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Two LADY AUDLEY’S SHOPPING DISORDERS
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Two ’ he year after Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret () appeared in volume form, Henry Mansel published “Sensation Novels,”a Quarterly Review essay in which he accused sensation writers of “supply[ing] the cravings of a diseased appetite.”1 Mansel feared that sensation fiction was producing an undiscriminating class who read solely for “the pleasure of a nervous shock.”2 No better were the writers of sensation novels, he maintained , for they aimed for “[e]xcitement, and excitement alone” at the expense of promoting morality and good taste.3 Many other reviewers seemed to agree with Mansel. A critic in the Christian Remembrancer, for example, charged that “[s]ensation writing is an appeal to the nerves rather than to the heart” and that its ultimate purpose was to “induce[ ] . . . a sort of thrill.”4 Clearly, the word sensation was beginning to acquire a new valence that emphasized affect as an uncontrollable somatic response. However, it was the “commercial atmosphere” of sensation fiction—an atmosphere T You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. “redolent of . . . the shop”—and the ways in which this genre’s affective properties resembled the vagaries of consumer desire that also troubled Mansel.5 Sensation fiction owed much of its mass appeal to the commercial success of the periodical and circulating library, phenomena that for Mansel were not neutral modes of distribution but the means by which these somatic disturbances were perpetuated. In her assessment of sensation fiction in Blackwoods a year earlier, Margaret Oliphant had objected to “[t]he violent stimulant of serial publication—of weekly publication, with its necessity for frequent and rapid recurrence of piquant situation and startling incident.”6 By electing to publish in serial form, many sensation writers were ensuring a ready supply of consumable print that offered readers the serial pleasures of the shock of the new. Lady Audley’s Secret appeared in installments, first in July in Robin Goodfellow and then, when that publication folded, in Sixpenny Magazine between January and December . When the installments were collected together in volume form and deposited in circulating libraries, there was little to distinguish a sensation reader’s “ephemeral interest” in the latest subscriptions and booklists from that of an aimless shopper’s browsing: “the subscriber is often content to take the goods the gods provide him, glancing lazily down the library catalogue, and picking out some title which promises amusement or excitement.”7 Indeed, for Mansel, the circulating library “is to literature what a magasin de modes is to dress, giving us the latest fashion, and little more.”8 The grands magasins or department stores, as seen in the previous chapter, were part of a new urban sphere of consumption that was being institutionalized in London’sWest End during the retail revolution of the s. Sensation fiction and the new shopping emporia were thus historically coincident at a time when the domains of both sensation fiction and consumerism were increasingly becoming feminized in the cultural imagination.9 The woman reader of sensation, as Susan David Bernstein puts it, was “the madame monster of the marketplace, the woman dazzled by her desires for material acquisitions and sensual pleasures.”10 In his objections to sensation fiction, Mansel thus suggestively links the affects of consuming sensation fiction—this “electrifying [of] the nerves”—to the feminizing affects of middle-class shopping, that is, a compulsion for ever-new consumerist diversions.11 As many critics were decrying the commodified mass appeal of sensation fiction and its reputed influence—its shocking tendency to evoke forms of mania in readers—an ancillary debate was erupting in that other commercial Lady Audley’s Shopping Disorders You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. [54.196.27.122] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 14:23 GMT) sphere, middle-class women’s shopping, over the purported affects of consumerism on women. By midcentury, the popular, periodical, and medical press had begun identifying, classifying, and pathologizing new shopping disorders that ranged from idle browsing in the shops with no particular end or object in mind, to ransacking the goods but refusing to buy them, to outright...