ABSTRACT
This chapter defines the typical sensational home and to investigate how sensation novels subverted the Victorian ideology of home that Ruskin's treatise summarised. The author's vision of the perfect home ran thus: This is the true nature of home it is the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division. Laura confidently tells her sister 'they will pass hours and hours every day with these four friendly walls round us', as if she were hoping to recreate her Limmeridge home within the microcosm of her sister's bedroom. If the sensational home fails to be a shelter against injury and terror, as The Woman in White exemplifies, or division and anxiety, as The Doctor's Wife suggests, it also fails to offer its inhabitants shelter against doubt and secrecy.
