ABSTRACT
The story of the sensation instigated by the serialization of Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1859–60) is by now a familiar one. So wildly popular was Collins's novel that it sparked a marketing frenzy of “Woman in White” clothing, perfume, and songs, inspired the year's most popular name for baby boys (Walter, after the lovesick hero), and launched a new genre of fiction that thrived throughout the decade subsequently known as “the sensational sixties.” 1 Together with Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret and Ellen Wood's East Lynne, Collins's novel was first in the triumvirate of sensation novels that became the unwitting locus of a heated debate concerning morality in literature. Exasperated reviewers held up The Woman in White for public scrutiny, complaining that it smacked of the French stage's most immoral excesses. One reviewer's complaint vividly exemplifies the critical chorus against The Woman in White: “Throughout the book circumstances grotesque or improbable meet you at every turn. You are bidden to look at scenes of real modern life … and find yourself, instead, wandering in a world as mythical as that portrayed on the boards of a penny theatre.” 2 This damning accusation provides a direct link between Collins's novel and the theatre, represented here in one of its most lowbrow forms.
