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This chapter explores Conrad's late works in relation to an earlier popular form of women's writing: the sensation novel of the 1860s and 1870s. By comparing Conrad's final, unfinished novel Suspense, and the sensation fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, particularly Lady Audley's Secret (1862), this chapter shows the extent to which Conrad was indebted to the methods of female sensationalism right up to the end of his life.

The introduction provides an overview of the intertwined strands which run through Creating character. Sensation fiction is introduced as a genre which was itself seen by Victorian literary critics as a negative determinant which could corrupt readers, and which both Victorian and modern critics have identified as predominantly concerned with plotting rather than characterisation. Contrastingly, I argue that sensation fiction is in fact very concerned with the creation of character and is sensitive to the varied ways in which the personality can be formed, modified and corrupted; the emphasis on plot is in fact an acknowledgement of the many uncontrollable factors which can dictate the course of a person’s life. Next, the relevant contextual background of ongoing scientific, medical and educational debates is explained, ranging from early theories of moral management, through Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and onwards to the development of degenerationist and eugenicist thought. Recurring topics of criminality, insanity and education are also introduced here, as are the theories of some of the prominent Victorian medical people whose work is drawn on extensively in future chapters. The Introduction ends with a summary of what the reader can expect in the rest of the book.

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.

Chapter Three examines witty meta-narrative instances of sustained implicatures in sensation fiction. These implicatures encourage the reader not only to grasp unarticulated information but also to appreciate the teasing, riddle-like quality of the narration. The chapter discusses implicatures in M. E. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, and Wilkie Collins’s Armadale. These implicatures satirize the realist tendency towards limited omniscience and play on an implied assumption of, rather than a lack of, reader knowledge. In these novels, implicature is neither a means towards acknowledging social convention nor an aid to characterization; it is rather an end in itself. This last chapter comments on the enjoyment readers derive from narrative indirection and the stylistic performativity it makes available to the author.

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.

This chapter challenges a common view that British aestheticism privileged the notion of an aesthetically sensitive, solipsistic individual. Situating Walter Pater’s fiction in relation to a revival of interest in Lucretian materialism, the chapter shows that Paterian aestheticism often portrayed physical objects as “enminded,” attenuating distinctions between inward self and outward world. The chapter shows how this idea of a vitalized aesthetic object grew from a widespread cultural reevaluation of scientific and philosophical materialisms, including in the period’s sensation fiction, and draws a connection between Pater’s Imaginary Portraits and James Sully’s writing on physiological perception of music, which was inspired by Hermann von Helmholtz. By contrast with George Eliot’s influential conception of the “web” of human relations described by the realist novel, writers such as Pater and Sully understood the figure of the web as made up of matter rather than of social relations.

This book is about Thomas Hardy, an English novelist and poet whose legal career began in 1894 when he was appointed county magistrate, and his fiction in relation to legislative and literary history. It situates Hardy’s legal fiction within the legal consciousness of the late nineteenth century and its pervasive preoccupation with the law. It argues that Hardy’s work was shaped both by his awareness of individual cases and acrimonious debates over legal reforms, that he was influenced by sensation fiction and its legal plot lines, and that his open-ended narratives provoke his readers to examine legal issues which he leaves unanswered in a modernist form of training in judicial reasoning. These issues range from the limits of counsel to the definition of legal insanity, legal protection of women from abusive relationships and fundamental social inequalities exacerbated by the reform of land law. Finally, the book considers how Hardy’s fiction offers pseudo-legal representation in narratives that mirror the dialogic form of trial procedure.

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 examines Thomas Hardy’s legal fiction in the context of debates surrounding the changing definition of legal insanity during the nineteenth century. Focusing on the McNaughten Rules and its insistence that insanity must be understood in terms of cognitive impairment, the chapter argues that Hardy’s fiction raises hypothetical cases that reveal the lack of certainty around insanity cases, particularly in cases of provocation. It also discusses the influence of sensation fiction, which also explored the issues of legal insanity and criminal responsibility through a limited narrative perspective, on Hardy’s fiction as well as his use of third-person narrative to defend his characters mirroring the role of defence counsel. It contends that the use of a limited third-person narrative demonstrates the legal complexity of establishing mens rea as well as the difficulty of the relationship between intention and action.

This chapter examines Thomas Hardy’s legal fiction in relation to the politics of land law reform and inheritance plots. More specifically, it looks at the increasing agitation for more democratic landholding laws that coincided with the debate over extension of suffrage. It considers the Tichborne trial, an inheritance dispute and the class tensions over landholding rights, and how Hardy takes up sensation fiction’s preoccupation with property law to tackle criminal imposture as well as illicit attempts to acquire property. The chapter discusses Hardy’s novel Desperate Remedies to highlight the power wielded by the aristocracy over those with insecure land tenure.

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.

Chapter 1 examines journalistic and fictional accounts of the dangers of railway travel for women, specifically, narratives of robbery, murder, sexual abuse, and rape, which, on the one hand, served to acquaint women with the dangers of railway mobility, but, on the other, helped perpetuate a stereotype of woman as vulnerable, inept, and unable to defend her person and her possessions. The railway as a new setting of uncertain signification, permeable borders, and tentative safety accommodated very elaborate sensation plots, which, however, did not always victimize women. The chapter looks at fiction by popular novelists such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins, Rhoda Broughton, Ellen Wood, and Margaret Oliphant as well as by anonymous authors published in periodicals. As these texts show, the railway, in which all passengers’ social and personal identity seems precarious due to anonymity, was often treated as a stage by women who found opportunity to manipulate their behaviour and appearance in order to pursue economic or amorous aims. The train facilitated both the blurring of identity on which the sensation plot depended and the consequent subversion of gender conventions through female transgression that such fiction is famous for.

Sensation writer Mary Elizabeth Braddon makes plenty of jokes at the expense of the suburbanites reading her novels, poking fun at the interests they shared, the ambitions they nursed. Yet the suburbs function narratively in her works as places of movement, opportunity, and change. Braddon deploys the plot arc of the suburban popular novel (first discussed in chapter 3) to lift worthy heroines out of the lives into which they were born. Striving heroines begin in dusty, down-at-heel Camberwell; if they work hard, and are lucky, they are rewarded with the pleasures of upper-middle-class Richmond.

This chapter shows how Reform-era potboilers about the lost people like No Name (1863), The Woman in White (1860), and Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) tactically reconfigure the mechanism of exclusion animating mass democracy. Following lost people until they become counted subjects, these plots—seen in dialogue with texts about induction like J. S. Mill’s A System of Logic (1843–73) and Karl Marx’s Capital (1867)—allegorize the state’s efforts to uplift particular bodies and convert them into members of a set, “citizens.” Armadale’s double-generational plot goes further, locating the violent origins of democratic induction in slavery and directing our attention to those cast out from law’s avowedly universal embrace. What the lost-person plots of the sensation novel mediate, then, is how abandonment and belonging evolved as mutually dependent characteristics of life at the center of capitalist modernity.

This chapter examines the relationship between late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century gothic, the sensation fiction of the middle decades of the nineteenth century, fin-de-siècle gothic works and modernism. It argues that in the late nineteenth century a distinctive, but implicit, gothic aesthetic developed which was characterised by a concern with divided selves, fragmented narratives and science. It also shows that this aesthetic was distinguished by optimistic narratives about adaptability and the presence of a mystical or spiritual world.