CHAPTER 41
Sensation Fiction
Although “sensation fiction” is often understood to refer to a group of novels written during the 1860s, the term predated the decade and continued to be applied to works written well after 1870. Moreover, the term “sensation” meant more than a particular type of fiction, as Jenny Bourne Taylor (1988, p. 2) explains:
“Sensation” was one of the keywords of the 1860s. It encapsulated the particular way in which the middle-class sense of cultural crisis was experienced during that decade. … In one sense this wasn’t so much a coherent literary tendency or genre, more a critical term held together by the word “sensation” itself.
Scholarly attention to sensation fiction has tended to focus on the work of more familiar novelists such as Wilkie Collins, Mary Braddon and Mrs Henry Wood. However, as Andrew Maunder’s Varieties of Women’s Sensation Fiction has shown, there were a great many authors of sensation narratives who have since been forgotten. Their work was discussed at the time by a range of authors and cultural commentators, including Sigismund Smith, the fictional “sensation author” (Braddon, 1998, p. 11) who appears in the curiously self-reflexive opening to Mary Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife (1864). Smith’s work as “the author of about half a dozen highly-spiced fictions, which enjoyed an immense popularity amongst the classes who like their literature as they like their tobacco – very strong” (p. 11) – reminds us that the genre was not confined to the middle-class novels found in periodicals such as Charles Dickens’s All the Year Round. The fictional Smith further complicates the nature of sensation fiction when he describes the sort of novels he writes as “a combination story” that “steal other people’s ideas” to present “the brightest flowers of fiction neatly arranged into every variety of garland” (p. 45). His detailed account of the different titles and incidents his work draws upon initially bores his friend George Gilbert, but the boredom gives way to consternation as Smith goes on to contemplate a sensational rewrite of Oliver Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield (1766). Like many of the actual critics from the 1860s, Gilbert is alarmed at the potential reach of the sensational phenomenon and its refusal to be contained within clear boundaries.
Given the generic promiscuity of the sensation novel and the way in which it sought to compete with more sedate, established literary classics for the attention of the reading public, it is not surprising that many critics saw the genre as battling for the soul of the reader. The religious discourse permeating much of the criticism of the genre – Henry Mansel famously claimed that sensation writers were “usurping … the preacher’s office” (reprinted in Maunder, 2004, p. 32) – was perhaps inevitable in a society where Christian faith played such an integral role. For example, the author of “Decay of Spiritual Strength,” published in The Revival: An Advocate of Evangelical Truth (8 March 1866), made it clear that reading was to be seen as a threat:
This is a reading age. What multitudes of books are constantly pouring forth! But the majority are from the world, and for the world. Men of strong but unscrupulous minds are writing with a determinate design to poison the minds of their fellow men … (p. 128)
In The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in the Nineteenth Century (1998), Patrick Brantlinger explores the trope of the dangerous, poisonous text in the nineteenth century and considers its reappearance during the sensation debates of the 1860s. His argument helps to account for the religious hostility to the sensation novel, and builds upon a claim he made in 1982 that the sensation novel is a secular form of mystery, without “even a quasi-religious content” (Brantlinger, 1982, p. 4). Brantlinger’s reading of the debates over sensation fiction is helpful on many levels; yet, at the same time, it is a reading that sometimes imports, uncritically, the rhetoric and assumptions of nineteenth-century critics who insisted on a strict dichotomy between religion and the “secular” sensation novel. The relationship between sensation fiction and religion is, however, less clear-cut than this, particularly when it comes to thinking about the way in which mid-nineteenth-century writers engaged with the Bible.
Publishing strategies such as serialization certainly helped to increase the public’s interest in sensation fiction, although reading patterns were affected by many factors including the limited levels of literacy in the nineteenth century and the growth of other demands on people’s leisure time. Nonetheless, for many mid-century religious commentators, the “secular” threat of sensation fiction was directed toward the Bible. An article titled “Character: How It Is Formed and What It Is Worth,” published in the Evangelical Magazine (June 1866), articulated its concerns in this way:
Are those books which he [the reader] devours so eagerly sensation novels, or good, substantial works, full of solid information and of right sentiments? … if a man would build up for himself a strong and useful character, he must read very sparingly fiction of any kind. … Let there be chosen, rather, books which will instruct … let there be daily studied that one Book which speaks to us the thoughts of God. (p. 376)
It was, of course, disconcerting for religious communities to think that the public’s burgeoning interest in sensation fiction might deplete the amount of time that individuals had available for reading the Bible. More surprising is the fact that some sensation novels of the period register this concern over the religious implications of changing reading habits. For example, in The Woman in White (1859–60), a novel that helped bring sensation fiction to the attention of the middle classes, the Bible is not read, but instead lies closed on “the largest table, in the middle of the room, … placed exactly in the centre, on a red and yellow woollen mat” (p. 494). When its owner, Mrs Catherick, feels her respectability threatened by Walter Hartright’s questions, she offers a defense based on what the Bible symbolizes rather than what it says: “I have matched the respectable people fairly and openly, on their own ground. … Is your mother alive? Has she got a better Bible on her table than I have got on mine?” (p. 498). The changing status of the Bible is an issue that Collins implicitly returns to in The Moonstone (1868), where Gabriel Betteredge’s comic reliance on “the one infallible remedy” (p. 518) involves opening a copy of Robinson Crusoe for inspiration rather than the Word of God.
The Bible is not forgotten in the world of sensation fiction, nor is it simply a parodied cultural artifact; instead, sensation fiction repeatedly draws on and engages with biblical tropes. The difficulty of exemplifying this engagement is that the more deeply a biblical text is internalized, the more diffuse its trace becomes. Dickens – one of the most influential figures in the development of sensation fiction – exemplifies the point, and the extensive scriptural trace in his work and the complex ways in which different biblical texts are juxtaposed and read against one another has been examined by Janet L. Larsen (1985). This chapter takes one example of such a trace in sensation fiction, and considers the ways in which the sensation novel might be read as a meditation on a selection of biblical texts relating to marital (in)fidelity and the fallen woman. These particular issues are central to the sensation genre, as even the most cursory glance at the critical literature on sensation fiction makes clear; they are also integral to the Bible, recurring, to give just a few examples, in descriptions of Israel, in the book of Hosea, in the figure of Mary Magdalene in the Gospel accounts, and in the comparison between Babylon and the New Jerusalem in the book of Revelation.
Sensation fiction is, then, willing to engage with biblical voices that have often been marginalized by religious communities. This is particularly evident in the case of the prostitute in the book of Hosea. As Yvonne Sherwood explains in The Prophet and the Prostitute: Hosea’s Marriage in Literary-Theological Perspective (1996), religious communities have frequently failed to come to terms with the central conceit in Hosea. This reluctance to talk openly about prostitution in conjunction with the Bible was especially acute in the middle of the nineteenth century, and can be seen in the selective way that Mary Smith, the first-person narrator of Out of the Depths (Jebb, 1859), reads the Bible. Her narrative claims to be a true confession of her fall into prostitution and her subsequent conversion to a life of faith. While the text is too polemical and one-dimensional to merit unqualified description as a sensation novel, its proximity to the sensation debates of the 1860s and its shared narrative content make it a useful point of comparison. One of the dominant markers in Mary’s conversion is the Bible that she carries everywhere with her. It is a text that she constantly reads and seeks inspiration from; yet while Mary occasionally mentions stories from the Gospels concerning the hope that Jesus offers to adulterous and promiscuous women (stories that can be seen as correlatives of the book of Hosea) she struggles to comprehend how religion makes space for a woman who is sexually impure. One of the signs of her inability to conceive of the possibility (described in Hosea) of unity between a prophet and a prostitute is that her confession struggles to speak clearly or openly about prostitution. For all her insistence that she is providing a frank and detailed confession, the word “prostitution” is only mentioned once, and in the latter stages of the book. Describing her conversation with Mrs Carbury, Mary writes: “ ‘I was once an unfortunate woman in London, ma’am – a – a prostitute! lady,’ I cry, extorted by some sudden thrilling pain” (p. 290).
In contrast to Mary’s pained reference, writers of sensation novels were more willing to name prostitution and other “immoral” activities. Through their reliance on what Thomas Hardy termed “moral obliquity” in his 1889 preface to Desperate Remedies (1871), sensation novels gave considerable space to the exploration of prostitution and they frequently extended readers’ understanding of what prostitution involved. Famously, Mary Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) details the financial inequality faced by Victorian women in a manner that blurs the distinction between being paid for sex and earning one’s financial security through marriage. In one of the novel’s most disturbing scenes, Lady Audley’s removal to an asylum as punishment for her deceit is preceded by a desperate attempt to fit whatever possessions she can into her case, aware that the effective dissolution of her marriage renders her financially helpless. Cultural critiques of this kind are in keeping with the critiques found in prophetic books such as Hosea, although they are far from straightforward. Not only were sensation writers constrained by the conservative aesthetics demanded by their readers; they found themselves reading a Bible that was sometimes deeply ambiguous about its attitude to unfaithful women. Hosea may conceive of the union of prophet and prostitute, but Gomer (his adulterous wife) is not given her own voice in the biblical text. The refusal to allow Gomer to speak in defence of her infidelity results in a strikingly violent punishment from God in chapter 2, raising questions about the possibility of real justice at the hands of a patriarchal writer. Hosea is constrained by his culture at the very moment in which he tries to think outside it and imagine the union of a prostitute and a prophet. A similar dilemma faces sensation writers in their response to the social plight women find themselves in, as much of the scholarship on sensation fiction has shown. Lyn Pykett explains:
Sensation novels reproduce and negotiate broader cultural anxieties about the nature and status of respectable femininity and the domestic ideal at a time when women and other reformers were clamouring for a widening of women’s legal rights and educational and employment opportunities. (Pykett, 1994, p. 10)
References to fallen women in sensation fiction are marked by a willingness to entertain the idea of union with the sacred. In this respect, the writers of these stories may be seen as more faithful readers of Scripture than many respectable nineteenth-century religious commentators, who found such ideas unimaginable. It is significant, for instance, that a number of novelists use the name “Magdalen” for their fallen female characters, recalling the figure of Mary Magdalene in the Gospels. According to tradition (the Gospels are unclear on this point), Mary Magdalene was a prostitute before she became a follower of Jesus. The possibility of redemption for fallen women is seized upon in many sensation novels and made an integral part of the narrative. It is a conceit that can also be found in some of the forerunners to the sensation novel, as the character of Nancy in Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837–8) illustrates. In a similar vein are the “numerous” (Zemka, 1977, p. 136) references to prostitutes in Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1847–8), which, as Sue Zemka goes on to observe, culminate in Harriet Carker’s interest in Alice Marwood leading back to the Bible rather than away from it. Like the sensation novels that followed, these accounts of prostitution in Dickens are able to conceive of falleness in conjunction with the sacred; however, the union is far from unproblematic. In many respects, the limitations to the sacred vision of sensation fiction are in keeping with the conservative undertone of any mainstream genre. Like the biblical stories they inherit, sensation novels exist in a multifaceted relation to their surrounding culture that is not easily disentangled or shaken off. My purpose here is not to insist that sensation novels be read as subversive continuations of a prophetic biblical tradition but to draw attention to the sacred dimension of the sensation novel and use it to highlight the complexity of determining what a faithful reading of the Bible, with its multiplicity of voices and counter voices, might look like.
Drawing on the work of Tina Pippin, Mary Carpenter argues in her book on women and the Bible in the nineteenth century that the apocalyptic vision found in the book of Revelation and repeated in Victorian novels such as Jane Eyre is permeated with a gender violence that is frequently sublimated and reinscribed. Reflecting on Jane’s self- positioning as an apocalyptic seer at the end of the novel, Carpenter (2003, p. 138) suggests that her “last words may also be read as enthusiastic agreement with the ‘continuous historical’ interpretation of Apocalypse, and her narrative as yet another commodification of the consumption of the Whore of Babylon.” The novel’s difficulty in reimagining the violence of the biblical text helps to explain why it is that the sympathetic treatment of fallen women in sensation fiction is frequently accompanied by violent and excessive punishment. As the majority of scholars writing on sensation fiction have noted, the heroines of the sensation novel endure immense and disproportionate suffering. Isabel’s betrayal of her husband in East Lynne (1860–1), for example, results in facial disfigurement and death, despite her repentance, while Miss Gwilt’s sorrowful discovery that she has almost killed the wrong man at the end of Armadale (1864–6) culminates in her own poisoning and death rather than a new beginning. Similarly, in Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–3), the softening of Lady Dedlock’s hardness at the moment in which her past is revealed is not enough to save her from a lonely and ignoble death. In each case, the texts use death to avoid having to reimagine a resurrected state for women after their fall. What is especially noticeable is the tendency of these texts to insist that, contrary to the Protestant idea of justification by faith alone, female repentance is insufficient without additional physical confirmation that justice has been served. The use of a disfigured or lifeless body to register this physical confirmation points to a lack of agency for women in sensation fiction, one that is rooted in biblical texts such as Hosea, where the female body is merely a means to a different narrative end. Pamela Gilbert (1997, p. 4) reads the bodily emphasis in sensation fiction as symptomatic of a broader concern “with violation of the domestic body, with class and gender transgression, and most importantly, with the violation of the privileged space of the reader/voyeur, with the text’s reaching out to touch the reader’s body, acting directly ‘on the nerves’.” Gilbert’s astute reading helpfully draws out the signification of the female body and connects it to the genre’s preoccupation with popular fiction, consumption, and disease; however, it is a reading that should be read alongside (rather than against) the theological significance of gendered approaches to punishment in sensation fiction.
The gendered dimension to the physical suffering of several characters in the sensation novel becomes clearer when comparison is made to the experiences of Pip in Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860–1). Pip’s faithlessness is evident from the start of the novel – his guilt at forsaking his roots in the interests of great expectations haunts almost all of his childhood recollections – yet it is not punished in the same way as the mistakes of his female equivalents. In thinking further about the gendered dimension of punishment, it is worth considering the way in which Dickens’s novel turns to another biblical narrative to structure its meditation on human faithlessness. As John Reed argues in Victorian Conventions, Pip’s reckless waste of his inheritance is evidence of the novel’s deliberate allusion to the parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15. The parable was frequently linked to Hosea by nineteenth-century preachers and commentators: while some commentators simply linked the two biblical stories to make a broader point about the faithfulness of God in the face of our faithlessness, others drew attention to differences between these stories. Having discussed the parallels between Luke and Hosea, Alfred Clayton Thiselton wrote in 1874:
In the latter [Luke 15] we see the prodigal son leaving his father; but in the former [Hosea] we are shown the faithless wife leaving an all-loving, always loving husband. Both show us the exceeding sinfulness of sin and the exceeding riches of God’s grace… . Both tell of full restoration to favour, of perfect reconciliation and peace between the base sinner and the holy and just God… . They both tell of all this; but as Hosea’s picture has reference to those who have been brought up to the enjoyment of great Church privileges and advantages, it describes the greatest possible turpitude on the part of those who forsake the living, loving God, and show us apostacy under a figure even more marked, more striking, than that of the prodigal son. Israel, in her departure from God, is no common sinner; she is therefore presented as an ungrateful and base adulteress. (pp. 28–9)
Thiselton’s distinction is a problematic one given the doctrine of grace and the emphasis in Jesus’ parable on the idea that all sinners are to be welcomed home, regardless of their actions. Beyond this, however, it is difficult to ignore the troubling implication that female faithlessness, particularly in the context of marriage, is viewed as a greater sin, deserving more severe punishment. For all its openness to a marginal, female, biblical voice, the sensation novel follows the dominant testimony of the Bible in seeing marital infidelity by a woman as particularly reprehensible and emblematic of disobedience to God.
Pip’s actions are not the only level on which Great Expectations reimagines the story of the Prodigal Son. The account in chapter 22 of Miss Havisham’s past and her suffering at the hands of a profligate half brother also contains unmistakable allusions to Luke 15. Having explained how the younger half brother “turned out riotous, extravagant, undutiful,” Herbert Pocket describes Miss Havisham as the proud, disapproving elder sibling. The allusion to Luke 15 casts Miss Havisham in an accusatory light, for while the father’s love for the older son in Luke 15 is clear, the emphasis of the parable is on the need for the older brother to stop focusing on his own rights and start welcoming the disinherited brother. With this in mind, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that at the very moment that Miss Havisham’s suffering is accounted for, she is also presented as bearing some of the responsibility. Her inability to adapt to a new situation in which an adopted son is to be valued results in a cycle of punishment. Instead of being the bride of Christ, Miss Havisham becomes a bride perpetually in waiting, having missed the opportunity of marriage to the bridegroom. Rather than directing our attention to a sympathetic reading of Miss Havisham’s plight, the novel finds no space for her redemption and uses the figure of Estella to detail her legacy as a “revenge on all the male sex” (p. 167).
A similar idea of the forsaken woman who attempts to wreak revenge on the male sex dominates the narrative of Collins’s No Name (1862–3). Unlike Great Expectations, however, the focus of No Name is on the identity of its forsaken woman rather than her punishment. Magdalen Vanstone’s identity shifts throughout Collins’s novel as a result of legal structures, natural circumstance, and her own use of artifice. In an attempt to enact revenge on the uncle and son who disinherit her and her sister, Magdalen assumes different identities throughout the story, to the extent that it is difficult to have any firm sense of who the “real” Magdalen is. Yet for all her multiple disguises and characteristics, Magdalen cannot escape the fact that she possesses a name, a history, and an inheritance, however fractured and arbitrary these prove to be. Her strained relation to the past provides much of the novel’s interest; it also offers a helpful analogy of the relation between sensation writers and the biblical texts they inherit in the mid-nineteenth century. Like Magdalen, sensation writers begin with a biblical identity that no amount of invention can throw off completely. One solution to the complex relations that ensue is to argue that the freedom of sensation writers depends on embodying the spirit of the Bible rather than following it to the letter. This is a solution that Dickens and Collins frequently articulate in their fiction, and one that the lawyer, Pendril, vocalizes in No Name. In his explanation of how the law freezes Magdalen and Norah out of their rightful inheritance, Pendril acknowledges the rigidity and injustice inherent in the legal system. Recognizing that it is a system that condemns not only the two sisters but also their parents, who lived together without being married for many years, Pendril offers the following defence of the mother’s youth:
Let strict morality claim its right, and condemn her early fault. I have read my New Testament to little purpose indeed, if Christian mercy may not soften the hard sentence against her – if Christian charity may not find a plea for her memory in the love and fidelity, the suffering and the sacrifice of her whole life. (p. 103)
Pendril’s juxtaposition of the New Testament spirit and the Old Testament letter (“sentence”) follows a popular Protestant response to the problem of how one is to read the Old Testament law in the light of the New Testament. Yet the letter of the law is not dismissed so easily, as the rest of the novel acknowledges, and justice cannot exist outside a linguistic and material framework.
For all Magdalen’s artifice and pretence, she inherits a name with a clear biblical echo, or, rather, at least two distinct biblical echoes. The Magdalene of the Gospels is a faithful follower of Jesus, but the sexually impure past ascribed to her by the Christian tradition links her to the figure of an unfaithful prostitute found in other biblical texts. Both identities inform Collins’s novel and prove difficult to separate. In the end, the narrative’s redemptive hope for its central figure is satisfied, but the narrative focus on Magdalen’s falleness is clearly removed from the Gospels’ description of Mary Magdalene as a faithful disciple of Christ. The impure taint of Mary Magdalene’s fallen history is highlighted in the latter stages of No Name when the character of Old Mazey describes Magdalen Vanstone as a “young Jezebel” (p. 552); however, Mazey augments the slippage between the two biblical histories evoked by Magdalen’s name when he goes on to offer a more sympathetic reading of Jezebel. Whereas the Bible views Jezebel negatively, treating her as a symbol of whoredom and infidelity, Old Mazey is sympathetic to the “Jezebel” (p. 552) he prevents from stealing a letter:
But, try as hard as I may, I can’t find it in my heart, you young jade, to be witness against you. I liked the make of you (specially about the waist) when you first came into the house, and I can’t help liking the make of you still – though you have committed burglary, and though you are as crooked as Sin. (p. 556)
Mazey’s mixed response to Magdalen acknowledges the different ways in which she is named by the Bible. The ambiguity of naming is a theme that recurs throughout No Name. It is most apparent when Captain Wragge and Magdalen write to one another about the identities they will assume to trick Noel Vanstone and Mrs Lecount. Magdalen’s initially dismissive attitude to the name that she takes on is accompanied by a recognition that names matter. She writes: “use any assumed name you please, as long as it is a name that can be trusted to defeat the most suspicious inquiries” (p. 261). Names matter, but they also have a capacity for new identities and fresh readings, as Captain Wragge illustrates in the language he uses to explain the name that he has chosen: “The Skin which will exactly fit us, originally clothed the bodies of a family named Bygrave” (p. 263).
In the same way that Magdalen Vanstone is shaped but not fixed by the names she inherits, the Bible constrains and frees the sensation novel to tell new stories that depart from and reinterpret the sacred text. The uncomfortable nature of the resulting relationship is evident in the conflict between religious critics and sensation writers in the 1860s. Yet it would be quite wrong to conclude from these arguments that the Bible and the sensation novel were diametrically opposed. Sensation fiction is full of allusions to the biblical texts, and the emphasis on theological considerations of infidelity gives rise to complex theoretical questions as to what it means to read the Bible faithfully. Given the multivocality and open-ended nature of the biblical story, faithfulness and infidelity collide and mingle at every turn, and it is hardly a surprise that sensation fiction challenged religious sensibilities in its reading and rewriting of the Bible. In conclusion, it is helpful to recall the way in which one of the arguments arising from the sensation furore of the 1860s epitomized the difficulty of determining what faithfulness to Scripture meant. In 1860 a new periodical, Good Words, was launched with a view to reaching the religious and secular market. The journal included a range of material from different sources, including overt discussions of the Bible, travel writing, and sensational stories from writers such as Anthony Trollope and Margaret Oliphant. Disquiet in some quarters regarding the new boundaries being drawn by the periodical led one religious publication, The Record, to offer the following complaint in 1863:
there is a “mingle-mange” … of persons, as well as of things, in Good Words, against which we indignantly protest. There is a spurious liberalism prevalent at the present day, which rejoices in seeing persons of the most opposite and antagonistic opinions brought to work, speak, or write together. (p. 5)
In light of some of the ideas explored in this chapter, it may be that the truth of this charge is precisely why Macleod’s periodical and, more generally, sensation fiction were able to depart from the Bible while remaining faithful to it.
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