Sensation

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss sensation, a Victorian literary phenomenon. The Archbishop of York fulminated against them in his sermons, they spread panic through the pages of The Times and in a famous review the Oxford Professor of Philosophy, Henry Mansel, called them “unspeakably disgusting” with a “ravenous appetite for carrion”: in the 1860s the novels of Sensation took the Victorian world by storm.Bigamy. Secrecy. Murder and Madness. Detectives and surprise plot twists - all in a genteel domestic setting. It was a compelling concoction that propelled sales of the genre into millions, and for the first time ever got those above stairs reading the same stories as their servants.How did Sensation achieve such an incredible popularity so fast? What did the ensuing moral panic reveal about the society in which the novels were set? And in terms of its literary reputation, does this racy genre deserve to languish so far behind Victorian Realism, its rather steadier cousin?

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• John Mullan 14 episodes
  Senior Lecturer in English at University College London
• Lyn Pykett No other episodes
  Professor of English and Pro-Vice Chancellor at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth
• Dinah Birch 13 episodes
  Professor of English at the University of Liverpool

Related episodes

• Sensibility
  
  3 Jan, 2002 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism
• Taste
  
  25 Oct, 2007 700 Arts
• Victorian Realism
  
  14 Nov, 2002 820 English and Old English literatures
• Madame Bovary
  
  12 Jul, 2007 840 French and related literatures
• Seventeenth Century Print Culture
  
  26 Jan, 2006 000 Computer science, knowledge and systems
• The Decadent Movement
  
  18 Nov, 2021 820 English and Old English literatures
• Epistolary Literature
  
  15 Mar, 2007 820 English and Old English literatures
• Gothic
  
  4 Jan, 2001 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism
• Edgar Allan Poe
  
  30 Nov, 2023 810 American literature in English
• Tess of the d’Urbervilles
  
  5 May, 2016 820 English and Old English literatures

---

Programme ID: p005492t

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/p005492t

Auto-category: 823.8 (English fiction–19th century)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello. The Archbishop of York fulminated against them in his sermons.