CULTURAL STUDIES: COLIN GRAHAMreviews Sensation and Modernity in the 1860sBy Nicholas Daly Cambridge University Press, 245pp £50
IT WAS ONCE a staple of writing about the Victorians to mention that they lived in a period of faith and doubt. This meant that the Victorians could be understood to have prepared the way for the post-industrial secularism of the 20th century. In more recent decades the 19th century has been analysed in terms of its expansive imperialism, and the partial democratisation and fractious class politics that building an empire necessitated. In the past few years the circle has started to turn back to an interest in Victorian religious belief and debate as something that was meaningful at the time and can be made meaningful again for us.
Nicholas Daly's lively and inventive account of the sensationalist literature and culture of the 1860s sees the decade very much through the lens of its social tremors. Political change is the determining factor that cuts across genres such as the novel, drama, painting and illustration.
In Daly's account it is the rise of the crowd, the reading public and the fear of the populus that animates the excesses of 1860s culture. It is also this newly important mass of people that offers an expanded audience for artists and writers. And that mass wants to feel sensation, as sensation reflects the excitement and terror of the technological progress characteristic of the age.
Daly ingeniously links Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, Dion Boucicault's play The Colleen Bawnand Whistler's painting known as Symphony in White, No 1: The White Girl. All three feature the figure of a vulnerable and revelatory woman in a white dress. Daly traces the origins of this cultural fascination with the white woman to the visionary experience of Bernadette Soubirous near Lourdes in 1858 and suggests that the Frenchness of Bernadette's vision of the Virgin, more than its religiosity, is what sustains the ripple effects of Lourdes through English culture in the following years.
The sarcastic vitriol with which the Timesreported the kerfuffle around Lourdes only served to reveal how anxious Britain was about the perceived threat from the French mob. And the extremity of democratisation that France represented in the political mindset of the Timeswas mirrored in Britain in moves towards widening the electoral franchise, culminating in the Reform Act of 1867. The women in white who appeared in Britain in the 1860s were then peculiarly modern in the sensation they caused, because they represented not something archaic but the thrill and chill of mob rule. Sensation literature, according to Daly, occurred when the popular audience was written into culture and culture tried to keep up with social change.
Throughout his discussion of whiteness Daly weaves curious manifestations of Irishness in 1860s Britain. The most obvious of these is in Boucicault's play, which stands a little askew from Collins's novel and Daly's general thesis in its archaic setting. The most fascinating story he tells is of Joanna Hiffernan's role as model (and lover) for Whistler, specifically in his painting Symphony in White, No 1.
Hiffernan's later putative modelling for Courbet's The Origin of the Worldadds spice to a wonderfully nuanced discussion of Whistler's strained sense of his art and his battle with the hoary art establishment. Daly marvellously suggests that Whistler's extensive use of lead white paint may account for some of the eccentricities of his behaviour.
Given that Irishness plays a role in the production of "whiteness" and femininity in the 1860s, and that Lourdes is mooted as a starting point for the phenomenon, it is curious that Catholicism, even as an institution, never mind as a theology and iconography, does not merit more attention in Daly's schema. His argument militates against the spiritual or the psychological as an explanation for the sensational obsessions of the 1860s. For Daly, Collins, Dickens and the other writers he discusses are not only conscious but self-conscious in the way in which they think about the changes that the 1860s brought.
While Daly's argument is engaging, often amusing, and convincing on its own terms, the woman-in-white figure, tied a little tenuously, though intriguingly, to the vision at Lourdes, is hard to disregard as a manifestation of a personal or historical unconscious. Daly's dismissal of the unknown as the main point of attraction of the woman in white seems shakily confident. Daly's method, he says, is to look at what texts "did" to their audiences, always in the belief that the author or artist has willed that effect into existence. For Daly, sensation was used by writers, painters and illustrators to attract an audience and to create and tap into a market.
Which, by the end of Daly's enjoyable travels through these sensational byways of the 1860s, might leave us still wondering what exactly Bernadette saw in the grotto at Lourdes and, more simply, why the women in white were such crowd-pullers.
Colin Graham is co-editor of the Irish Reviewand a lecturer in English at NUI Maynooth
