ABSTRACT
The scientific romance was intertwined with a significant Gothic revival that resituated the delirium of the eighteenth-century Gothic in the structures of the new print culture, producing a golden age of supernatural fiction. Recognisable modern popular fiction genres began to emerge in the latter half of the nineteenth century, with the extension of mass culture driven by a transformation in the economic and technological basis for print journals. The ‘scientific romance’ was a hybrid development that created adventure from the possibilities opened up by the revolutions in science and technology that transformed everyday life with a host of electrical inventions and scientific breakthroughs in the 1870s and 1880s. The revival of the literary romance form in England in the 1880s was hailed by its defenders as a return to older, virile, native forms of narrative against the etiolated, Decadent interiors of the analytic novel.
