Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print: Belgravia and Sensationalism, and: Victorian Sensational Fiction: The Daring Work of Charles Reade (review)

Alberto Gabriele's Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print: Belgravia and Sensationalism and Richard Fantina's Victorian Sensational Fiction: The Daring Work of Charles Reade both address the genre of sensation fiction and the cultural trope of sensationalism, but otherwise the works are quite different in approach. Gabriele's major focus is on periodical publication, and extends beyond Victorian fiction to advertisements, French sensationalism of the 1880s, and early-twentieth-century silent film. Fantina's book, on the other hand, is an in-depth study of a neglected but nevertheless significant novelist, Charles Reade. Both books are noteworthy contributions to scholarship on a genre that was marginalized in the nineteenth century, but which has sparked the interest of literary critics in the last twenty-five years.

Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print opens with a diachronic history of Belgravia from 1866 to 1876, the years Mary Elizabeth Braddon edited the magazine, and then it "adopts a synchronic perspective in the study of the reader's response to print culture" (xviii). Gabriele argues that each issue of Belgravia, which was named for the upscale London neighborhood, juxtaposed fiction with nonfiction journalism, poetry, advertising, and illustrations in order to "reproduce the fragmentation of urban modernity through the ephemeral associations created in the reader's minds by scattered findings about world exhibits, bric-a-brac treasures, historical neighborhoods of London, satirical poetry, fashions of the day, installments of serialized novels, and episodic narratives contained in the advertisements" (61). He then moves on to discuss the genre of sensation fiction by outlining the narrative functions of novels by Braddon, Wilkie Collins, and Ellen Wood. He shows how these writers challenge "the stable structure of nineteenth-century class relations and, while evoking anxiety about social mobility, demystify bourgeois pretense to moral superiority" (46). He points to the role Belgravia played in the history of the British press, discussing the audience created by periodical publication for controversial and otherwise fascinating topics.

Chapter 4 points to the fragmentation that the reader of the periodical press faced. In Gabriele's account, the seemingly unrelated narratives circulated by sensationalism in its various forms in fact performed the coherent project of helping to "spread and naturalize the logic of market economy and the ambitions of imperial expansion" (81). He examines Braddon's anonymously published Bound to John Company (1868-69) in relation to commodity culture. The novel—which includes lists of objects, like Braddon's other works—"employs sensational narrative functions to deconstruct the tenets of British history that were arranged in a way to build a proud colonial narrative to identify with" (107). It criticizes the British war effort in India during the Sepoy Rebellion and "questions and to some degree demystifies the prestige associated to the consumption of oriental commodities" (12).

Gabriele also considers sensationalism in its influence on nineteenth-century spectacles, such as the magic lantern show. Visual spectacles are similar to Braddon's novels in their shocking effects, punctuating "each installment with some extraordinary event" (122). A comparison of Braddon's work to the sensationalism in Louis Feuillade's 1915 silent film, Les Vampires, and particularly of Braddon's popular heroines, Lucy Audley and Aurora Floyd, to the film heroine, Irma Vep—illustrates "the persistence of narrative models and characters of Victorian novels in the silent film industry beyond the sheer adaptation of popular novels" (12).

The last chapter moves to sensation fiction imported from France in the 1880s, with an emphasis on the detective novels of Émile Gaboriau and a discussion of the differences between the effects of monthly and daily publication formats. The book ends rather abruptly without a conclusion, but includes an excellent appendix with a useful index of the contents of Belgravia from...