7AAEM656 Victorian Sensation
2015-16
‘Yes or No’ , Photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron, 1865, at the V&A
Victorian Sensation usually relates to a genre of literature that shocked and
scandalised its readers in the period 1859, with the publication of Wilkie Collins’s
The Woman in White, to 1880. Sensation literature is often described as melodramatic
with plots involving bigamy, adultery, poison and compelling aristocratic villains.
Other famous sensation novels like Lady Audley’s Secret and East Lynne were swiftly
adapted for the theatre where they proved ever popular. This module will examine
these three novels to discover what made them so sensational to Victorian readers.
As well as Sensation Literature, the Victorians were witness to other sensations and
these also will be discussed in class. We have the sensational science of Charles
Darwin, and the sensational photography of Julia Margaret Cameron while the
paintings of Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood outraged the art world. The poet of the age
was Alfred Lord Tennyson and while he may have not caused a sensation Arthur
Hallam called him the poet of sensation, as his poetry appealed to all the human
senses. All these new aspects of Victorian modernity coalesce in the ‘Age of
Sensation.’
We will be looking at mainly British literature, but we will turn to Uncle Tom’s Cabin
to see how issues such as the abolition of slavery have a place in melodrama.
Course aims:
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- to late-Victorian science
and the genre of popular scientific writing in the Victorian period
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nineteenth-century physiology of the senses and Victorian psychology
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istorical context in which to situate your
responses to the Victorian sensation novel
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responses to Pre- Raphaelite and other Victorian paintings housed at the Tate
Britain
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familiarise you with a number of nineteenth-century melodramatic
adaptations
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stage
Materials
While many of the texts are to be found on the Internet, it would be best to obtain
copies of the following. There are various copies:
In order of study:
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859)
Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1859)
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862)
Franny Moyle, Desperate Romantics: The Private Lives of the Pre-Raphaelites (2009)
Ellen Wood, East Lynne (1861)
Charles Dickens: The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells that Rang an Old Year
Out and a New Year In (1844)
Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870)
Thomas Hardy, Desperate Remedies (1871)
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851)
Assessment:
Scene Recreation: 1x1500 word scene recreation from a sensation novel for stage
OR a close reading of a scene (either novel or drama) OR a close reading of a PreRaphaelite painting. (20%)
Essay: 1x 4000 word essay (80%)
To Visit:
Students should visit the following:
The Tate Britain for their Pre-Raphaelite paintings (free)
The Julia Margaret Cameron Exhibition at the V&A on until 21st February (admission
charge)
Julia Margaret Cameron at the Science Museum until 28th March (free)
Schedule
Week 1
Sensational Introduction
Patrick Brantlinger, ‘What is Sensational about the Sensation Novel?’, NineteenthCentury Fiction 37.1 (1982): 1-28 (available on JSTOR)
Hermann von Helmholtz, ‘On The Recent Progress of the Theory of Vision’ (c. 1868)
http://www.archive.org/stream/popularlectures02atkigoog#page/n216/ mode/2up
Essay starts p.197
Hermann von Helmholtz, ‘On the Relation of Optics to Painting’ (c. 1865)
http://www.archive.org/stream/popularlectureso00helmrich#page/72/m ode/2up Essay
starts p.73.
Week 2
Poets of Sensation
Lord Alfred Tennyson,
Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830)
‘The Lady of Shallot’ (1830/1842)
‘Ulysses’ (1833)
Robert Browning,
‘My Last Duchess’ (1842)
‘Porphyria’s Lover’ (1842)
‘Love Among the Ruins’ (1855)
‘Caliban upon Setebos’ (1864
Arthur Hallam ‘ On some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry and on the Lyrical
Poems of Alfred Tennyson’ Englishmen’s Review (1830)
Week 3
Sensational Science
Charles Darwin, The Origin of the Species (1859), Chapters IV (Natural Selection);
Chapter V (Laws of Variation); Chapter XIV (Recapitulation and Conclusion)
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871);
Chapters I-VII
Edward Bulwer Lytton, A Strange Story (1862); Found at:
http://www.archive.org/stream/strangestory01lytt#page/n0/mode/2up
Volume I, Chapters XXXI and XXXII
Volume II, Chapters XLIII to XLIX
Week 4
Other Origins of Sensation
Wilkie Collins The Woman in White (1859)
E. S. Dallas, The Gay Science (1866); Volume I, Chapter VI (On Imagination);
Volume I, Chapter VII (The Hidden Soul); Volume I, Chapter VIII (The Play of
Thought)*
Found at
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=X78NAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=g
ay+science&hl=en&ei=n5okTfGlEcqIhQeByqmKAg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=res
ult&resnum=4&ved=0CD8Q6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false
Week 5
Sensation/ Melodrama
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862)
C. H. Hazlewood, Lady Audley’s Secret, an original version of Miss Braddon’s
popular novel in two acts (London: Thomas Hailes Lacy, n.d.)
An American edition of the same play can be found at:
http://www.archive.org/stream/ladyaudleyssecre00hazl#page/n1/mode /2up
William E. Suter, Lady Audley’s Secret, a drama in two acts, adapted from Miss
Braddon’s novel of the same title (London: T Hailes Lacy, n.d.)
An American edition of the same play can be found at
http://www.archive.org/stream/ladyaudleyssecre00sute#page/n1/mode /2up
Week 6
Reading Week
Week 7
Sensation and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
Franny Moyle, Desperate Romantics: The Private Lives of the Pre-Raphaelites (2009)
Selections from John Ruskin; will be available on Keats
Week 8
Sensational Novels
Ellen Wood, East Lynne (1861)
Week 9
Dickens and Melodrama
Charles Dickens: The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells that Rang an Old Year
Out and a New Year In (1844)
Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870)
Mary, Hammond, ‘Readers and Readerships’ in Joanna Shattock (ed.), The
Cambridge Guide to English Literature 1830-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010)
Week 10
Late Sensation
Thomas Hardy, Desperate Remedies ( 1871)
Week 11
Race, Melodrama and America
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851)
Theatre production:
George Aiken, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) at:
http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/onstage/scripts/aikenhp.html
Further Reading
History of science
David Cahan, Hermann von Helmholtz and the Foundations of Nineteenth-Century Science
(Berkeley: U of California P, 1993)
David Cahan, ed., Science and Culture: Popular and Philosophical Essays, by Hermann von
Helmholtz (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1995)
Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: on vision and modernity in the nineteenth
century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1991)
James Secord, Victorian Sensation: the extraordinary publication, reception, and secret
authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2000)
Nicholas J. Wade, A Natural History of Vision (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1998)
Victorian literature and science (including theories of race)
Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: evolutionary narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and
Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1983)
James Buzard, Disorienting Fictions: the autoethnographic work of nineteenth-century
British novels (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005)
William A. Cohen, Embodied: Victorian literature and the senses (Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 2009)
Nicholas Dames, The Physiology of the Novel: reading, neural science, and the form of
Victorian fiction (2007)
Laurie Garrison, Science, Sexuality and Sensation Novels: Pleasures of the Senses
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)
Grace Moore, Dickens and Empire: discourses of class, race, and colonialism in the works of
Charles Dickens (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004)
Rick Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture, 1850-1880 (Oxford University
Press, 2000)
James Secord, Victorian Sensation: the extraordinary publication, reception, and secret
authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2000)
Jenny Bourne Taylor, In The Secret Theatre of the Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative
and 19th- Century Psychology (London: Routledge, 1988)
---- and Sally Shuttleworth, Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts, 18301890 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998).
Alison Winter, Mesmerised: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: U of Chicago P,
1998)
Sensation Novel
Richard S. Albright, Writing the Past, Writing the Future: time and narrative in sensation
fiction (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2009)
Richard D. Altick, Victorian Studies in Scarlet (London: Dent, 1970)
T.F. Boyle, Black Swine in the Sewers of Hampstead: Beneath the Surface of Victorian
Sensationalism (London, 1990)
Patrick Brantlinger, ‘What is Sensational About the Sensation Novel?’, Nineteenth-Century
Fiction 37.1 (1982): 1-28
Michael Diamond, Victorian Sensation, or, the Spectacular, the Shocking and the Scandalous
in 19th-century Britain (London: Anthem, 2003)
Catherine Gallagher, The Body Economic: life, death, and sensation in political economy and
the Victorian novel (Princeton: PUP, 2006)
Kimberly Harrison and Richard Fantina, eds, Victorian Sensations: essays on a scandalous
genre (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2006)
Winifred Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s (Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1980)
Andrew Maunder and Grace Moore, eds, Victorian Crime, Madness, and Sensation
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004)
Andrew Radford, Victorian Sensation Fiction: a reader’s guide to essential criticism
(London: Palgrave, 2009)
John Sutherland, Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, Readers (London: Macmillan, 1995)
Nicholas Rance, Wilkie Collins and Other Sensation Novelists (London: Macmillan, 1991)
Feminism and Sensation
Susan David Bernstein, Confessional Subjects: Revelations of Gender and Power in Victorian
Literature and Culture (Chapel Hill: University of Carolina Press, 1997)
Ann Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992)
Pamela K. Gilbert, Diseases, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)
Lynda Hart, ‘The Victorian Villainess and the Patriarchal Unconscious’, Literature and
Psychology 40 (1994): 1-25
Jennifer Hedgecock, The Femme Fatale in Victorian Literature: the danger and the sexual
threat (Amherst: Cambria Press, 2008)
E. Ann Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation: the mother in popular culture and
melodrama (London: Routledge, 1992)
Andrew Mangham, Violent Women and Sensation Fiction: crime, medicine, and Victorian
popular culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)
Lyn Pykett, The ‘Improper’ Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and New Woman
Writing (London: Routledge, 1992) and Sensation Fiction: from The Woman in White to The
Moonstone (Plymouth: Northcote Press, 1994)
Jill Matus, ‘Disclosure as “cover-up”: the discourse of madness in Lady Audley’s Secret’,
University of Toronto Quarterly 62.3 (1993),
Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to
Lessing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977)
Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and
Sensation Novels (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007)
Marlene Tromp, The Private Rod: marital violence, sensation, and the law in Victorian
Britain (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 2000)
Deborah Wynne, The Sensation Novel and the Victorian Family Magazine (Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2001)
Pre-Raphaelitism
J. B. Bullen, The Pre-Raphaelite Body: fear and desire in painting, poetry and criticism
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1998)
David Peters Corbett, The World in Paint: modern art and visuality in England 1848-1914
(Manchester: Manchester UP, 2004)
John Hyman, The Objective Eye: Colour, Form and Reality in the Theory of Art (Chicago:
Chicago UP, 2006)
Lindsay Smith, Victorian Photography, Painting, and Poetry: the enigma of visibility in
Ruskin, Morris, and the Pre-Raphaelites (Cambridge: CUP, 1995)
Andrew Wilton and Robert Upstone, eds, The Age of Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and Watts:
symbolism in Britain, 1860-1910 (London: Tate, 1997)
Melodrama
Eric Bentley, The Life of the Drama (New York: Athenaeum, 1964)
Michael R. Booth, English Melodrama (London: Jenkins, 1965)
-----, Victorian Spectacular Theatre 1850-1910 (London: Routledge, 1981)
David Bradby, Louis James, and Bernard Sharratt, eds, Peformance and Politics in Popular
Drama: aspects of popular entertainment in theatre, film, and television, 1800-1976
(Cambridge: CUP, 1980)
Jacky Bratton, New Readings in Theatre History (Cambridge: CUP, 2003)
----, Allen Cave, et al., eds, Acts of Supremacy : the British Empire and the stage, 1790-1930
(Manchester: Manchester UP, 1991)
----, Jim Cook and Christine Gledhill, eds, Melodrama: stage, picture, screen (London:
British Film Institute, 1994)
Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the
Mode of Excess (Yale UP, 1976)
Jim Davis and Tracey C. Davis, Reflecting the Audience: London theatregoing 1840-1880
(Iowa: U of Iowa P, 2001)
Tracy C. Davis and Peter Hollands, eds, The Performing Century: nineteenth-century
theatre’s history (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)
Joseph Donahue, ed., The Cambridge History of British Theatre, Volume II (Cambridge:
CUP, 2005)
Joseph Donahue and James Ellis, eds, The London Stage Project: a documentary record and
calendar of performances, http://people.umass.edu/a0fs000/lsp.html
Alicia Finkel, Romantic Stages: set and costume design in Victorian England (Jefferson:
McFarland, 1996)
J. Ellen Gainor, ed., Imperialism and Theatre: Essays on World Theatre, Drama, and
Performance (London: Routledge, 1995)
Daniel Gerould, ed., Melodrama, New York Literary Forum 7 (1980)
David Grimstead, Melodrama Unveiled: American Theater, 1800-1850 [1968] (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1987)
Elaine Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics: theatricalised dissent in the English marketplace,
1800-1885 (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995)
Michael Hays, Melodramatic Formations (Cambridge: CUP, 1995)
----, Anastasia Nikolopolou, eds, Melodrama: the cultural emergence of a genre
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996)
Robert B. Heilman, Tragedy and Melodrama: versions of experience (Seattle & London:
University of Washington Press, 1968)
Ian Henderson, ‘‘Looking at Lady Audley: Symbolism, the Stage, and the Antipodes’,
Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Film, 33.1 (2006): 3-25
E. Ann Kaplan, ‘Theories of Melodrama: a feminist perspective’, Women in Performance 1
(1983): 40- 83
Marcia Landy, ed., Imitations of Life: a reader on film and television melodrama (Detroit:
Wayne State UP, 1991)
Katherine Newey, Women’s Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan , 2005)
Richard Pearson, Victorian Plays Project http://victorian.worc.ac.uk/modx/
Kerry Powell, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre
(Cambridge: CUP, 2004)
J. Redmond, ed., Melodrama (Cambridge: CUP, 1992)
Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: early sensational cinema and its contexts (New
York: Columbia UP, 2001)
James L. Smith, Melodrama (London: Methuen, 1973)
George Taylor, Players and Performances in the Victorian Theatre (Manchester: Manchester
UP, 1989)
Hazel Waters, Racism on the Victorian Stage: representation of slavery and the black
character (Cambridge: CUP, 2007)
Sharon Aronofsky Weltman, Performing the Victorian: John Ruskin and Identity in theatre,
science and education (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2007)
Edward Ziter, The Orient on the Victorian Stage (Cambridge: CUP, 2003)
Sentiment
Rachel Ablow, The Feeling of Reading: affective experience and Victorian literature (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010)
Fred Kaplan, Sacred Tears: sentimentality in Victorian literature (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1987)