Sensation!

Pure sensation!

Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon and The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale

The taste for the sensational is so immense it predated literature, possibly predated human speech. We love too much to be given information that is unbelievable, unverifiable, but that someone, for some reason, insists is true. The tale of the great hunt, waiting over the other side of the dusty hill. The story of the emperor’s wife, who is a notorious drunkard, or a prostitute, or a witch. The emperor who wishes to fight as a gladiator, or to sing on stage, or to be the willing plaything of his guards after hours. Religious history (peopled with tales of miracles and of the terrible sufferings of the martyrs and the enemies of the faith) is full of it – in both senses. What is serious historical study but the winnowing down of these tales? They arrive in squadrons, and must be laboriously shot down.

As literacy slowly came to England and as printed culture took off with it, what did people buy to enjoy in their leisure hours? Religious tracts, mostly. There is always a human desire for consolation. But aside from them, we have the growth of the fantastical, the sensational. In the sixteenth century, books about witchcraft and demonology were best-sellers. People wanted to be excited by tales of those things that were unimaginable and awful, and they wanted to be told what it was they might do – almost like the self-help books that Americans keep writing and buying – to avoid the risks and pitfalls associated with the actions of the supernatural.

The modern novel came about relatively late after the invention of the printing press. But once it emerged, it dominated. Occasionally characters in an Austen or a Dickens book reproach each other for reading too many novels. Fiction is unseemly. It’s all made up! Made up for money! The novel was the TikTok of its own day.

You’ll destroy your mind with that nonsense. That’s what some said. And who’s to say, judging by one of today’s books, whether those people were wrong?

Lady Audley’s Secret was the kind of novel disapproving aunts warned about. It is what Oscar Wilde possibly had in mind when he said it was not hard to write a three-volume novel; you simply had to know nothing at all about human nature.

But all of that said, it’s a hell of a read. Naturally, I care for my readers and would not dream of giving them the details of what this book contains. They will want to find out for themselves. But I will provide a few hints, a few tantalising crumbs brushed from the table. Think if you will about great wealth luxuriously described, foul deeds done for truly unscrupulous reasons, and great suspicion, a suspicion that falls upon all like a dark shadow. A sensational shadow. Cast by an act of deep and abiding evil.

Kate Summerscale, by contrast, writes with great poise and restraint. In her book, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, she discusses not only the murder at Road Hill House to which Mr Whicher is sent as detective but also an entire genre of literature. She does a very fine job of describing the kind of effect Lady Audley’s Secret had on the world.

It did not introduce the idea of the domestic sphere being invaded by calculated deceit. It did not depict the first murder in popular literature. Far from it. But what it had is there in the title, ladies and gentlemen. There’s a secret. The authoress is telling us we will have to use our abilities to reason to try to puzzle it out. For some people, as with the whole suite of detective fiction, which came later, there is nothing more stimulating a promise than that.

What Summerscale does very profoundly in her book is to take a real case in which a real tragedy truly played out, and to handle it with the sensitivity so lacking in the ‘cold case’ and ‘true crime’ pornography genres ever do. Genres that particular demographics appear to adore and to play with recreationally – as if the people who really suffered in these cases are dolls, existing only for the amusement of their manipulators, and going completely still and cold when they are put down or put away.

What I could do without, in Braddon’s book, is the mass description of de luxe material items, and the purple language which follows Lady Audley herself. Everything she does is pretty, from her pretty ways to her pretty laugh. Everything she owns is pretty, from her pretty gloves to her pretty combs to her pretty hair. Even her horse, Atalanta (a horrible name), is pretty thing.

And look now to her wealth, to her servants who adore her, to her husband who – despite being older, my dears – is still attentive and prepared – ever prepared – to hand over folding money to give his darling what she so prettily desires. Naturally, this is wish-fulfilment on a very grand scale; it’s Desperate or Real Housewives; it’s tawdry.

And leavened by murder, by deception, it’s sensational. Pure sensation. How could you resist it?