Bret Harte's Parodies of Sensation Fiction

Rummaging through the catalogue of the National Library of Scotland, I came across a small volume called Sensation Novels Condensed, published in London in 1871, by the American writer and journalist Bret Harte (1836-1902). Harte’s life was full of adventure and neither his Wikipedia entry nor the “Preliminary” by the publisher John Camden Hotten, that opens Sensation Novels Condensed, do justice to Harte’s roller-coaster career.

The facts about Harte’s early life seem patchy. He was born in Albany, New York. His father ran a series of private schools and would move the family to wherever he could find paying pupils. Harte left school for work at the age of thirteen. Harte’s mother remarried in 1854 (when he was eighteen years old). The family moved to Oregon. From then on, Harte’s life was associated with the west coast of America. He spent six years working along the Humboldt River. This experience provided him with a lifetime of material for stories about wilderness and frontier adventures. The whole area was for a time known as ‘Brett Harte country.”

Eventually Harte gravitated to journalism. In 1860 he lost his job as a subeditor of The Californian for denouncing a massacre of Indians by local ‘diggers.’ He had a secretarial job at the United States Mint when in 1862 he married Anna Griswold. In 1868 he became the first editor of Overland Monthly. He wrote his best-known works for the paper: the story “The Luck of Roaring Camp” and the poem “Plain Language from Truthful James,” better known as “The Heathen Chinee,”both in 1870. The latter was, according to Harte, a satirical tale of two men, one European and one Chinese, cheating each other at cards. But it was deemed controversial in its portrayal of racial equality. According to Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,  it is “a satiric condemnation of racism.

In 1871 Harte moved back east to Boston, accepting a contract to write twelve stories for $10,000, the highest amount ever offered to an American writer. However, away from California Harte lost his touch; his inspiration dried up and a painful slide downhill began: his “career reduced to desperate hack work” (ODNB). In 1878 he managed to secure a diplomatic post in Crefeld, a German town on the river Rhein. He left his wife and four children in New Jersey, never to return to the US. Move to Europe released Harte’s creative genius, and he began to write stories about an American in an imaginary German town “Sammstadt.” He became a great success in Germany. In 1880 he transferred to a post in Glasgow, spending most of his time in London. In 1885 after he lost his consular salary, Harte turned back to writing plays. In England he lived with Marquerite Van de Velde, a wife, then a widow, of a Belgian diplomat. He never divorced his wife Anna. At his funeral in Surrey, after his death from throat cancer in 1902, both women were present. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography sums up Harte’s career: “Beginning as a frontier Dickens, he faded with failed ambition into inadvertent self-parody.”

The fourteen short satirical stories in the style of well-known popular authors published in Sensation Novels Condensed, were written early in Harte’s career in the 1860s before he began editing Overland Monthly. They were first published in The Golden Era in San Francisco. The English publication by John Camden Hotten in 1871 coincided with the high point of Harte’s career and move to the East Coast.

Parody is “The imitative use of the words, style, attitude, tone and ideas of an author in such a way as to make them ridiculous.” (The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory) “Parody is difficult to accomplish well. There has to be a subtle balance between close resemblance to the ‘original’ and a deliberate distortion of its principal characteristics.” (Ibid.)

Good parody operates by embellishing and exaggerating the principle characteristics of its original and, in so doing, reveals something about this original; often it exposes the shallowness of the values or the misguided nature of the ideas espoused by its object. Parody is often (always?) political and should be illuminating.

Sensation novels, with all their exaggerated melodrama, spectacular crime and stock characters of frail heroines and flamboyant villains, seemed from the start ripe for parody. Punch advertised “The Sensation Times” in “Prospectus for a New Magazine” on May 9, 1863 (p193) and again parodied sensation fiction in “The Victim of Fiction” on Jan 14, 1865 (p19), as well as publishing several illustrated jokes about the genre. Perhaps the best know satire of a sensation novel is Groweth Down Like a Toadstool (1876-7) published in St. James’s Magazine , which makes fun of Rhoda Broughton’s Cometh Up as a Flower (1866-7). For an analysis of this parody, see Laurie Garrison’s Science, Sexuality and Sensation Novels: Pleasures of the Senses (2011); it is a good study of the contemporary reception of sensation fiction.

In his review of Garrison’s book, in The Wilkie Collins Journal 11 (2011), Saverio Tomaiuolo states the obvious value of parody for our understanding of contemporary reception of sensation novels: “literary parody offers a distorted mirror image of the narrative codes of a certain literary genre and, in this case, can be useful to approach, isolate and study the basic components of the sensational recipe."

So what can Bret Harte’s Sensation Novels Condensed tell us about the principle characteristics of sensation fiction and how they were viewed  by his Victorian audience?