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.