- Hardcover: 211 pages
- Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr (1980)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0691064415
- ISBN-13: 978-0691064413
- Product Dimensions: 23.2 x 16.7 x 2.8 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 2,227,362 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
The truth behind those Victorian triple-deckers
19 Jan 2009
Edited 6/16/10: I've just noticed that, for some reason, the title and author of this work have disappeared! It's The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s, by Winifred Hughes.
Any lover of the Victorian triple-decker should find this book a treat. Hughes shows how the sensation novels of M.E. Braddon, Charles Reade, Wilkie Collins and their fellows developed from the Gothic works that preceded them. But rather than ruined abbeys and other exotic settings, these books are set prosaically in Victorian home and hearth. These ordinary places, familiar to the books' readers, are juxtaposed with bigamy, adventuresses and murder, threatening and endangering the Victorian ideas of domesticity and femininity. And yet, Brooks makes clear that, at the same time, a close reading of these works reveals that they are reinforcing these ideals. If the hearth is threatened, it is nevertheless true that an adulterous Lady Isabel (East Lynne is severely punished, ending unrecognized as a governess to her own child in the home her husband now shares with his new wife.
If there was any danger to one's morals in reading sensation novels, there is also danger to one's pocketbook in reading this book, as one scribbles down the names of authors and novels mentioned by Brooks, ready for the next visit to one's local bookstore!
Any lover of the Victorian triple-decker should find this book a treat. Hughes shows how the sensation novels of M.E. Braddon, Charles Reade, Wilkie Collins and their fellows developed from the Gothic works that preceded them. But rather than ruined abbeys and other exotic settings, these books are set prosaically in Victorian home and hearth. These ordinary places, familiar to the books' readers, are juxtaposed with bigamy, adventuresses and murder, threatening and endangering the Victorian ideas of domesticity and femininity. And yet, Brooks makes clear that, at the same time, a close reading of these works reveals that they are reinforcing these ideals. If the hearth is threatened, it is nevertheless true that an adulterous Lady Isabel (East Lynne is severely punished, ending unrecognized as a governess to her own child in the home her husband now shares with his new wife.
If there was any danger to one's morals in reading sensation novels, there is also danger to one's pocketbook in reading this book, as one scribbles down the names of authors and novels mentioned by Brooks, ready for the next visit to one's local bookstore!
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