Abstract
Brown argues that, just as the Victorians invented realism as a ‘high’ art, they invented sensation fiction as its ‘low’ counterpart – and that sensation writers used the artist figure to embrace this designation, in turn denigrating realism as elitist and pretentious. Brown shows how Wilkie Collins’s Hide and Seek (1854), and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s John Marchmont’s Legacy (1863) and Eleanor’s Victory (1863) all use artists to recast realism’s skepticism as mere sophistry. Sensation writers thus came to embrace their ‘low’ art status, valuing art that appealed to the masses without trying to rise above them and pointing out the pretensions of a realism that claimed to depict the everyday but ultimately aimed at something exceptional.
Art Mystic, I would briefly endeavour to define, as aiming at the illustration of fact on the highest imaginative principles. It takes a scene as exactly and naturally as possible…[And] Besides the representation of the scene itself, the spirit of the age…which produced that scene, must also be indicated, mystically, by the introduction of those angelic or infernal winged forms…which so many illustrious painters have long since taught us to recognize as impersonating to the eye…good and evil… (Collins, 1993, pp. 238–39)
– Valentine Blyth, in Wilkie Collins’s Hide and Seek (1854)
That bitter term of reproach, ‘sensation’, had not been invented for the terror of romancers in the fifty-second year of this present century; but the thing existed nevertheless in divers forms, and people wrote sensation novels as unconsciously as Monsieur Jourdain talked prose. (Braddon, 1998, p. 11)
– Mary Elizabeth Braddon, The Doctor’s Wife (1864)
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Notes
- 1.
For example, Richard Nemesvari’s ‘“Judged by a Purely Literary Standard”: Sensation Fiction, Horizons of Expectation, and the Generic Construction of Victorian Realism,’ in Beyond Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre (2006) argues that critics invented sensation as ‘an improper genre against which to define an acceptable realist standard…[B]y learning what sensation fiction was, Victorian readers learned what realist fiction was (and vice versa)’ (pp. 18–19). Similarly, Pamela Gilbert argues in Disease, Desire and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels (1997) that ‘the concept of privileged realist fiction can only exist positioned opposite the popular,’ such as with the so-called sensation fiction (p. 112).
- 2.
This manufactured division may well account for what Gilbert notes is the generally accepted history in which ‘the realist novel continued to develop into the modern novel, while the melodrama and sensation novel, depending on whom you ask, either died a well deserved death or parented such degenerate and feminine forms as the popular romance’ (2000, p. 184).
- 3.
Caroline Levine goes so far as to ‘suggest that the sensational Collins was in fact an exemplary Victorian realist’ (2003, p. 43).
- 4.
According to the editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition, Catherine Peters, Collins also based Blyth on William Holman Hunt (1993, p. 434).
- 5.
Charles Collins, who married Charles Dickens’s daughter, Kate, is perhaps best known for Convent Thoughts (1850–51), which Ruskin admired.
- 6.
Holman Hunt recalls a conversation with Collins in Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, in which Collins champions ‘English art’ and deplores the veneration of the ‘old masters’ (1905, p. I: 311).
- 7.
The coveted position to have at the RA was ‘on the line’ (that is, at eye level).
- 8.
According to Peters, this too was part of William Collins’s studio (1993, p. 434).
- 9.
Immediate predecessors to realism, Constable and Turner were both admired for the ways in which they captured clouds and sunlight. Ruskin, of course, was a huge admirer of Turner’s. French Realists heavily practiced plein air painting. And the Pre-Raphaelite painter, William Holman Hunt, paid meticulous attention to natural lighting in his paintings, going so far as to travel to the Middle East to paint The Scapegoat, as mentioned in the Introduction.
- 10.
Seventeenth-century French painters were disparaged by Ruskin in The Stones of Venice, where he says they ‘were weak men, and have had no serious influence on the general mind’ (qtd in Birch, 2004, p. 30).
- 11.
Furthermore, she adds, ‘For his third novel, Wilkie Collins was trying an experiment. It was an attempt to show how the potentially dramatic and extraordinary lies hidden in the characters of ordinary people, whose everyday and domestic lives may conceal secrets unsuspected by their friends and neighbors. The first half shows the surface, and hints at what it may hide. The second half is revelatory’ (1993, p. viii).
- 12.
Sardanapalus was the legendary seventh-century BC king of Assyria, who, in order to escape his enemies, self-immolates with his material possessions, eunuchs and concubines. He was the subject of a poem by Byron and a painting by Delacroix.
- 13.
Of course, it is a Pre-Raphaelite painting that famously reveals the inner ‘essence’ of Lady Audley. But Braddon does not offer enough of a sustained analysis of artist figures in that novel to gain a strong sense of her overall attitudes to artistic movements. The passage in Eleanor’s Victory seems much more clearly satirical.
- 14.
Such attitude runs counter Aurora Leigh’s statement that Homer’s ‘giants’ were merely men.
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Brown, D. (2016). Realist Con Artists. In: Representing Realists in Victorian Literature and Criticism. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40679-4_6
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