The Sensation Novel and Newspaper Time

Abstract

This paper examines the sensation novel's representations of the newspaper and the newspaper’s power to structure social experience. Many critics have argued that the sensation novel asserts its plausibility by deriving plots from real news. I argue, however, that far from simply appropriating the apparent facticity of news coverage, the sensation novel destabilizes the newspaper’s ability to construct a shared social reality through serial time. Situated within the capitalist and industrial system that produced it, the newspaper is embedded in calendar and clock time (Beetham 28). The newspaper comes out on a regular basis and thereby structures readers’ experience of the everyday. In this sense, the newspaper not only refers to external reality but also constitutes that reality. The irony is that events do not happen on a daily or weekly news cycle. Rather than waiting for events to happen, “the serial production of news” requires what Niklas Luhmann calls “deception” (25). Many sensation novels break down the serial function of the newspaper and destabilize its method of organizing social experience. In many sensation novels, characters encounter the newspaper outside of its original serial publication and in fragments cut out by other characters and enclosed with personal letters. Whereas many critics have emphasized the sensation novel’s use of serial form, I argue that the sensation novel disrupts newspaper seriality as a means to think through the temporal and formal tensions inherent in novelistic form. This paper will focus on novels by Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins.