Sensation novel

The sensation novel was a literary genre of fiction popular in Great Britain in the 1860s and 1870s, following on from earlier melodramatic novels and the Newgate novels, which focused on tales woven around criminal biographies. Ellen Wood's "East Lynne" (1861) was the first novel to be critically dubbed "sensational" and began a trend whose main exponents were Wilkie Collins ("The Woman in White", 1859; "The Moonstone", 1868), Mary Elizabeth Braddon ("Lady Audley's Secret", 1862) and most of Ellen Wood's later fiction.

Typically the sensation novel focused on shocking subject matter including adultery, theft, kidnapping, insanity, bigamy, forgery, seduction and murder. [See "The Victorian Sensation Novel, 1860-1880--'preaching to the nerves instead of the judgment'" at "Victorian Web" (http://www.victorianweb.org/genre/sensation.html).] It distinguished itself from other contemporary genres, including the Gothic novel, by setting these themes in familiar and often domestic settings, thereby undermining the common Victorian-era assumption that sensational events were something foreign and divorced from comfortable middle-class life. W. S. Gilbert satirised these works in his 1871 comic opera, "A Sensation Novel".

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