In their time, Victorian sensation novels were deemed dangerous, morally
poisonous and corrupting to the extent that they would destroy entire lives and
drive whole sections of the reading public into perdition. But can they still
give a thrill today? Are they still powerful or are they just material for
heritage-porn in period dramas? Today we have gritty crime fiction with gruesome
violence and we have erotic novels with detailed depictions of all manner of
fetishisms. Is the modern reader too jaded, too been-there-done-that-and-have-50-Shades-of-Grey to show it, to get any
kind of a kick out Victorian sensation fiction? I will not attempt a scholarly
analysis of the merits of Victorian popular fiction. This is a project to
assess how Victorian sensation fiction works in the mind of an average
21st-century reader.
The criticism of stories of sensation in the 1860s took on a strangely
pharmaceutical terminology. Contemporary critics commented on the large amount
of poisons employed in sensational novels and soon this association with drugs
was extended to characterize the whole genre. Articles like “The Perils of
Sensation” (Saturday Review, 1864), where
the name of this blog comes from, and “Novel Reading” (Ibid., 1867) warned of the “most dangerous influence upon the minds
of the readers” by sensational stories laced with crime and mystery which were
“the medium through which moral poison is frequently administered.” H. L.
Mansel’s essay “Sensation Novels” in Quarterly
Review (113, April 1863, pp481-514) illustrates the general alarm about the intoxicating and
addictive power of mystery stories: they belong “to the morbid phenomena of
literature – indications of wide-spread corruption, of which they are both
effect and the cause; called into existence to supply the cravings of a
diseased appetite, and contributing themselves to foster the disease and to
stimulate the want which they supply.” Sensational stories strive “to act as
the dram or the dose, rather than as the solid food, because the effect is more
immediately perceptible.”
Like those brave Victorian medical men who drank poisons and electrocuted
themselves in the name of science, I will conduct a self-experiment and dose
myself with sensation fiction to see whether this particular drug still has
potency. I will start with that great feminist manifesto, Lady Audley's Secret published in 1862.
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