Are the Victorians Still with Us?: Victorian Sensation Fiction and Its Legacies in the Twenty-First Century

This essay argues that sensation fiction’s most significant legacy is its self-consciousness about how print culture both constructs the present moment and mediates the past. These resonances are particularly evident in the work of neo-Victorian novelists Michael Faber and Sarah Waters, who, like the sensationalists, are writing at a time of great stress and change in the publishing and print industries. Faber and Waters’s self-awareness of the materiality of writing echoes concerns raised in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret and Wilkie Collins’s Armadale, both of which draw attention to the importance—and the fallibility—of print while still recognizing their own embeddedness in print culture.