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Sensationalism and the Sensation Debate


Of our contemporary school of lady novelists of the sensational kind, commencing with Miss Braddon and Mrs Henry Wood (whose earliest works already date more than a quarter of a century back), continuing with Mrs Riddell and Miss Rhoda Broughton, and culminating in the writer who calls herself ‘Ouida’, much need not be said. They have unquestionably acquired and perfected the art of enthralling the reader’s attention and keeping it captive: in that art less skilful, if more moral, writers might do well to take a lesson from them. In all or most of their books, the views of life are distorted, the whole atmosphere is oppressive and tainted, the sentiment false, the style tawdry and slipshod. As well might a reader pluck one of the poisonous fruits of French fiction (some ‘scrofulous French novel’, such as Mr Browning describes, and such as Westgate [character in the novel] snatched from Hebe’s hand and flung into the fire), as gather one from any of these trees, loaded with apples of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Volume Contents

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    Front Matter
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    Introduction By Andrew Maunder
  • Sensationalism and the Sensation Debate
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      ‘The Enigma Novel’, Spectator (28 December 1861), p. 1428
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      ‘Sensational Novels’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 91 (May 1862), pp. 564–80 [extract] By Margaret O. W. Oliphant
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      ‘The Philosophy of “Sensation”’, St James’s Magazine, 5 (October 1862), pp. 340–6
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      ‘“Lady Audley”. On The Stage’, London Review (7 March 1863), pp. 244–5
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      ‘Sensation Novels’, Quarterly Review, 113 (April 1863), pp. 481–514 [extract] By Henry Mansel
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      ‘Mrs Wood and Miss Braddon’, Littell’s Living Age (18 April 1863), pp. 99–103
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      ‘Sensation’, The Literary Times (9 May 1863), pp. 102–3
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      ‘Sensation Novels’, Medical Critic and Psychological Journal, 3 (July 1863), pp. 513–19
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      ‘Thackeray and Modern Fiction’, London Quarterly Review, 22 (July 1863), pp. 375–408 [extract]
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      ‘A Word of Remonstrance With Some Novelists. By a Novelist’, Good Words, 4 (July 1863), pp. 524–6 By Henrietta Keddie
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      ‘Sensation! A Satire’, Dublin University Magazine, 63 (January 1864), pp. 85–9
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      ‘The Sensational Williams’, All the Year Round (13 February 1864), pp. 14–17
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      ‘Our Female Sensation Novelists’, Christian Remembrancer, 46 (July 1864), pp. 209–36 [extract]
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      ‘The Archbishop of York on Works of Fiction’, The Times (2 November 1864), p. 9 By William Thomson
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      Editorials from The Times (3 November 1864), pp. 8–9; (4 November 1864), pp. 6–7
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      ‘Our Library Table’, Athenaeum (3 December 1864), pp. 744–5 By Geraldine Jewsbury
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      ‘Works of Imagination in 1864’, Literary Gazette (14 January 1865), p. 3 [extract]
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      ‘Sensational Literature’, The Christian Observer, 65 (November 1865), pp. 809–13 By B.
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      ‘Tigresses in Literature’, Spectator (10 March 1866), pp. 274–5 [extract]
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      ‘Homicidal Heroines’, Saturday Review (7 April 1866), pp. 403–5
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      ‘Novels Past and Present’, Saturday Review (14 April 1866), pp. 438–9
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      ‘Belles Lettres’, Westminster Review, n.s. 30 (July 1866), pp. 268–80 [extract] By John Richard De Capel Wise
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      ‘Aunt Anastasia on Modern Novels’, Tinsley’s Magazine, 1 (1867), pp. 308–16
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      [Margaret Oliphant], ‘Novels’, Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, 102 (September 1867), pp. 257–80 [extract] By Margaret O. W. Oliphant
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      ‘A Sermon Upon Novels’, London Review (14 September 1867), pp. 293–4
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      ‘The Cant Of Modern Criticism’, Belgravia, 4 (November, 1867), pp. 45–55 [extract] By George Augustus Sala
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      ‘Afterword’ to Lucretia. The Heroine of the Nineteenth Century. A Correspondence Sensational and Sentimental (London, Masters, 1868) [extract] By Frederick Paget
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      ‘Women’s Novels’, The Broadway, n.s. 1 (1868), pp. 504–9
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      ‘Peculiarities of Some Female Novelists’, Pall Mall Gazette (13 January 1870), p. 8
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      ‘Female Novelists of the Period’ The Period (22 January 1870), p. 99
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      ‘Literary Culture of the Period’, The Period (19 February 1870), p. 135
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      ‘The Sensation Novel,’ Argosy, 18 (1870), pp. 137–43 By E. B.
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      ‘Our Novels: The Sensational School’, Temple Bar, 29 (June 1870), pp. 410–24 By Alfred Austin
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      ‘Sensationalism’ in Six Sermons Preached on the Sundays after Easter 1874 in the church of St. James’s Piccadilly (London, SPCK, 1874), pp. 75–105 By Bishop of Derry William Alexander
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      ‘Modern Novels’, Cambridge Review, 2 (8 December 1880), p. 138
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    Back Matter