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).

The 1860s marked a key moment in the history of extraction and the rise of extraction-based life, a social order premised on the removal of subsurface resources and, especially, on the coal economy. This decade saw the explosion of an economic discourse around coal exhaustion in Britain, thanks to the publication of William Stanley Jevons’s The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal Mines[GK21] (1865), and the expansion of overseas imperial extraction projects following, for example, the discovery of diamonds (1867) and gold (1869) in South Africa. In this chapter, I explore the role of extraction in the 1860s’ most characteristic genre: sensation fiction. After an overview of the chronotope of exhaustion and how it manifests in fiction, I turn to two sensation novels premised on extractive plots: Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret [GK22](1862) and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone [GK23](1868). Together they suggest the extent to which British national life was, by the 1860s, already imagined to be fully dependent on extraterritorial mineral inputs.

An analysis of Collins’s influence on Victorian women writers who were also identified as sensation fiction authors

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.

This chapter examines the genre of sensation fiction, which flourished alongside efforts to introduce British women’s suffrage into the Ballot Act of 1872. Sensation and suffrage were both seen as alarming, unnatural, and immoral attempts for women to gain representation. Sensation novels inspired much critical hand-wringing through their depiction of antiheroines and villainesses that supposedly imperiled the virtue and femininity of the female reader, who identified with them against her will. Modern critics tend to accept sensation’s self-advertisement according to which it elicits a reflexive, psychosomatic response from female readers. This chapter, however, asserts that Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s narrative techniques in her popular sensation novels prompt readers’ awareness of and resistance to the affinities ostensibly endorsed by the novels, soliciting the reader’s choices among multiple possible perspectives. At issue in the arguments for and against women’s enfranchisement were notions of women’s ethical integrity and susceptibility to affective influence. The chapter contends that sensation fiction fomented scandal not because it corrupted impressionable female readers with its content, but because it challenged the automatized emotionalism ascribed to women and promoted, instead, their rational and ethical autonomy – in direct opposition to the premises held by the anti-suffragists.