In his famous and often-quoted article about sensation
fiction in Quarterly Review (Vol. 113, April 1863) Henry Mansel wrote:
"A commercial atmosphere floats around the works of
this class, redolent of the manufactory and the shop. The public want novels,
sensation-pattern, to be ready by the beginning of the season. And if the
demands of the novel-reading public were to increase to the amount of a
thousand per season, no difficulty would be found in producing a thousand words
of the average merit." And later on: "These books would certainly not
be written if they did not sell; and they would not sell if they were not read;
ergo, they must have readers, and
numerous readers too."
Sensation fiction was first and foremost recognized as
commercial fiction to be consumed. Mansel identified periodicals, circulating
libraries and railway bookstalls as the watering holes of mass readership
to aid the proliferation of sensation fiction. Mansel's words echo Wilkie
Collins's delighted realization, in his article "The Unknown Public"
in Household Words, 21 August 1858, that
there is a whole new, untapped reading public out there in the newly literate
working classes; and he had a chance to make a fortune out of them.
Above all else sensation fiction was so sensational because
its lurid and melodramatic tales of scandal and crime took place at the
Victorian reader's doorstep. It was topical and contemporary and it was
generally acknowledged that its power to thrill originated from these
qualities of immediacy, verisimilitude and tantalizing
proximity to the reader's reality. As Henry James put it in his review of Lady Audley's Secret (Nation 9 Nov 1865): "The novelty lay in the
heroine being, not a picturesque, Italian of the fourteenth century, but an
English gentlewoman of the current year with the use of railway and the
telegraph." Mansel agreed: "Sensation novel, be it mere trash or
something worse, is usually a tale of our own times. Proximity is, indeed, one
great element of sensation."
Following on from this, it was a small step to complain that
all sensational authors did was re-circulate the despicable, abhorrent and
miserable tales of the law courts in fictional form. In Mansel's words again:
"When fashionable immorality becomes insipid, the
material for sensation may still be found hot and strong in the "Newgate
Calendar;" especially if the crime is of recent date, having the merits of
personality and proximity to give it a nervous as well as a moral effect.
Unhappily, the materials for such excitement are not scanty, and an author who
condescends to make use of them need have little difficulty in selecting the
most available. Let him only keep an eye on the criminal reports of the daily
newspapers, marking the cases which are honoured with the especial notice of a
leading article, and become a nine-days' wonder in the mouths of quidnuncs and
gossips; and he has the outline of a story not only ready-made, but approved
beforehand as of the true sensation cast."
It can be argued that bigamy novels, such as Lady Audley's Secret and Mrs Henry
Wood's East Lynne, became a subgenre of sensation fiction having been
specifically inspired by the setting up of the divorce court in 1858. After the
establishment of this new court not only did the number of divorce cases increase
but details of divorce and bigamy cases became more readily available to
journalists and, through them, to other writers.
The case of Constance Kent is often mentioned as an
inspiration for Lady Audley's Secret
(a quick google search will show this, a couple of examples are Kate
Summerscale in The Suspicions of Mr
Whicher and Rhiannon Williams in
her Feb 5, 2012 Observer review). While
the crimes committed by Constance and Lady Audley are not that similar, there
are interesting thematic parallels in the real life case and Braddon's fiction.
Constance Kent was 16 years old, when in 1860 in the early hours of the morning
she allegedly stole her little half-brother from the bedroom where her father
and step-mother were asleep. She carried the toddler out into the garden
through the French windows. She then cut his throat and pushed the poor lad's
body into the privy. Her motivation, it was suggested, was jealousy. Her mother
had been treated as an invalid and a lunatic, after her death her father
married the governess. The victim of the crime was a son from this second
marriage. While the children of the second marriage were cherished, Constance
herself was sent to sleep at the top of the house with servants.
The case came
into trial in June 1860, but although Constance was suspected by the mighty
police detective Mr Whicher of the Detective Department, she was not convicted.
Instead she moved to France. Curiously, several years later, she became
religious, returned to England and confessed to the murder. To this day, her
confession has not convinced everybody and there remains a mystery about the
case. This case, also known as the Road House murder is re-told by Kate Summerscale
in The Suspicions of Mr Whicher
(2008) and a shorter summary is included in Mary S. Hartman's Victorian Murderesses (1977).
Another suggested influence on Braddon was the infamous Yelverton
bigamy case that filled the newspapers in 1861 (see Jenni Fahnestock's article
"Bigamy: The Rise and Fall of a Convention" in Ninenteenth-Century Fiction 36, 1981). Dashing Captain William Charles
Yelverton met the 19-year-old Theresa Longworth on a steamer from Boulogne.
Their love-affair led to a suspect Irish wedding in a locked church with no
witnesses. Theresa was kept hidden from the Yelverton family, because they
expected William to marry money, which Theresa did not have. Imagine her
disappointment when William announced that he had married again. The trial for
bigamy that took place in Dublin was a sensation, with Theresa as the wronged
heroine and William as the dastardly, aristocratic villain. Although Theresa
won the trial, she later lost an appeal in the House of Lords. She published a
fictional account of the events in Martyrs
of Circumstance in September 1861 using the name 'The Honourable Mrs
Yelverton.' Theresa Yelverton's story is told in Wild Romance: The Scandal That Shook Victorian Society (2010) by Chloe Schama.
In the first volume of Lady
Audley's Secret, Robert Audley refers to Maria Manning:
"What do we know of the mysteries that may hang about
the houses we enter? If I were to go to-morrow into that common-place,
plebeian, eight-room house in which Maria Manning and her husband murdered
their guest, I should have no awful prescience of that bygone horror. Foul
deeds have been done under the most hospitable roofs, terrible crimes have been
committed amid the fairest scenes, and have left no trace upon the spot where
they were done." (Vol I, Chapter 18)
Maria Roux was born in Switzerland but later worked in Britain as a lady's maid to the daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland. In 1847 she married Frederick Manning
and using her savings they set themselves up as keepers of the White Hart Inn
in Taunton. Neither the marriage nor the business went well and before long Mrs
Manning had a lover, Patrick O'Connor, a shady, small-time businessman and a crook. In 1849 the Mannings gave up on their business and moved to
London where Maria supported them as a dressmaker. On August 9th, 1849,
Patrick O'Connor said he was heading to his ladyfriend's for dinner and
promptly disappeared. Three days later his naked body was discovered by the
police under the flagstones in the Mannings' kitchen, drenched in quicklime. There
was no sign of the Mannings. The Detective Department sprang into action and
the ultra-modern gadget of the telegraph was used to contact Edinburgh police
where Maria Manning had fled. She was arrested, and Frederick was soon after
caught on Jersey. Both were brought back to London and put on trial on
October 29th, 1849. The husband tried to shift all the blame on the wife and the
newspapers, after the country-wide murder hunt went on having their field day. It
took the jury 45 minutes to judge the Mannings guilty and they were executed on
13 November 1849 in front of a huge, clamouring crowd. For a more detailed
description which puts this case well in its social and cultural context see
Judith Flanders's The Invention of Murder
(2011).
In the quotation above, Robert Audley is talking to Lady Audley and goes on to say
how "we may look into the smiling face of a murderer, and admire its
tranquil beauty." (Ibid.) While
his words are a veiled accusation, they also hint at the murky, hidden depths underneath
the mundane surface of everyday life. Lady Audley's Secret knowingly and cunningly aims to create
that sense of proximity and verisimilitude so crucial to sensation fiction.
