Sensation Fiction

A Short Analysis of Wilkie Collins’s Armadale

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By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Will the real Allan Armadale please stand up? Armadale, Wilkie Collins’s longest novel (and he wrote quite a few doorstops), was serialised in Cornhill magazine between November 1864 and June 1866, and published as a two-volume novel in 1866. It took Collins two years to write. Like another of Collins’s perennially popular novels, The Moonstone, the narrative comprises a series of testimonies and accounts (such as from characters’ diaries and letters) which gradually shed light on the mystery. What follows are some notes towards an analysis of the novel’s themes and characters, perhaps the most notable of whom is Lydia Gwilt, one of Victorian fiction’s most scandalous villainesses.

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A Short Analysis of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret

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By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Lady Audley’s Secret was the most successful sensation novel published in the 1860s, the decade that saw the high point of sensation fiction. The book’s author, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, became famous – and notorious – as a result of the novel’s runaway success, and she would go on to have a very lucrative publishing career as a prolific novelist. Despite the novel’s popularity, it is only in recent decades that it has received the analysis and attention it deserves, as one of the founding texts of the sensation fiction genre.

As John Sutherland records in The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction, Lady Audley’s Secret was partly serialised in Robin Goodfellow in July-September 1861, then serialised in full in the Sixpenny Magazine throughout the whole of 1862, published as a three-volume novel by Tinsley the same year, and then rerun as a serial in the London Journal in March-August a year later. This publishing history alone gives a sense of just how riotously popular the novel quickly became. It was, to coin a phrase, a sensation. Why did it grab readers’ attention so, and how should we analyse the novel’s themes?

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