Darwin’s Origin of Species [GK26][GK27](1859), despite its almost complete silence about human evolution, was the catalyst for widespread discussion and debate during the 1860s about the history and future of humanity; about slavery and the identity of the human ‘races’; and about competition and struggle in Victorian society. Three popular novels of the early 1860s – George Meredith’s Evan Harrington [GK28](1860), Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations [GK29](1860–61), and Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies [GK30](1862–63) – illustrate how quickly Darwin’s ideas were appropriated into fictions dealing with race and social class in the decade of the American Civil War, the Morant Bay Rebellion, and the Second Reform Bill. Although generally associated with literary realism, Darwin’s work may be better aligned with the new narrative form so popular in the 1860s: sensation fiction.

This chapter places race and disability in dialogue to highlight the complex, often contradictory, negotiations of exclusionary discourse within sensation narratives of the 1860s. The first half of the chapter discusses Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The ital Octoroon (1861–62), as a sensational text which places issues of race center stage and demonstrates how racial rhetoric is encoded through melodrama. Through exploiting the heightened topicality of racial questions in the midst of public discussions about the American Civil War, the novel exposes contradictory constructions of racial difference in the decade and implicitly displaces and elides British imperial violence. Issues of miscegenation and hybridity are analyzed in relation to the “octoroon fever” of the 1860s, before moving to a consideration of the ways in which contemporary discourses of race and mental disability converge in the slave figure, Tristan. The final part of the chapter extends this analysis of the constitutive relationship of race and disability in two of Wilkie Collins’s major novels of this no quote marks. Ital. all titles decade, Armadale (1866) and The Moonstone (1868).

Victorian science fiction, imperial romance, sensation fiction, and utopian fiction helped readers cope with the immensity of the evolutionary time scale by stories that featured the progressive improvement of the species through the inheritance of acquired characteristics or by planned programs of eugenics. Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race, Haggard’s She, Collins’s The Legacy of Cain, and other works of Victorian genre fiction demonstrate some of the consequences of neo-Lamarckian thinking and serve as a warning to commentators on epigenetics who have suggested that it supports Lamarck’s views. In the hands of novelists, neo-Lamarckism buttressed notions of the inherited character of criminality, the progressive nature of evolution, and the tendency to “blame mothers” for degeneration of the species.

An analysis of the ways in which Collins was used by Victorian reviewers to construct the concept of ’sensation fiction’ in contrast to realism

A review of Collins’s most famous novels published during the 1860s - The Woman in White, No Name, Armadale and The Moonstone

A brief summary of Collins’s activities as as Victorian author in multiple modes

Using Mark Salber Phillips’s concept of historical distance to defamiliarize our ideas about proximity in historical representation, Chapter 5 examines the sensation novel’s innovations with temporal and spatial immediacy to illuminate its rendering of modernity as rife with incongruous affects. Reading Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) and Aurora Floyd (1863), this chapter shows that the sensation novel characterizes the present in terms of affective excess, drawing into focus a perpetual tension between forces of attraction and repellence, captivation and alienation in contemporary life. Moving beyond critical readings that try to decide the question of Braddon’s subversion or reinforcement of social norms, I contend that her fiction keeps the affective incongruities of the heroines case in play in order to articulate the extreme contradictions that characterize the forms of belonging governing contemporary experience.

Anatomy museums were thoroughly scrutinised as institutions that potentially perverted public taste, exhibiting specimens of sexual disease, victims of vanity, and monstrous curiosities. Claims that museums might be sites of titillation were not entirely unfounded; visitors to La Specola in Florence were apt to touch the wax genitalia of the anatomical Venus, while Kahn’s Museum peddled quack cures to visitors’ sexual diseases. In an attempt to combat this, anatomy museums foregrounded the moral and educational aspects of their institutions, places that one could visit to ‘know thyself’. Sensation fiction suffered similar imprecations for exhibiting sexualised bodies. Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady (1875) engages with the excesses and order of anatomical, medical, and museum culture, his novel populated by characters that are simultaneously represented as specimens and curators, with clues collected from worryingly instable pathology, collections of female hair, and sexualised objects. Working with nineteenth-century anxieties about the differences between reputable and contentious displays of anatomy, Collins’s textualised and substitute bodies negotiate the tensions of the anatomy museum. This chapter argues that museums and literature shared similar strategies to make these excessive bodies respectable; narrative was used to order anatomy, making displayed specimens educative instead of titillating.

Tracing the evolution of Brontëan Gothic into sensation fiction between the late 1840s and mid-1860s, this chapter explores the dialogue between Victorian Gothic novels with a domestic setting and contemporary debates about gender known as the Woman Question. Representing the home as the site of violence, infidelity and dysfunction rather than as the tranquil refuge envisioned by domestic ideology, the fiction examined here is informed by, and even explicitly alludes to, topical controversies regarding marriage and gender roles sparked by such events as Caroline Norton’s campaign to reform child custody law, the passage of the Matrimonial Causes Act and the establishment of the civil divorce court. Yet, while their representation of women’s domestic entrapment has feminist undertones, these ideologically conflicted works also echo anxieties about the breakdown of separate spheres reminiscent of the period’s conservative discourses. These anxieties are most evident in the portrayal of the sexually deviant woman, a highly controversial figure in Victorian culture, and one depicted in these examples of domestic Gothic with pronounced, and often aesthetically complex, ambivalence.