ABSTRACT
Little attention has been given to the way in which ghost stories as a popular magazine form in the middle decades of the nineteenth century influenced sensation fiction as a literary genre. Neither to how these stories contributed to the “phantasmagoria” of commodity culture that has come to define Victorian “sensation” more generally. One of the most immediately recognizable characteristics of both short ghost stories and sensation fiction of the mid-nineteenth century is one the genres share: their domestication of the gothic. Sensation fiction’s oddly othering effect on readers, which often occurs through an eerie destabilization of social norms and modes, is what has secured its status as gothic progeny in the eyes of so many contemporary scholars. While these tales of the supernatural have much in common with sensation fiction of the period, Victorian readers saw them as somehow different from quintessential sensation novels like The Woman in White or Lady Audley’s Secret.
