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For Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens, writing at a time when powerful sectors of the medical profession were increasingly insisting that knowledge of human life would be grounded in physiology rather than psychology, the love-mad woman provided a means of asking what constituted ‘real’ pain. Such women had always raised the question of ‘truth’. Because they have suffered directly by men's falsehood or, indirectly, by the world's inability to guarantee their happiness, they prompt doubt about what can be assured in life. Couching their stories in hyperbole, they nevertheless resist the equation of excess with lying. Although they convey other stories within nineteenth-century fiction — and, in the process, come to mean both more and less than their own desolation — they still command pathos in themselves, even in the unsentimental world of the 1860s.

After Walter Besant completed Wilkie Collins’s unfinished novel, Blind Love (with Collins’s authorization and elaborately detailed instructions), Besant emphatically declared that he had “altered nothing” in the final version. A comparison of the published novel with Collins’s notebook, however, reveals that Besant’s declaration was somewhat disingenuous. In addition to making several significant alternations to Collins’s original plot, the more conservative Besant incorporated both anti-Irish and anti-feminist themes, thus undercutting the more socially progressive narrative originally intended by the deceased author.

This chapter studies images of spectrality that can be found in Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, No Name, Armadale and The Haunted Hotel. It determines that Collins believed that money immorally or illegally acquired makes the self ghostly and visible to the amorality of the economic system. It then introduces ‘The Ghost in the Bank of England’, where Collins addresses the relationship between paper money and the ghostly.

The Enlightenment has one enduring historical paradox. Though it strove to create a society wherein all human are by their very nature equal, it also was the era where skin color became viewed as a difference in human capacity. This chapter takes a close look and study at Wilkie Collins’s novel The Woman in White. The chapter aims to explore the logic of race from the perspective of the impulse to literalize—to make like things manifest into something that can be witnessed. The chapter continues to argue that this impulse to make likeness perceptible emerged mainly as a solution to a particular Enlightenment problem: to make likeness instantaneously visible. The chapter shifts in analysis from Collins novel to the 1856 murder trial of the Rugeley Poisoner, William Palmer, which inspired it. Palmer was a physician that was charged with poisoning his patients under the guise of medicating them. In this exploration of likeness and sameness, Collins’s novel is well suited to the task.

Basil’s Robert Mannion, and No Name’s Magdalen Vanstone are both subject to monomaniacal impulses. In Basil, Collins draws on early-nineteenth-century theories of insanity and moral management, promoted by “alienists” such as John Connolly and J. C. Prichard, which warned of domination by unruly passions. Mannion allows himself to be swept away by his uncontrolled emotions, and therefore contributes to his own mental deterioration. In No Name, Collins makes use of mid-Victorian theories of the will, developed by mental physiologists such as William Benjamin Carpenter, to depict Magdalen as someone who has not been trained to manage her willpower correctly and is therefore overwhelmed by a monomaniacal urge when faced with sudden tragedy. Unlike Mannion, Magdalen also possesses intrinsic reserves of moral strength and endures a series of internal conflicts between her monomania and her ‘better’ nature. In his contemplation of the different aspects which comprise the individual personality, Collis asserts (and so counters mid-century associationist psychology as propounded by men like Alexander Bain) that we are not ‘born with dispositions like blank sheets of paper’, but also insists that our inborn traits may be cultivated for better or for worse.

The form and tone of Wilkie Collins’s fiction are strikingly different from Trollope’s. Instead of naturalism, the perception of breached heirloom sovereignty gives rise to multi-perspectival narration, elaborate plotting, and outlandish events that conduce toward an almost postmodern notion of sovereignty as porous and pluralized. Collins’s mixed-raced characters migrate to the foreground where their unconventional stories stimulate the rendering of that historically cumulative form of experience which Walter Benjamin called Erfahrung. Armadale, a novel begun midway through the US Civil War, uses fictive archeology to explore the disavowed history of Britain’s participation in Atlantic slavery, while The Moonstone, often read as a “mutiny” narrative, traces a multi-authored path to truth. Whereas Ozias Midwinter’s story excavates a submerged Atlantic experience, Ezra Jennings, a character whose crucial piebald knowledge “is entirely out of the experience of the mass of mankind” (388), enables a formal shift from detective narrative to utopian romance.

This chapter looks at the reading communities formed through the personal advertisements on the newspaper's front page. Its second column came to be known in the late 19th century as the “agony column” for its emphasis on personal distress, ranging from pathetic tales of runaway husbands to plaintive cries for attention from lonely hearts. Such heartfelt pleas did not escape the attention of the school of sensation novelists, who were quick to capitalize on the criminal possibilities of the most interactive section of the newspaper through an improbable number of phony marriage announcements, misreported obituaries, and unanswered missing-persons inquiries among their fictional narratives. Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, Ellen Wood's East Lynne, and Mary Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret illustrate how the newspaper could be used to begin a second life. The misuse of advertisements in these novels taps into the at-once stimulating and disturbing implications of anonymity in modern life brought within everyone's reach through the daily press. Audiences were not just reading about other people's lives in the newspaper. They were using the newspaper to change their own.

This chapter discusses Wilkie Collins’s sensation novel The Woman in White (1859–60) in relation to the 1844 Post Office Espionage Scandal, which revealed British government spying against Italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini. Representations of the Post Office Scandal in Parliament and print predict the revision of the Gothic into sensation fiction, helping to create the imaginative space through which the sensation genre could begin to interrogate Gothic national stereotypes and relocate the Gothic plot within modern Britain’s private homes and institutions. The letter-opening scandal and The Woman in White share a central place in a mid-Victorian moment of evolution in the mutually constitutive relationship between Italian and British national identities, generating and reflecting a crisis in Britishness focused on the secret tyrannies concealed beneath the surface of Victorian liberalism that emerged from the collision of British and Italian politics and print culture.

This chapter illustrates how mid-Victorian sensation fiction responds to anxieties exacerbated by nascent Victorian psychology’s attempt to map the self on the corporeal body. Examining the form and focalization of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd (1862–63) and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), this chapter argues that bodies in sensation fiction function both as spectacle, exhibitions of physical instability, and as specimens, case studies on the source of identity. In Aurora Floyd, focalization through an authoritative external perspective provides ‘correct’ interpretations of bodies which have previously been misinterpreted by physiognomy, phrenology, and lineage. In particular, the narrator uses external focalization on disabled villains to manifest how identity appears in bodies and to place eugenic value on those with healthy bodies. By contrast, The Moonstone, lacking authoritative external focalization due to its multiple first-person narrators, uses plot to reveal misinterpretations of disabled bodies, in particular that of Rosanna Spearman. In addition, internally focalized interactions between normate narrators and disabled characters in the novel often cause the narrators to recognize the instability of their own identities and bodies, and thus of normalcy. However, the novel’s overall narrative structure works to control deviance through linearity, which imposes normalcy as a stable, final result.

The argument of this chapter is that the writing of sensation fiction was itself part of the critical endeavour to make sense of the enormous excitement that it produced. There is, in other words, a tendency towards self-investigation and self-reflection inherent in the sensational imagination. Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret and Aurora Floyd, for instance, seem to read and review, repeatedly, the very art that constitutes them. In accordance with Braddon’s letters to Edward Bulwer-Lytton, these novels, being engaged in a quest for their own meaning and social function, are uncertain about the very sensational effects that they helped to create. Likewise, the stories of Wilkie Collins’s Armadale and The Moonstone contain within themselves various models of the creative activity through which they were assembled and made into their characteristically suspended, drawn-out shape. By means of such models, the chapter argues, Collins’s writing makes itself legible, between the lines, as an experimental practice that composes its form as it goes along, rather than on the basis of a predefined plan.

The final chapter analyses the reconfiguration of the Victorian baby in the sensation genre. As sensation novelists participate in social and scientific discourses on infancy, the baby might exemplify theories of infant development or care; more provocatively, its sensationalization showcases how and why particular methods do not work or how normative attitudes require a critical rethinking. Mrs Henry Wood capitalizes on modern mothers’ self-doubts to produce new sources of sensationalism. Babyhood is not merely vulnerable and easily mismanaged, but also a target of criminal intervention, and in the process, Wood identifies parenting practices she disagrees with as a crime. In Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s fiction, by contrast, the baby features as an inadvertent impostor as well as a target in criminal plots. In his complex representations of maternal love for an illegitimate infant who has been removed from its mother, Wilkie Collins challenges normative conceptions of breastfeeding, illegitimacy, and adoption in Victorian Britain. Literary sensationalism, I contend, at once utilizes, criticizes, and thereby transforms images of babyhood in nineteenth-century popular culture. While sensation novelists participated in topical controversies surrounding new expert knowledge of infancy and infant care, genre developments produced as well as traded on changing attitudes to babies. A close look at these interchanges enables us to realize how different and self-conscious as well as culturally central the changing images of infancy were at the time and how they informed debates that still determine discourses on babyhood, baby care, and their expected roles in literature today.

Nowhere is the borrowing from newspapers by novelists so clear as in the case of shipwrecks, the most frequently reported disaster in the Victorian press. This chapter shows that novelists used this wildly popular feature drawn from the pages of Lloyd's List to highlight the impact news could have on domestic life. Although the shipping news has often been regarded as an exclusively male interest of sailors, merchants, and investors, this section of the newspaper was read with equal fervor by domestic women separated by the sea from loved ones. We know this through a remarkable sequence of parallel scenes across the 19th-century novel in which the revelation of private love takes place at the moment when the newspaper ensures that the heroine's admiration will be shared by all of England. Novelists as different as Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, and Charlotte Yonge all recognized the counterintuitive way in which public media enabled the expression of private feeling, a response strikingly evident on dramatic occasions such as the loss of a ship at sea. Such scenes vividly illustrate a new approach to understanding catastrophe in Victorian fiction.

This chapter examines Collins's rewriting of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in Basil (1852), paying particular attention to the transformation of fears related to modern technology and visual culture. Just like Shelley's mad scientist, Basil is fatally pursued and persecuted by a monstrous being. If Mary Shelley sought to revamp the supernatural by moving away from ‘the disadvantages of a mere tale of spectres or enchantment’, Collins revamps dusty ghosts by setting his tale in London at the heart of modern culture. As a consequence, the sublime assault on the senses of the Romantic traveller exploring the Alps becomes an assault on the senses of the consumer. While Dr. Frankenstein is blinded to the horror of his experiment, Basil is bedazzled by the lures of commodity culture, which creates desires and fancies that haunt him and literally lead him to the brink of a precipice. Material culture is a ‘phantasmagoria,’ in Walter Benjamin's terms, which blinds and maddens the consumer, turning the phantasmagorias of the marketplace into a horror motion picture.

Photography was a quintessential new visual technology of the nineteenth century. Chapter 4 studies cartes de visite, or small photographic portraits. These collectible photographs became both popular and controversial during the so-called “sensation” craze of the 1860s. Scholars have largely focused on sensation novels, known for their lurid crime plotlines and outrageous villainesses. Yet sensation was more than merely a literary aesthetic: it was a multimedia phenomenon encompassing both novels and photographs. It responded to new forms of spectacular female celebrity, as seen in the wild popularity of photo portraits of actresses, opera divas, prostitutes, even Queen Victoria. The carte-de-visite medium, circulating women’s portrait photographs in millions of paper copies, perfectly encapsulated sensation’s dialectic between embodiment and mediation, and between individual celebrity and the democratized mass. These themes drive the plots of sensation novels, especially Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White and M. E. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret.