ABSTRACT
There is no accounting for tastes, blubber for the Esquimaux, half-hatched eggs for the Chinese, and Sensational novels for the English. Everything must now be sensational. Professor Kingsley sensationalizes History, and Mr. Wilkie Collins daily life. One set of writers wear the sensational buskin, another the sensational sock. Just as in the Middle Ages people were afflicted with the Dancing Mania and Lycanthropy, sometimes barking like dogs, and sometimes mewing like cats, so now we have a Sensational Mania. Just, too, as those diseases always occurred in seasons of dearth and poverty, and attacked only the poor, so does the Sensational Mania in Literature burst out only in times of mental poverty, and afflict only the most poverty-stricken minds. From an epidemic, however, it has lately changed into an endemic. Its virus is spreading in all directions, from the penny journal to the shilling magazine, and from the shilling magazine to the thirty shillings volume. Bigamy is just now its typical form. Miss Braddon first brought the type into fashion. No novel can now possibly succeed without it. In real life money is sometimes obtained by marriage, but in literature only by bigamy. When Richardson, the showman, went about with his menagerie he had a big black baboon, whose habits were so filthy, and whose behaviour was so disgusting, that respectable people constantly remonstrated with him for exhibiting such an animal. Richardson’s answer invariably was, ‘Bless you, if it wasn’t for that big black baboon I should be ruined; it attracts all the young girls in the country.’ Now bigamy has been Miss Braddon’s big black baboon, with which she has attracted all the young girls in the country. And now Mr. Wilkie Collins has set up a big black baboon on his own account. His big black baboon is Miss Gwilt, a bigamist, thief, gaol-bird, forgeress, murderess, and suicide.This beats all Miss Braddon’s big black baboons put together. And the interesting creature is brought forward under the plea of religion. She is heralded in with a fine preface about ‘Christian morality.’ But we must assure Mr. Wilkie Collins that this and his other moral reflections no more make his book religious than a Hindu drama is made religious because it begins with a prayer, or an Oxford prize poem because it ends with a ‘Salem.’ Mr. Wilkie Collins once nearly succeeded in making a mad woman popular, but he has now perfectly succeeded in making religion ridiculous. But besides the big black baboon there are a number of small baboons and monkeys, for by no stretch of language can they be called human creatures. The most prominent are a hag, who paints and enamels women’s faces, and a doctor, whose services, when we are at first introduced to him, are apparently principally required by painted women. Lying, cheating, intriguing, and dreaming strange dreams are the characteristics of these animals. Some of them keep diaries, and some of them yachts.
