many contemporary critics generally centred on the genre’s subversive qualities, such as the proliferation of violence and deviance, its plots of bigamy, murder, and crime, and its frequent destabilizing of traditional representations of marriage and femininity. And though such issues continue to garner the attention and focus of many modern studies of the sensation novel, the genre itself seems to have been liberated from its scandalous origins to become a respectable field of scholarly study. Since the publication of Winifred Hughes’s The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s (1980), the first full-length study of the sensation novel since Walter C. Philips’s Dickens, Reade, Collins: Sensation Novelists (1919), and the vast amount of scholarly research that has followed, sensation fiction has indeed become a vibrant academic field. 3 The early studies’ theoretical and thematic considerations have continued to influence sensation fiction research during the last thirty years. Indeed, the early studies have provided the major paradigms through which the genre has been analysed, including, for instance, the debate between the 2 Henry L. Mansel, ‘Sensation Novels’, Quarterly Review , 113 (April 1863), 481-514. For a comprehensive overview of contemporary and modern critical responses to sensation fiction see Andrew Radford, Victorian Sensation Fiction: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2009). 3 Winifred Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); Walter C. Phillips, Dickens, Reade, Collins: Sensation Novelists (New York: Columbia University Press, 1919). 7 subversive and/or conservative qualities of the genre; its fusion of disparate genres; its relationship to the periodical press and contemporary cultural, social, and medical discourses; its middle-class settings and lower-class origins; and its mass popularity. Hughes’s seminal study, still a valuable benchmark in the field, evaluates sensation fiction in relation to mid-nineteenth century critical and literary debates, declaring, ‘What distinguishes the true sensation genre, as it appeared in its prime during the 1860s, is the violent yoking of romance and realism, traditionally the two contradictory modes of literary perception.’4 Hughes positions the sensation novel as purely subversive, claiming it to have been an antidote to the stiltedness of mid- Victorian gentility. However, Thomas Boyle, in Black Swine in the Sewers of Hampstead: Beneath the Surface of Victorian Sensationalism (1989), assesses sensation fiction as an extension of existent discourses found in contemporary newspapers, observing that sensation novels are ‘riddled with detail which recall widely reported criminal occurrences at the time’. 5 Pamela Gilbert’s study, Disease, Desire and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels (1997), which looks at metaphors of disease surrounding popular fiction, particularly the sensation genre, counters Hughes’s and Boyle’s delineations of the sensation novel. Responding to Hughes’s contention of sensation fiction’s subversiveness, Gilbert declares that, ‘Far from bringing the terrifying into the midst of the middle-class neighbourhood, as Hughes asserts, the sensation novel’s purpose was to remove it and frame it, so that it might be perused safely and at some distance.’ 6 Gilbert also observes how the novel, unlike the newspaper, binds the ‘uncanny within the conventional strictures and structures of plot development and denouement, in which conventional values are, at 4 Hughes, p. 16. 5 Thomas Boyle, Black Swine in the Sewers of Hampstead: Beneath the Surface of Victorian Sensationalism (New York: Viking, 1989), p. 146. 6 Pamela Gilbert, Disease, Desire and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 69. 8 least nominally, upheld’ (69). A novel, then, as Gilbert reasons, ‘about a bigamist or a child-murder in a fictional middle-class neighbourhood is far less immediate than a newspaper which places such events a block and a day away’ (69). Gilbert’s point is that sensation novels give ‘shape and provide coherence for that barrage of information’ that Boyle describes as having originated in the nineteenth-century press (69). In contrast, Patrick Brantlinger’s 1982 documentation and analysis of the sensational content and structural components of sensation novels contends that sensation narratives ‘do not connect with anything outside of themselves’. 7 Brantlinger’s depiction of sensation fiction as isolated from contemporary discourses situates it as a ‘minor subgenre’ as compared to ‘serious fiction’ (2).

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