Victorian sensation fiction may be crudely but accurately enough understood via modern day analogy: roughly equivalent to twenty-first century true-life crime stories and dramatized documentaries, the hugely successful sensation subgenre dominated the English public imagination for much of the 1860s and 70s and featured criminal events often “ripped from the headlines”, augmented with fictional detail to render wildly popular page-turners that transcended class divisions in its readership. Attending to the analyses provided by modern scholars of the novel form, one might also compare it to our blockbuster action movies: driven by plot, tolerant of otherwise unbelievable contrivances, and preferring clever caricatures to fully developed, psychologically real characters (Terry 57)—but compelling and emotionally stimulating to audiences—sensation novels, like action films, drew the wrath of highbrow critics who saw them as an “abomination” of the age, in...
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Citation: Wooden, Shannon R., Brett Young. "Sensation fiction". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 18 June 2010 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1002, accessed 09 June 2026.]
