SOURCE: "Sensation, Sex, and the 1860's," in The Fallen Angel: Chastity, Class and Women's Reading, 1835-1880, Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1981, pp. 73-99.

[In the essay that follows, Mitchell explores the ways in which sensation novels—particularly George Meredith's Rhoda Fleming and Thomas Hardy's Desperate Remedies—reflect and react to changing roles for women in the Victorian period.]

The literary phenomenon of the 1860s was the sensation novel.¹ Sensationalism meant excitement, secrets, surprises, suspense; it meant strong emotion aroused by strong scenes, violent death by murder, train, fire, and poisons ranging from chloroform to nightshade; and it meant continual shocks provided by violating decorum. One critic in 1863 complained that eight of the twenty-four recent novels he was reviewing were about bigamy,² and his selection did not include some entries by leading novelists, such as Charles Reade's Griffith Gaunt (Argosy, 1865-66; 3 vols. 1866) or William Makepeace Thackeray's Phillip (Cornhill, 1861-62; 3 vols. 1862). One can hardly open a novel written at the height of the vogue without discovering a woman unchaste in fact, in reputation, or by desire, whether with intent, by accident, or through a technicality.

Of course the decade had no monopoly on the sort of light literature that depends on exciting incident, strong emotion, and characters who vary from the stereotype only in the particular perversion that expresses their villainy. The Gothic, the Newgate, and the penny dreadful had preceded the sensation; the detectives, the spies, the cinema, and television were to follow. The difference in the sixties was the serious critical attention paid to the kind of novel which we have for the past hundred years considered a sub-species: fiction, not literature. Sensation novels were reviewed in respectable quarterlies and denounced from the pulpit. The second generation of Victorian writers began under their influence; George Meredith's Rhoda Fleming and Thomas Hardy's Desperate Remedies are both treatments of the unchaste woman written in the shadow of sensationalism.

With so many portraits of the unchaste placed before the public eye, and with such a supply of causes, motives and consequences for her actions there is—even in the restoration of justice at the end—a remaining substratum of ambiguity. That, in itself, is significant. Writers who saw enlarged possibilities for a woman of less than immaculate purity were both reflecting and reacting to changes in the role of women in society.

One striking feature of the sensation novels of the 1860s, as a group, is the centrality of female characters. The form requires a villain to move the plot, and an astonishing number of the villains are, in the words of an 1866 review, "beautiful women of elegant figure and golden locks, whose fascinating exterior only hides a subtle brain and a pitiless heart."³ Justice punishes the villainess; her strength is demonstrated, feared, and crushed. Often her sexual misbehavior provides the clinching proof of her viciousness.

Other centrally placed female characters, however, are neither chaste, victimized, nor anathematized. Adeline Sergeant explained that East Lynne was popular because people were tired of "inane and impossible goodness" in heroines.⁴ Really interesting women—women worth writing a whole book about—had sexual experience. The subterfuges that novelists had to invent so heroines could have freedom of action and still be pure enough to marry the hero reveal the strain that social limitations imposed on the feminine role.

The typical novel of the 1860s was about contemporary life. "Proximity," as one reviewer said, is "one great element of sensation. It is necessary to be near a mine to be blown up by its explosion."⁵ Writers are very specific about street names and railway timetables and the nearest town with a telegraph office (and they probably expected their readers to check up on them); they often drop in references to scandals or murders that have recently been in the news. This intense awareness of contemporary detail also encouraged sensation novelists to reflect immediately on the changes they perceived in social standards and modes of behavior.

A good deal of the sexual frankness is conservative—or even reactionary—in effect. Divorce, for example, was legally possible for the middle class after 1857, but sensation novelists seldom use it to solve their characters' problems; instead they protest that the law can not possibly divide two people who have literally been merged into one. Even a woman victimized by a fake wedding is not usually allowed to marry while the man who took her virginity remains alive.

Middle-class virgins are unchaste in sensation novels, as they had not been in earlier popular fiction. Changing social patterns provided new opportunities. Girls attend Eights Week at Oxford and the system of chaperonage breaks down; they walk across the fields unaccompanied to pay a call and find only the young man of the house at home. Most significantly, they ride—an occupation which makes the company of a suitably mature chaperone particularly difficult to obtain. The woman riding with only a groom to protect her provides new plots: she can, like Bella in Annie Thomas' On Guard (3 vols. 1865), get lost and have to spend the night at an inn twenty-seven miles from home, or she may, even more scandalously, elope with the groom himself, like Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Aurora Floyd.

Aside from the new plots she creates, the figure of a woman riding gives clear evidence of conservative reaction to a new social phenomenon. When a woman is introduced in a riding habit—or even more dangerously, on the hunting field—we can be virtually certain that trouble and impropriety will follow. Bella (in On Guard) and Kate Gaunt (of Reade's Griffith Gaunt) manage to avoid unchastity but not dishonor; Adelaide in Henry Kingsley's Ravenshoe (Macmillan's, 1861-62) and Caroline Eversfield in Elizabeth Grey's Passages in the Life of a Fast Young Lady (3 vols. 1862) both marry, but not soon enough after they have eloped for the county ladies to visit them. One cause of the reaction can be seen in the first description of Aurora Floyd: "At six years of age she rejected a doll and asked for a rocking-horse."⁶ Women who ride horses are also apt to use slang—that is, to talk men's language. Before a riding heroine can reach a happy ending, she must suffer enough weakness, illness and humiliation to melt her down into chastened femininity. (In On Guard, we know that Bella will be saved when she compassionately lets the fox live.)⁷

Besides the general reaction against women who assume masculine traits, there is also a specific contemporary phenomenon that gave an aura of impropriety to the horsewoman: the "pretty horsebreakers" of Rotten Row. At the beginning of the 60s the English demimonde appeared publicly in the Park, in letters to the Times, in alluring portraits in newsagents' shops and, indeed, in Sir Edwin Landseer's Royal Academy picture for 1861, of which Skittles was the subject. Towards the middle of the decade a series of two-shilling yellowbacks purported to tell the life stories of the most notorious women about the town. Though they imitated the format of the railway novel they were not carried by Smith's bookstalls or, of course, by Mudie's, but they were available elsewhere—curiously, more easily in the provinces.⁸ The books pretend half-heartedly to be journalistic exposes. The parties in St. John's Wood which break up suddenly when a division is called in the House are described in pornographically opulent terms but there are no scenes of actual sexual encounter, and even these books usually come down on the side of conventional roles, sometimes with amusing suddenness. The Soiled Dove ends with a melodramatic tableau of Laura frozen to death in the snow after the sound of hymns sung in the street has kept her from murdering the "Honorable" who ruined her. Anonyma finally marries the man who rouses her respect so much that she will not even kiss him until she has proved that she can reform.⁹

The most common type of sinful, sexual, evil woman in sensation novels is the adventuress. The whole race are Becky Sharp's children: women who pursue money, position, power and security by the socially acceptable route of marriage. The adventuress marries without love and therefore submits to sex without love. Even though the submission takes place within marriage, the adventuress is often shown to be evil because of her sexual willingness; she later commits adultery or reveals that she was not a virgin when she married.

Bracebridge Hemyng's Held in Thrall (yellowback, [1869]) is typical of the cheap railway books that reduce the story to its essentials by leaving out such subtleties as psychology. By the second page we have learned that Mona Seafield is a governess who would willingly sell her soul to the devil in order "to raise herself above the necessity of working … and to compel others to render her the homage due to rank and wealth." She fails to attract the heir to a neighboring estate, persuades an old poacher to force his submissive wife to "remember" switching the babies she had nursed, blackmails the newly-elevated pseudo-heir into marrying her, makes sure of her settlement, and elopes with a captain who deserts her to sink "from one depth of degradation to another" (p. 149).

In thoughtful hands the figure is more complex and reveals how difficult it was to reconcile the work-ethic with the genteel distrust of pushiness and ambition. The adventuress admits her goal, which, in these novels, heroes generally do not. It is admirable for a man to work hard, but he does not deliberately seek riches and power—the money is an accidental by-product and the seat in Parliament a gracious recognition of an effort which was virtuous for its own sake. The conflict is further complicated by the realization that woman's state is anomalous: she can "work" her way to the top only by putting her person (as opposed to her hands and brain) in trade. Significantly, the character named Magdalen in Wilkie Collins' No Name (All the Year Round, 1862-63; 3 vols. 1862) is not the unmarried mother of Vanstone's children but the daughter who cold-bloodedly contrives to recapture the inheritance lost through her illegitimacy by committing matrimony with the heir-at-law.

The treatment of the adventuress also reveals an underlying fear of woman's sexual attractiveness once she decides to use her body for what it is worth and adopts the aggressive role. She can succeed because she violates the understood conventions. Men are not used to supplying restraint; they can therefore be ruined by seductive females. William Winwood Reade's Liberty Hall, Oxon. (3 vols. 1860) has a whole phalanx of man-trapping women, from the three shopgirl sisters in Woodstock whose father earns a living by threatening undergraduates with breach-of-promise suits to the ladies at a county ball who make bets with each other about which men they will be able to capture by the end of the evening. Lucy (another woman who rides to the hounds) loses her virginity without any sense of shame. She does, however, make a clear calculation of its value:

"I have lost a woman's chief treasure, and I have lost it like a fool, I have lost it for nothing, I have lost it for itself. Itself, ha! ha! what a prize, for so great a stake—Ah, if we young girls knew…. but when we know, it is too late … all is lost, lost, lost!"

She drooped her head, and she thought. Then her eyes flashed: a proud smile curled upon her lips.

"Lost for others, not for me! I have still a stern will, a strong brain: I have still resolution to conquer, and cunning to hide. I have been a child, I have fallen; I will be a woman, and I will rise. But I must forget that I have a heart, that heart which has so nearly lost me all." (II, 283)¹⁰

Men were threatened by riding women, by ambitious women, by women who used sexuality for their own ends. The most reactionary novelists sensationally exaggerated the masculine-serving qualities of the old ideal. James McGrigor Allan objects, in Nobly False (2 vols. 1863), that

the woman who can unite in herself, the graces and charms peculiar to her sex, with sufficient intellectual power to comprehend and sympathise with a superior man, and with sufficient moral worth to sacrifice self, and make her life subservient to that of the man she adores—is extremely rare, and can hardly ever be met with in Society!

The tone of society and modern female education are fatal to the gentleness, yielding disposition, and disregard of self, which are absolutely essential to a woman who wishes to be the companion of a man of thought. The women to be met with in ball-rooms, are all educated to Queen it through life … (II, 76-77)

Fortunately, the novel's hero finds Miriam, a self-taught ferryman's daughter, who not only is willing to live with him without marriage so that he can keep a promise made to his dying mother, but also drinks lye in compromising circumstances so that he will hate her and marry a social equal for his own good. In the book's introduction, Allan says that Miriam embodies the ideal of womanhood which had obsessed him for years: unchaste not through weakness but because of "the unfathomed depths of woman's capacity of suffering and self-negation for a man she loves" (I, v-vi). We are not surprised to discover that Allan later wrote Woman Suffrage Wrong in Principle and Practice (1890).

The plot that introduces the widest variety of sexual scandal is also, though more ambiguously, conservative. This plot is one of the stand-bys of English fiction: the discovery of rightful inheritance. The sexual incident usually takes place offstage. Illegitimate children—often in the best of families—have been concealed under polite fictions or farmed out to foster parents. Babies have been switched for motives pure or impure. The sexual adventure in the past generation was evil because it confused the social fabric and introduced the uncertainty consequent to not knowing who people really are. The outcome is conservative; the rightful heir is at last recognized.

This conservatism is ambiguous because it tends to confirm middle-class values by giving them the sanction of aristocratic "legitimacy." The plot frequently provides moral elevation for a socially inferior girl at the expense of her betters. The legitimate child who ultimately inherits is the offspring of an early mesalliance. When the social climber or younger son comes into the property, he convinces the milliner or farmer's daughter or nurserymaid who had valiantly held out for the church and the ring that their marriage was invalid because he signed the register with a false name, or the license was not in order, or the clergyman not in orders. Then he bigamously marries a woman who brings him an aristocratic connection to go with his money or money to go with his encumbered estate. (A girl could be fooled even if she were not particularly naive. One section of the 1867 Consecration of Churchyards Act had the purpose of "affirming the validity of certain marriages supposed to have been doubtful on account of the position of the communion table being changed.")

Thackeray's Henry Esmond (3 vols. 1852) is a good example of the pattern, though the plot is so ubiquitous in the sixties it can hardly be said to have a source. It is, of course, the male version of the Cinderella story. The hero, usually thought to be illegitimate, has been raised in obscurity and earned his own way in the world. The delayed inheritance rewards the hardworking heir and provides a magic symbol of gentility to confirm his virtue—and his mother's.

The wicked seducers who deliberately ruin girls to gratify their own sensuality are almost invariably aristocrats who also display the other vices of idleness—gaming, racing, ruinous debt. Sensation novelists do not just silently disapprove of the villainy by showing the ironic contrast between the victim's suffering and the man's prosperity; they are more apt to punish the man overtly. Thus they demonstrate a sense of justice more rigorous than novels of previous decades. We are meant to infer that society approves of the moral rigor. The gamekeeper in A. J. Barrowcliffe's Normanton (1862) murders his daughter's seducer and is sentenced to only one year's imprisonment. The aristocratic despoiler in The Soiled Dove commits suicide. The girls in novels of this sort are young, poor, uneducated, innocent and pitiable and sometimes, therefore, survive. In Jessie's Expiation (3 vols. 1867), by Oswald Boyle, the poor victimized girl is forced by her titled seducer to marry a lunatic; she (being a true woman) grows to love him "because he is miserable" (III, 246) and they are treated kindly by the novel's admirable people, a young middle-class couple who made a love-match on slender means and have to work hard. But wicked Lord Rendover poetically drowns at the very spot where he had kidnapped Jessie.

Mrs. Henry Wood's East Lynne (Colburn's New Monthly Magazine, 1859-61; 3 vols. 1861) is the most famous of the sensational bourgeois moralities about sex and unearned money. The curse of both looms over the opening words: "In an easy-chair of the spacious and handsome library of his town house sat William, Earl of Mount Severn. His hair was grey, the smoothness of his expansive brow was defaced by premature wrinkles, and his once attractive face bore the pale, unmistakable look of dissipation" (Ch. 1). William Vane had been an industrious, steady, legal student until three unexpected deaths gave him a title and sixty thousand a year on which to ruin himself. Meantime he went to Gretna Green with the woman he loved. Because of the elopement there was no settlement; because of the title there was waste and indolence. When the earl dies his daughter Isabel is penniless and homeless. She marries Mr. Carlyle, who buys Mount Severn's home (East Lynne) with the money he earns as a country lawyer, who continues to work even after he becomes a man of property, and whose neighbors recognize his worth by electing him to Parliament. Isabel falls prey to idleness (Carlyle's sister lives with them and manages the household), jealousy (because her husband keeps necessary business secrets from her), and physical proximity to a man who stirs her blood. Her punishment is instantaneous:

Never had she experienced a moment's calm or peace, or happiness, since the fatal night of quitting her home. She had taken a blind leap in a moment of wild passion; when, instead of the garden of roses it had been her persuader's pleasure to promise her, (but which, in truth, she had barely glanced at, for that had not been her moving motive), she had found herself plunged into an abyss of horror from which there was never more any escape … a lively remorse, a never-dying anguish, took possession of her soul for ever. O reader, believe me! Lady—wife—mother! should you ever be tempted to abandon your home, so will you awake! Whatever trials may be the lot of your married life, though they may magnify themselves to your crushed spirit as beyond the endurance of woman to bear, resolve to bear them; fall down on your knees and pray to be enabled to bear them: pray for patience; pray for strength to resist the demon that would urge you so to escape; bear unto death, rather than forfeit your fair name and your good conscience; for be assured that the alternative, if you rush on to it, will be found far worse than death. (Ch.10)¹¹

The novel's second half is effective because Mrs. Wood manages the emotional effects so that even the reader who agrees with every word of the moral homily remains sympathetic towards Isabel. Her flaws (the biggest was to marry a man she respected but did not love) are clearly shown in the first half of the book. In the second part, Mrs. Wood puts much more emphasis on Levinson's villainy—he refuses to marry Isabel and make their child legitimate; he is shown to be a practiced seducer and, ultimately, a murderer—so that Isabel comes to seem more of a victim. Her most noble quality—her love for her children—provides both the vehicle for her punishment and the opportunity for purification through suffering.

That punishment is most harrowing which involves the loss of that which is most valued. A generation earlier the heaviest burden on the unchaste woman had been the sense of sin (the fear that she would not go to heaven), the physical threats of poverty and further degradation into prostitution, and the loss of place in society. Isabel suffers from loss of place in the family. Disfigured in a railway accident which kills her bastard child and leads Carlyle to think that she is dead, she returns to East Lynne as governess. She sees her husband happy with his second wife. She must give her children the cool attention of a governess instead of a mother's passionate embraces. Daily and hourly she lives with the awareness of what she has lost.

The reader always knows a good deal more than Isabel about what is really going on, realizes that Levison is a villain, knows that her jealousy is unfounded, and thus never doubts that Isabel acts wrongly. But Mrs. Wood's portrait of her character and of the marital relationship leads to sympathy, not pity. Isabel is conscious of her utter dependence on Carlyle. She stands to him as child to parent; she is afraid to ask questions because he might laugh at her for not understanding the obvious; she is constantly on her good behavior. She is protected, cherished, and not allowed to grow up. She feels hurt when he pays less attention to her after the honeymoon year is over; he has a business to attend to but the business of a woman's life, so far as she can see, is to maintain a perfect relationship with her husband. She feels inferior: if she were a better woman, somehow, he would love her more.

The husband and marriage bond are the focus of her feelings of inferiority. Her elopement is, if only momentarily, an act of revenge; like Edith Dombey, she uses the weapon most effective in the battle between the sexes. Isabel's crime and punishment show how much social retrictions shape woman's nature. The role traps Isabel; she has no independent goal but can only leave vengefully in the company of another man. Furthermore, as Margaret Maison has pointed out, the divorce law is essential to the story. Carlyle is morally free to marry again because he thinks Isabel is dead, but if he had not divorced her first, his marriage to Barbara would be invalid.¹² Divorce set up a legal barrier against any hope that the adulteress might work out a reconciliation; it ensured that she would be permanently cut off from her family.

When East Lynne first went the rounds of publishers it was rejected by both Smith and Elder and Chapman and Hall. George Meredith, the reader for the latter, called it "foul."¹³ By the end of the century it had sold almost half a million copies and had been translated, according to Mrs. Wood's son, "into every known tongue."¹⁴ The review by Samuel Lucas in the Times for 25 January 1862 is a study in qualified enthusiasm by a man who—like many another reader with a sense of literary standards—loved the book and felt that he shouldn't: "It would, perhaps, be invidious to say that, in our opinion, East Lynne … is the best novel of the season," he begins, and goes on to point out Levinson's fortuitious and unexplained villainy and the large role played by coincidence in keeping the plot afloat. And yet, he admits, "as regards its satisfaction of the indispensible requirement which is the rude test of the merits of any work of fiction … East Lynne is found by all its readers to be highly entertaining."

One reason characters like Isabel engage the reader's attention is that we sense they are right in objecting to their role. Elfrida in Florence Marryat's Love's Conflict (3 vols. 1865) is shy and timid and afraid that her husband will stop loving her unless she makes a doormat of herself. When she admits that she was attracted to a man who treated her decently, her husband demands a separation; emotional faithlessness is enough for him.

Thus even while moralists are horrified by unchaste behavior and use its consequences to punish aggressive women, they realize uncomfortably that continued oppression will lead to acts of rebellion. Lucy of Liberty Hall, Oxon. marries the man she had her eye on, despite her lost virginity, and then reaps misery because he brings up her past every time they quarrel. The narrator's tone is ambiguous: "When a girl, she was bound by those chains to which women submit, because they are slaves. This girl attempted to break her bonds, and she has suffered" (III, 362). A slender thread of sympathy glints momentarily even in the portrait of the most devious adventuress, the slight, childish, golden-haired Lady Audley who, in the interval between being terrified by a thunderstorm and coming home with a skirt full of wildflowers, has shoved her lawful husband down a well in order to preserve her bigamous marriage.¹⁵ The reader had earlier seen her in her bare governess's room after Sir Michael Audley proposed, saying to herself: "No more dependence, no more drudgery, no more humiliations …" (Ch. 1). Elaine Showalter suggests that Lady Audley is allowed to end her life in a madhouse instead of on the gallows because both Braddon and the reader have, in many ways, identified with her.¹⁶

Marriage was the only way that a woman could improve her social position. In William Starbuck's A Woman against the World (3 vols. 1864) "Pretty Sally" is a cheeky, vain, farm laborer's daughter who lives in a cottage with two rooms and eight people. Even though she has a baby, she sets her cap at the doting old squire: "she would live to triumph over her enemies; those who sneered should yet be made to curtsey in her presence. Not mere vulgar ambition animated her mind, but the wild feverish longing to obtain a woman's victory" (I, 274). She wins financial security and social place, but ultimately achieves a crucial realization:

To be lost in the light of a true man's love was once her dream. Hers had been a sad awakening. All other affections save that of and for her children had been in her experience a delusion, and she began to think that a woman's destiny is not necessarily dependent for its fulfilment on possessing a greater or less amount of marital … love. (III, 353)

Starbuck hedges Sally's sexual guilt by disclosing that there had been a secret and supposedly invalid wedding with the baby's father and, for the sake of his readers' romantic expectations, gives her a happy marriage after all (though only in a footnote to the end of the book), with the village schoolmaster who starts a communal farm where degraded farm laborers are transformed into clean, enlightened citizens. Starbuck's book is an attack on the persistence of "this ridiculous notion of caste … in spite of the evidence afforded by almost every town and village, that the secret of the change that transmutes the boor naturally into the gentleman accidentally, is education" (II, 256). The sensational story of Sally and her bigamous entanglements may simply be sauce to keep the reader interested, but it has the effect of adding sex to the other accidents of birth that unjustly limit human aspirations and achievements.

The novels we have been considering emphasize the social sources of woman's unchastity, but few are problem novels that show the woman as a victim of society. Rather, the problem is that women use their bodies for social ends; they try to dispose of their own persons in their own best interests. Physical passion is not often mentioned. Rhoda Broughton's Not Wisely but Too Well (Dublin University Magazine, 1865-66; 3 vols. 1867) was shocking not because the heroine fell but because she wanted to, continuously, in a series of climactic scenes of encounter and renunciation repeated for three volumes. The novel was first published as a serial in Dublin University Magazine, a relatively expensive and small-circulation periodical edited by Broughton's uncle, Sheridan LeFanu. No English publisher would accept it as a library novel until it had been extensively revised. The crucial revision is intriguing. In the three-volume edition the heroine's married lover is fatally injured on the way to a ball, and she sits solicitously by his deathbed trying to provide religious comfort. She then joins a charitable sisterhood. In the first version he gets to the ball, takes her out into the garden, and shoots her—dead. Why is that more shocking? Perhaps because violent martyrdom in defense of her virginity would make Kate a saint, and she had already been too passionate to go to heaven without spending some time repenting. But there is also a social consideration. In the previous confrontation, which is nearly the same in both versions, Kate refuses to yield for the good of his soul; she loves him too much to let him damn himself by ruining her. That is an acceptable heroic role for a woman. In the rejected version's garden scene, she will not yield because she does not want to lose her own chance of heaven. When the conflict between herself and a man comes to the last extremity, she puts herself first. For the publisher, heroic martyrdom was not permissible but compassionate sacrifice was.

The religious emphasis itself was probably also shocking. The book seems to imply that only fear of God keeps women chaste; that without religion Kate would listen to the animal promptings of her body. Most of the sensation novels have a worldly frame of reference. Women commit human errors and are punished by human consequences: loss of caste, inability to bear children, unhappy marriage. The death penalty is no longer inevitable. Nor did the earthly punishment have to be so severe that sexual error became the one central fact of woman's existence. The heroic scale is diminished; women remain women even with imperfections.

The most common punishment is loss of the opportunity to fill woman's natural role. Only rarely does an unchaste heroine have Ruth's motive to rise. It is almost as if the link between intercourse and pregnancy had been broken. Motherhood, like inheritance, is a magic reward reserved for the virtuous. Aurora Floyd has no children until her unintentional bigamy is relieved by the death of her first husband; the child that Griffith Gaunt got bigamously on Mercy Vint dies so that she can marry Sir George Neville and have nine that are healthy and sound. The Fast Young Lady's son is born dead. Elfrida Treherne's child is deformed because of the passion she felt for her husband's cousin while carrying it. Adelaide, in Ravenshoe (Macmillan's 1861-62; 3 vols. 1862), who had become Lord Welter's mistress in order to force him to marry her, breaks her back in a fall while hunting and grows softened, beloved and sterile. (We might also notice that Rosamond Lydgate's ill-fated horseback ride in Middlemarch [4 vols. 1871-72] is an act of defiance towards her husband and leads to miscarriage.)

Motherhood has a simple symbolic value instead of exerting a moral or psychological influence on woman's character. Good women have children and bad women reject them. Lady Audley leaves her legitimate child with her drunken father; Lucy of Liberty Hall, Oxon. gives her illegitimate one to its father because she has "had enough" of "the brat" (III, 202). The hero of Land at Last (Temple Bar, 1865-66; 3 vols. 1866)¹⁷ makes a daringly unconventional marriage to a woman rescued from the streets, and the reader knows for certain that the marriage was a mistake when she refuses to nurse their child.

The good mother was still a standard image for the good woman. But the sentimental novel's innocent heroine virtually disappeared. The lengthy pursuit of a helpless girl by a vicious man is one sensational plot conspicuous by its absence. The fair fragile virtuous innocent, when she remains, is reduced to the role of ingenue, waiting quietly in the drawing room to marry the hero when he gets free of all those interesting entanglements. The sensation novel depended on action, and an admirable, matrimonially negotiable middle-class virgin could not do much; the code of chaperonage required that even in her own house a single woman under thirty could not talk to an unrelated man unless a married gentlewoman or mature servant was in the room. But a married woman had freedom of movement, affairs to direct, and servants to order around. She might have a settled income at her disposal. And she also had, like lower-class girls, an aura of sexual knowledge. George Treherne (in Marryat's Love's Conflict) has an image of the girl he wants to marry, "a pure, half-celestial being, refined and delicate in the extreme, with a mind cultivated and attuned to be the companion of his own. He had not thought of her as very beautiful so much as very pure in mind and body …" (I. 78). The woman he falls in love with is his cousin William's pregnant wife, Elfrida.

Marriage gave women freedom of action; motherhood, as in novels of previous decades, allowed them to exhibit acceptable strength. The husband, however, had to be removed from the scene so that the woman could demonstrate her self-sufficiency—and so that she could play a romantic role. Even the ingenue was sometimes married; in Ouida's Under Two Flags (3 vols. 1867) the woman who eventually marries the hero is introduced first as a child and reappears later as a rich virgin widow—her husband died before the wedding night, leaving her plenty of money, a changed name, and the status to roam around North Africa. Both Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade (as well as many lesser novelists) used the complications of Scots, Irish, medieval, civil, and foreign marriage ceremonies to provide heroines with sexual experience. A husband's bigamy was often simply a device for supplying a woman who was "neither maid, wife, nor widow."¹⁸ These legal technicalities show a certain slippage in moral absolutes; the moralist uses crime in order to show that it does not pay, but the sensationalist has a tendency to reveal that it was not actually crime.

Some sensation novelists must have resorted to intentional and cold-blooded pervarication to make their own conceptions about women acceptable to the mid-Victorian audience and publishers. The leading female authors could hardly sympathize with retiring helpless women even if society said they ought. Most of them wrote for a living because they had incompetent or incapable men (either husbands or fathers) dangling somewhere in the background. Some, in addition, had their own secrets to conceal. Florence Marryat was separated from her husband. The five children of Mary Braddon and John Maxwell were born before 1874, when the death of Maxwell's first wife (who was in a mental asylum) allowed them to marry.¹⁹ Both of the leading male sensationalists had semipublic unorthodox private lives; Reade kept house for twenty-five years with an actress, Mrs. Seymour,²⁰ and Wilkie Collins lived for the latter half of his life with Caroline Graves, the original Woman in White, though in the meantime Martha Rudd bore him three children.²¹

The fascination with women's strength touches on the scene that dominates the pornography of the period. Most of the riding women carry a whip; Anonyma brings it down across the face of a gentleman who looks rudely at her in the park; Lucy of Liberty Hall, Oxon. is said to have horsewhipped a man; Aurora Floyd beats a stableboy for kicking her dog. Charles Reade was so obsessed by strong-armed women that one recent biographer explains nearly the whole canon as a sadomasochistic fantasy resulting from the suppression of Oedipal love. The pattern was noticed by contemporaries.

Mr. Reade's repertoire is limited. He has one brilliant, splendid woman, full of noble instincts, of passion and generosity … and he has another simple, tender, wise feminine creature who is the rival, the conqueror, the defender … and between these two he has a fancy for placing a very weak, sometimes contemptible, man.²²

Reade subsumes sexuality in the maternal function. In The Cloister and the Hearth (4 vols. 1861) Margaret is pregnant and socially compromised after a medievally binding betrothal of which she has no proof. She practices medicine to support her child and her senile father until the law catches up and stops her. When her betrothed reappears—he had become a priest because he thought Margaret was dead—she stage-manages a "miracle" to scare him out of his hermit's cell and convince him that his duty is to relieve misery in the parish. She becomes his housekeeper and district visitor and promises that she will make sure he keeps his vow of celibacy even if he should be tempted by living in the same house with her.

The woman in a conventional social role—who was totally dependent on a man—was little use to the sensation novelist. The striking thing about Reade's Margaret is the complete reversal: she takes care of her child and her husband and even her father. Her practical abilities are held up for us to admire. The unchaste girl who was forgiven in novels of the thirties and forties was always in some measure a victim; those qualities that the male novelist (like Bulwer-Lytton or Froude) adored derived from her submissiveness, her naturalness, her innocence, her quality of being presocial—uncorrupted by society. She was an ideal child. Collins and Reade, on the other hand, portrayed

the ideal mother, who chose not to be a victim, and whose strength lay in her social skills. The men are unworldly; the women can cope. They manipulate society instead of abjuring it.

Collins' No Name (All the Year Round, 1862-63; 3 vols. 1862) hurries through the illegal connection of the elder Vanstones retrospectively in the opening chapters. "Mrs. Vanstone," even at forty-four, is more interesting and more refined than either of her daughters. A generation earlier, she had chosen to save Vanstone from ruin; he was drifting into hopelessness and dissipation after he had pensioned off the adventuress who "led him on, with merciless cunning" (Ch. 13) into matrimony. The second Mrs. Vanstone uses woman's superior capacity for social maneuvering towards a good end:

she set herself from the first, to accomplish the one foremost purpose of so living with him, in the world's eye, as never to raise the suspicion that she was not his lawful wife. The women are few indeed, who cannot resolve firmly, scheme patiently, and act promptly, where the dearest interests of their lives are concerned …. she took all the needful precautions, in those early days, which her husband's less ready capacity had not the art to devise—precautions to which they were largely indebted for the preservation of their secret in later times. (Ch. 13)

One other feature of the sensation novel also tended to weaken the ethereal image of womanhood. In their search for ever greater and greater emotional effects, novelists touched on taboos for the sake of the response that they generated. There was a run on scenes of women nursing their infants. Birth became a physical process and not merely a spiritual one; morning sickness and postpartum weakness were used as plot devices; new fathers emerged shaken and restored to moral rectitude by realizing what their wives had gone through in the birth chamber. Things that could not be talked about were approached by innuendo; the abortion den in Armadale (Cornhill, 1844-66; 2 vols. 1866) might have been shielded from all but the very knowing by Collins' description of it as "a house rightly described as filled with wicked secrets, and people rightly represented as in danger of feeling the grasp of the law" because they are "skilled in criminal concealment" (Bk. 4, Ch. 4) but many novelists counted on readers' ability to gauge the suitable date of a marriage by counting off nine months backwards. W. W. Reade described Lucy, who had made a sudden trip to France and was gone for over a year, on her wedding day: "Her face was pale but beautiful; her arms were white, and finely molded; her bosom displayed more embonpoint than is usually found in young unmarried women."²³ Novelists used blood as well as sex; accidents are gory; heroines (even virtuous ones) die laboring for breath and coughing up blood; poison-takers have their stomachs pumped; and the final reconciliation in Griffith Gaunt is underlined when Griffith supplies a transfusion for Kate after a difficult childbirth.

Novelists had evidence of public interest in these topics. One secondary effect of the 1857 Divorce Act was that divorce court proceedings—which tended to be messy, since adultery had to be proven—were reported in the press. Though careful families probably did not let unmarried girls read the newspaper, women did buy Cecil Beeton's The Queen, a sixpenny weekly journal first issued in September 1861. It offered fashions and needlework, reports from Buckingham and Balmoral and, almost every week, a long illustrated account of a railway or steamship disaster and a column of criminal news headed "The Black Book":

A Mr. John Grayson Farquhar, of Grange-road, Smallheath, shot, on the evening of Thursday week, a girl of 20, named Elizabeth Brooks, who had been living under his roof as housekeeper, and had borne him a child, which is dead …

A respectable young woman, at Littleborough, near Rochdale, having incurred public disgrace by concealing the birth of a child (which was found dead), the brother went out and hanged himself, and the reputed father of the child has done the same.²⁴

Novelists could be witty in pointing out the distance between people's taste in excitements and the brittle surface of prudery, as when Henry Kingsley carefully referred to "Br—ch-s" in a novel about bastardy, seduction and the death-throes of a whore.²⁵ Editors constantly imposed standards of taste. Florence Marryat removed a good deal the caressing from Love's Conflict at Geraldine Jewsbury's insistence.²⁶ Charles Dickens' eye was apparently caught by a questionable phrase in No Name. Chapter 13 of the three-volume edition says that "The accident of their father having been married, when he first met with their mother, has made them the outcasts of the whole social community." A reviewer protested that "we have often heard an illegal connexion and its result euphemistically designated as a 'misfortune;' but this is the first time, as far as we are aware, in which a lawful marriage has been denominated an 'accident.'"²⁷ The objectionable phrase had not appeared in the serial chapter that Dickens printed in All the Year Round on 10 May 1862.

The revisions made for the London publication of Not Wisely but Too Well reveal some details about the standard of propriety in the sixties. Many of the corrections come under the heading of good taste. In the earlier version Dare describes his last meeting with his legal wife thus:

"I could have split laughing if I had not felt so inclined to be sick. I thought she'd never have done slobbering over me; and I can tell you, Kate, it is a serious thing to have a great female six feet six hanging all her weight round your neck. Such a strapper she is, Kitty!"²⁸

For book publication the passage was altered to:

"I should have died laughing if I had been spectator instead of sufferer. I thought she would never have ended the enacting of the Prodigal Son over me. Six fatted calves would not have been too many to slay in honour of my return. Such a giantess as she is, too, Kitty!" (II, 16-17)

The heroine is made more refined—she says "O nonsense" instead of "Oh bother"—and the niceties of physical propriety are observed: at one point in the original Dare catches Kate by the arm, while in the novel it is by the hand. In the revision, Broughton added paragraphs of commentary to assure the reader that she is not "defending the girl" or trying to make Dare attractive (I, 273).

In doing so she violates her original conception. Removing the physiological detail forces Broughton to deny her heroine's sensual experience and keeps the reader from realizing that Kate was physically attracted to Dare. In this passage, for example, the italicized phrases appear only in the first published version:

… and he wrapped his arms around her as she stood before him, tighter, tighter, till they were like fetters of iron binding her; and the strain that fulfilled all the wild longing, the burning dreams of weeks, was quite painful; and he bent down his head from his stately height to her small uplifted face, nearer, nearer, till their lips met …²⁹

The words Broughton had to leave out—the italicized words—are for me a fairly accurate description of the sexual tension that precedes orgasm, even in a virgin: kissing, masturbating, fantasizing. Many similar emendations indicate that the description of a woman's feelings that came from the experience or imagination of a rural clergyman's twenty-two-year-old daughter was not, in the eyes of a London publisher, fit to be read. The Times found even the revised version "unreal and repulsive."³⁰ Yet the book was highly successful, which suggests that Broughton found a responsive chord among readers. Not Wisely but Too Well was published anonymously, and it was reported that the Reverend Broughton strictly forbade his daughter Rhoda to read it.³¹ In point of fact, he had died in 1863, before the novel came out, which destroys the truth of the anecdote but makes its wide circulation perhaps even more significant, because it reveals the subversive glee with which some women looked at men's opinions about what they ought to know and feel.

Few of these sensation novels have any claim to literary survival except as a reflection of the decade's interests. Changes in the publishing business and the reading audience that were not wholly understood at the time explain why sensationalism received more serious critical attention than we now give to similar kinds of entertainment.

The important innovation in publishing, which took place almost exactly at the beginning of the decade, was the shilling monthly magazine. The older monthlies had been so expensive (two shillings and sixpence, or even three shillings and sixpence in the case of the New Monthly Magazine) that they were read primarily by the gentry and the upper reaches of the middle class. The old monthlies saw their public as the educated, the cultured, the influential; most supported an identifiable political philosophy through articles on economics and public policy. Even Bentley's Miscellany, which was founded in 1837 on the strength of its editor's Oliver Twist and later passed from Dickens' hands into Ainsworth's, printed only one serialized novel at a time. Throughout the fifties none of the monthly magazines had a circulation of more than six or eight thousand copies per issue.

Around 1860 paper prices dropped sharply and, as with the penny magazines two decades earlier, many publishers saw the potential profits to be made from larger sales of a cheaper article. Cornhill began in 1860 with an astonishing circulation of 120,000. That figure could not hold—it depended on novelty and lack of competition—but by late in the decade Argosy, Belgravia, Cornhill, Macmillan's, St. James, St. Paul's and Temple Bar were each selling around twenty thousand copies an issue.³²

Financially, the readers must largely have overlapped with the library audience; people who could afford a shilling a month for a magazine could also spend a guinea a year to subscribe to Mudie's. The difference is that choosing which magazine to buy gave them a more direct influence over what was published. The two authors whose sensation novels were smash hits early in the decade soon had their own magazines: Braddon founded Belgravia in 1866 and Mrs. Wood took over Argosy in 1867. Magazine serials had a tremendous impact on book sales, because a three-volume edition was usually published just before the end of the periodical run. No Name concluded in All the Year Round on 17 January 1863. When the book was published complete in an edition of four thousand on 31 December 1862, all but four hundred copies were sold by the end of the day.³³

The shilling monthly colored the style and content of sixties writing. The number of competing magazines created a great demand for novels. Serialization encouraged the accumulation of incident (as opposed to the leisurely development of character) and the construction of an exciting peak in each installment. (The pace, not the subject matter, of Adam Bede made Blackwood decide to publish it in volumes rather than, as he had first intended, in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine.) The dramatic withholding of secrets kept the reader buying until the last issue. And the audience that influenced style, topic and moral standards by choosing what to buy was no longer simply the educated reading class.

The greatly expanded magazine-buying audience was made up of people who had lacked either the half-crown or the serious interest to subscribe to the older periodicals. Both factors had an influence. The less weighty format ate into sales of the established monthlies; Blackwood's circulation declined steadily throughout the sixties, and Bentley's first tried running more fiction and then merged with the shilling Temple Bar in 1868. But there were also many, especially in the lower to middling ranks of the commercial and administrative middle class, who had been priced out of the market at half a crown.

We do not need to go so far as the Quarterly Review article which found the penny novel of the forties and fifties to be "the original germ … to which all varieties of sensational literature may be referred"³⁴ to realize that the new novel-buying public was partly composed of those who might have been reading penny weekly magazines twenty years earlier. The economy was expanding; one historian says that three-fifths of the people who could be described as middle class in 1880 entered the class since 1840.³⁵ The story of an apparently false marriage made valid by discovering the truth, the "have your cake and eat it too" morality that criticizes the aristocracy and yet gives the heroine a title at the end, and the paradoxical combination of frankness with family-centered morality are all features of the Family Herald or the London Journal. Indeed, even the dramatic method reminds us that puzzles were popular in the penny magazines; with any sensational author less skillful than Wilkie Collins the reader generally figures out the answers long before the characters do. In the sixties we can see some direct overlap in audiences. Lady Audley's Secret was "second serialized" in the London Journal in 1863³⁶ and was successful enough to be followed by another story of Braddon's.³⁷ A few years later a Family Herald reader wrote to ask who Ouida really was.³⁸ In 1868 Reade reissued in hard covers the novel he had written for the London Journal eleven years earlier; he retitled it The Double Marriage to emphasize the bigamy theme. Many sensation novels were translated immediately to the other mass form and were successful as melodramas.

Until the 1860s it had been possible to assume that literature very successful with the novel-reading audience was probably worth reading. If books of the sensational type ceased to attract critical notice by the end of the decade, it was not because they had disappeared but because "bestseller" was on its way to becoming a pejorative term. In another ten years the future poet laureate, Alfred Austin (who had himself tried his hand at a sensation novel) told the public that "High Art" could not be written in a democracy because commercial success was "in the hands of a clever, pushing, semi-educated middle-class."³⁹ George Eliot was the last English novelist to enjoy both immediate popularity and lasting acclaim. After the 1860s writers and critics alike began to assume that the majority were Philistines.

Moralizers throughout the sixties believed that sensation literature was a symptom of rot at the core of society. But others defended the vogue. "E. B." wrote in Mrs. Wood's Argosy that people sought fiction to relax with because of "the very thoughtfulness of the age."⁴⁰ Escape reading gives us a clue about what is being escaped from; it may reflect a reverse image of the tone of the times.

At the turn of the nineteenth century the sensational form of literature was the Gothic. The novel of the sixties, like the Gothic, had an aristocratic cast of characters, used suspense to elicit terror, introduced perversion and abnormality, and depended heavily on the inheritance theme. It differed, however, in two important ways: the much smaller role of the supernatural—which was central to most Gothic novels—and the disappearance of the vapid, vapoury, helpless heroine.

The Gothic novel's supernaturalism was a reaction to the age of reason; it suggested that there were forces abroad in the world which could not be comprehended. The domesticated or urbanized Gothic tale of the 1840s—often published in penny numbers for poorer readers—used the real terrors of city life as a substitute for the imagined terrors of haunted castle and ruined monastery. James Malcolm Rymer's The White Slave (penny numbers, 1844-45) has a poor girl pursued through number after number by a villainous colonel. Her additional hazards include the poor law, misguided charitable ladies, needlework contractors, pompously respectable employers whose sons take liberties on the back stairs, and wretched prison conditions. Here, as in much of Dickens, the very geography of the city is as frightening as the subterranean passages of a medieval castle.

W. H. Ainsworth's Old Saint Paul's (1841)—the first novel to be serialized in an English newspaper—is an interesting transition-piece. Ainsworth uses the standard Gothic plot of the chased chaste as a string to hold together scenes of urban horrors magnified by fire and plague. Amabel is an innocent victim, but the grocer's apprentice who had tried for month after month to save her wins a knighthood for his role in halting the fire and marries an heiress.

The Gothic novel gave readers helplessness as an escape from rationalism and responsibility. In Ainsworth, in 1841, the heroine is still helpless, but the hero is an incarnation of initiative and self-help. By the 1860s helplessness, even of women, had apparently lost its attraction. The sensation novel provided escape from an increasingly complex urban economic and social environment that limited the individual's freedom of action, and from a decade colored by lack of certainty: by scientific questions about the special creation of the human race, by religious doubt. The sensation novel exorcised helplessness by ascribing evil to the actions of a single villain and then defeating that villain. The events that characters can't control arise not from social or supernatural forces but from deliberate human actions: wills, deathbed promises, secrets, intrigues. Detective skill and rational process and playing by the rules restore order at the end. The Gothic novel put the irrational in escapism; the sensational took it out again. It was a heroic literature for an age that had secret doubts about the individual's controlling role in the scheme of things.

George Meredith has been called the first "highbrow novelist."⁴¹ His "plain story" about an unchaste woman is anything but plain; his hero and villain are the same person; social conventions and rigid morality are to blame but there is no alternative good to praise; and the interpretation of Dahlia's purification through suffering is open to doubt.

Rhoda Fleming (3 vols.) was published in 1865, five years after Meredith had become a reader for Chapman and Hall. In it he abandoned the highly individual style and restricted social milieu of his earlier books for what seems in part a deliberate attempt to use his new understanding of a publisher's business relationship with the customers and in part a serious reflection inspired by the manuscripts he had been reading by the gross. Virtually every element of character and situation might be duplicated in any number of novels from the early 1860s: the farmer's daughter drawn to the city by her search for excitement, the son of a baronet-banker who abandons her because of class and family, the widowed adventuress over whom two duels have been fought, the bigamist who ships his wife off to America so he can marry for money, the misappropriated funds and intercepted letters.

Meredith was not, however, a sensationalist in technique. Many of the most gripping scenes (Robert's beating, his attack on Algy, the climactic moments of Dahlia's wedding to Sedgett) take place offstage. Some questions are never answered. Incomplete narration and shifting viewpoints had been used, of course, by Wilkie Collins (or, for that matter, by Mrs. Crowe a generation earlier) but in Meredith's book no detective comes along to pick up the loose ends. J. C. Jeaffreson's review in the Athenaeum raised a common contemporary objection; the story, he says, goes "slipping through the reader's fingers."⁴² Meredith says in chapter 12 that the British public "will bear anything, so long as villainy is punished." The mass public will not, however, bear figuring out for themselves who the villains are and whether they have been punished or not.

Most of the characters accept class-based sexual codes. Edward abandons Dahlia because a lower-class wife would damage him socially, though his friends forgive "the lesser sin of his deceiving and ruining the girl" (Ch. 8). Public appearance and social prejudice also bind Dahlia's family; her father puts his farm on the market because—since everyone assumes that a man is responsible for his daughter's behavior—he can no longer hold up his head in front of the neighbors. Rhoda's part in the crucifixion of her sister reveals an absolute confusion between purity and respectability. Rhoda refuses to believe that Dahlia has done anything wrong. If her sister will only get married, her faith will be vindicated; Rhoda sees marriage as a proof of chastity rather than a substitute for it.

Each marriage in the book is a symbol of woman's surrender. In the final movement of the story, the strong woman is humbled. Rhoda is caught between the horns of duty and desire, the same dilemma which led her to impale her sister's heart in the name of duty. Rhoda once exulted that "she, alone of women, was free from that wretched mesh called love" (Ch. 42). But faced with the promise to marry Algy—which she made to mitigate the consequences of her own action—and the realization that she loves Robert, she grows "weary of thinking and acting on her own responsibility and would gladly have abandoned her will." She tells Robert "'I am not fit to be my own mistress'" (Ch. 43).

Dahlia herself is shown almost entirely by indirection, and it is hard to know what we should make of her. Meredith insists that she not be seen in light of the "foul sentimentalism" of "soiled purity … lost innocence, the brand of shame" (Ch. 30). She avoids the victim role by taking responsibility for herself: "she had voluntarily stripped her spirit bare of evasion, and seen herself for what she was; pleading no excuse" (Ch. 30). She refuses to consider social judgments; she does not mind what people will say about her; she drinks poison rather than go with the "husband" who has been arranged for her. The cliche rendering of Dahlia's sanctification—that her soul "shone in her eyes and in her work, a lamp to her little neighbourhood"—and the moral of her final words—'"Help poor girls'"—were added to the novel when Meredith revised it for the collected edition of 1886. The original version of 1865 closes with Edward's puzzled realization that the purified woman—the woman free of society and sensuality—has escaped Eve's curse and is independent of man. Does the perfectly pure woman indeed have no heart? Is Dahlia something more or something less than human once she is "purified" of desire and emotion?

Thomas Hardy's Desperate Remedies (3 vols. 1871) is often considered an embarrassing beginner's piece to be explained away as a use of sensational material in order to secure publication. Hardy began as a social critic; Macmillan wrote him in 1869, when rejecting The Poor Man and the Lady, that "your pictures of character among Londoners, and especially the upper classes, are sharp, clear, incisive, and in many respects true"—but, he feared, in many respects comparable to the sort of thing printed in Reynolds's Miscellany.⁴³ Chapman and Hall were willing to publish but recommended against it; their reader, George Meredith, advised the aspiring novelist to forget about social reform and "attempt a novel with a purely artistic purpose, giving it a more complicated 'plot.'"⁴⁴

And so he did. At first reading, Hardy's use of the sensation materials appears simply bungled. The changes of identity and secrets of the past are obvious; any reader of sixties novels knows what it means when an unmarried girl suddenly makes a long trip to the Continent for her health and looks as suspiciously at death certificates as at marriage lines. In comparison to Collins, Hardy seems plodding and self-conscious in dropping the clues, as, for example, when the otherwise characterless housekeeper just happens to fold a hair left on a pillow into a scrap of paper so that it will be available, ten chapters later, when it is needed. Yet the method itself—arriving at a rational explanation for every detail, and using every detail to build the final situation—comes, in Hardy's hands, to imply cosmic interdependence. The characters' fortunes do not depend on individual efforts, or virtue, or villainy, or even on some dark and malignant fate but on half-chance events that arise from the intersection with other lives. One story's hero, the author muses, is a walk-on in the story of another life. Trains are delayed not by spectacular accidents but because it is Christmas and everyone is travelling; concealments arise from motives no darker than self-consciousness. The ultimate effect expresses the very sense of helplessness that popular sensationalists exorcised. Hardy's late novels are hardly less sensational than Desperate Remedies but the complaint ceased to be made, not only because the vogue for the term had passed but because, as Darwin, Marx and Freud seeped into intellectual consciousness, the sense of helplessness took on a philosophical dimension.

Hardy elaborates stock sensational conventions. Miss Aldclyffe displaces her maternal emotion onto Cytheria, the daughter of the man she did not marry because she knew that he would hate her when he found out she was not a virgin. The situation is conventional, but the scene in which Miss Aldclyffe comes to Cytheria's bed, tries to turn her against all men, and pleads for her love extends Charles Reade's blurring of the distinction between maternal and sexual love into uncharted territory.

Chastity is not terribly high on Hardy's list of virtues. Anne Seaway is perhaps a conventional whore with a heart of gold: "Many of these women who own to no moral code show considerable magnanimity when they see people in trouble. To act right simply because it is one's duty is proper; but a good action which is the result of no law of reflection shines more than any" (Ch. 19). But duty, indeed, is the problem, because duty implies some one or some thing more important than the individual. When Cytheria discovers immediately after her wedding to Manston that she loves Edward, her brother speaks for society:

"Many a woman has gone to ruin herself … and brought those who love her into disgrace, by acting on such impulses as possess you now. I have a reputation to lose as well as you … Besides, your duty to society, and those about you, requires that you should live with (at any rate) all the appearance of a good wife, and try to love your husband."

"Yes—my duty to society," she murmured. "But ah, Owen, it is difficult to adjust our outer and inner life with perfect honesty to all! Though it may be right to care more for the benefit of the many than for the indulgence of your own single self, when you consider that the many, and duty to them, only exist to you through your own existence, what can be said? … perhaps, far in time to come, when I am dead … they will pause just for an instant, and give a sigh to me, and think 'Poor girl,' believing they do great justice to my memory by this. But they will never, never realize that it was my single opportunity of existence, as well as of doing my duty, which they are regarding …" (Ch. 13)

The whole basis of the thematic movement has changed. There can be no sin, suffering, purification and redemption for the unchaste woman because there is no final reward, no eternal scale. Miss Aldclyffe is neither a tragic victim nor a wicked adventuress nor a purified heroine. She made a mistake, was sorry, and tried to rectify it, but good motives are not enough; her maternal love leads to further sorrow. "'Pity me—O pity me'" she says to Cytheria towards the end. '"To die unloved is more than I can bear!'" (Ch. 21) In a universe stumbling towards darkness human love takes on new significance, not as a cement for the family-based social order but as a temporary shelter against loneliness and doubt.

Neither Hardy's novel nor Meredith's was widely enough read at the time of publication to enter into the mass consciousness in any direct fashion; Desperate Remedies was remaindered by Smith's library after three months on the shelves and Rhoda Fleming was the most sparsely and unfavorably reviewed of Meredith's novels.⁴⁵ Though they grew from the same time and class conditioned consciousness and made use of the same plot material as the more ephemeral sensation novels, Rhoda Fleming and Desperate Remedies offered problems instead of solutions.

In the sensation novels proper, a woman's unchastity is used, often, simply to violate decorum for the sake of an emotional effect. The interesting moral issues are seldom followed to their conclusion; often they seem no more than the accidental insertions of an intelligent author writing at speed. In very broad terms, however, popular sensation novels react conservatively to changing mores. The woman who is, like a man, sexual is apt to be bad because she is also financially ambitious or powermad or in other ways masculinized. The attacks are mitigated, however, by a recognition that economic dependence and social subordination are imposed by woman's conventional role and by a realization that propriety is not necessarily the same thing as chastity. When—as in Collins and Reade—the strong women are admired, it is because they have the power, motherlike, to intervene between men and a sometimes undesirable world.

Notes

¹ The term "sensation novel" was first used in September 1861 in the Sixpenny Magazine, according to Kathleen Tillotson, "The Lighter Reading of the Eighteen Sixties," preface to The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), p. xxi.

² H. L. Mansel, "Sensation Novels," Quarterly Review, 113 (1863), 490.

³ "Recent Novels: Their Moral and Religious Teaching," London Quarterly, 27 (1866), 104.

⁴ Adeline Sergeant, "Mrs. Crowe, Mrs. Archer Clive, Mrs. Henry Wood," in Women Novelists of Queen Victoria's Reign (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1897), p. 181.

⁵ Mansel, p. 488.

⁶ Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Aurora Floyd (London: Tinsley, 1863), I, 33.

⁷ The sporting novelist Robert Smith Surtees also disliked women on horseback, though on slightly different grounds; his targets were the feminine types who joined the fox-hunt for romantic reasons and thereby interfered with masculine pleasures. See Ch. 15, "The Hunting Woman," in Frederick Watson, Robert Smith Surtees: A Critical Study (London: Harrap, 1933).

⁸Athenaeum, 22 Oct. 1864, p. 523.

⁹Anonyma or Fair but Frail (1864); The Soiled Dove: A Biography of a Fast Young Lady Familiarly Known as "The Kitten" (1865). Other titles include Skittles, Incognita, The Beautiful Demon, Love Frolics of a Young Scamp, "Left Her Home", and Fanny White. The series was originally published by George Vickers and reissued about 1884 by C. H. Clark. All were anonymous; the authorship has been attributed to W. Stephens Hayward, E. L. Blanchard, Bracebridge Hemyng, and others. Sadleir feels that Hemyng, who wrote the section on prostitution in London for Mayhew and also produced a great number of cheap railway novels, was probably responsible for at least the earlier books of the series; see Michael Sadleir, Nineteenth Century Fiction: A Bibliographical Record (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1951), II, 8.

¹⁰ Elipses in the original. The Saturday Review called Liberty Hall, Oxon. "the filthiest book that has been issued by a respectable English publisher during the lifetime of the present generation"; see 21 Jan. 1860, p. 84.

¹¹ Punctuation is taken from the first edition, II, 107-08. The cheap editions tend to be more liberal with exclamation points and italics.

¹² Margaret Maison, "Adulteresses in Agony," The Listener, 14 Jan. 1961, p. 134.

¹³ Amy Cruse, The Victorians and Their Books (London: Allen and Unwin, 1935), p. 325.

¹⁴ Charles W. Wood, Memorials of Mrs. Henry Wood (London: Bentley, 1894), p. 248.

¹⁵Lady Audley's Secret, by Mary Elizabeth Braddon; serialized in Robin Goodfellow (6 July—28 Sept. 1861, unfinished) and in Sixpenny Magazine from March, 1862; published in three volumes by Tinsley on 1 Oct. 1862 with eight further three-volume editions by early 1863. The profits enabled Tinsley to build a villa which he graciously named Audley Lodge.

¹⁶ "Desperate Remedies: Sensation Novels of the 1860's," Victorian Newsletter, No. 49 (1976), p. 4.

¹⁷Land at Last was published in Temple Bar under the name of the magazine's editor, Edmund Yates. William Tinsley, in Random Recollections of an Old Publisher (London: Simkin, Marshall, 1900), I, 143, says that most or all of the book was written by Frances Sarah Hoey.

¹⁸ Charles Reade, Griffith Gaunt, Ch. 43.

¹⁹ Robert Lee Wolff, "Devoted Disciple," Harvard Library Bulletin, 22 (1974), 6.

²⁰ Judging from Reade's character as interpreted in Wayne Burns, Charles Reade: A Study in Victorian Authorship (New York: Bookman Associates, 1961), the relationship with Mrs. Seymour could have been physically innocent. Reade did, however, have an early alliance with a fisher girl, and his will acknowledged their child.

²¹ Kenneth Robinson, Wilkie Collins (New York: Macmillan, 1952), p. 36.

²² Margaret Oliphant, "Charles Reade's Novels," Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 106 (1869), 490.

²³Liberty Hall, Oxon., III, 205.

²⁴The Queen, 7 Sept. 1861, p. 11.

²⁵Ravenshoe, Ch. 66.

²⁶ The text of the first edition shows that Marryat has carried out Jewsbury's suggestions quoted in Jeanne Rosenmayer Fahnestock, "Geraldine Jewsbury: The Power of the Publisher's Reader," Nineteenth Century Fiction, 28 (1973), 253-72.

²⁷ Mansel, p. 296.

²⁸Dublin University Magazine, 66 (1865), 505.

²⁹ I, 247; Dublin University Magazine, 66 (1865), 15.

³⁰Times, 25 Dec. 1867, p. 4.

³¹ Cruse, p. 332.

³² Alvar Ellegard, "The Readership of the Periodical Press in Mid-Victorian Britain," Victorian Periodicals Newsletter, No. 13 (1971), p. 18.

³³ Robinson, Wilkie Collins, pp. 168-69.

³⁴ Mansel, pp. 505-06.

³⁵ H. J. Hanham, The Reformed Electoral System in Great Britain, 1832-1914 (London: Historical Association, 1968), p. 12.

³⁶LJ, 37 (21 Mar. 1863) - 38 (15 Aug. 1863).

³⁷ "The Outcasts," expressly written for the London Journal and commencing on 12 Sept. 1863, p. 161. Braddon also wrote for Reynolds's Miscellany and for other cheap magazines.

³⁸FH, 31 (6 Sept. 1873), 300.

³⁹ Alfred Austin, "Art and Democracy," Cornhill, 40 (1879), 231.

⁴⁰ "The Sensation Novel," Argosy, 18 (1874), 142.

⁴¹ L. T. Hergenhan, "The Reception of George Meredith's Early Novels," Nineteenth Century Fiction, 19 (1964), 214.

⁴²Athenaeum, 14 Oct. 1865, p. 495.

⁴³ William R. Rutland, Thomas Hardy: A Study of His Writings and Their Background (Oxford: Blackwell, 1938), 353-54.

⁴⁴ Florence E. Hardy, The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840-1891 (London: Macmillan, 1928), p. 82.

⁴⁵ L. T. Hergenhan, "Meredith's Attempts to Win Popularity: Contemporary Reaction," Studies in English Literature, 4 (1964), 638.