Sensation

Photography was a quintessential new visual technology of the nineteenth century. Chapter 4 studies cartes de visite, or small photographic portraits. These collectible photographs became both popular and controversial during the so-called “sensation” craze of the 1860s. Scholars have largely focused on sensation novels, known for their lurid crime plotlines and outrageous villainesses. Yet sensation was more than merely a literary aesthetic: it was a multimedia phenomenon encompassing both novels and photographs. It responded to new forms of spectacular female celebrity, as seen in the wild popularity of photo portraits of actresses, opera divas, prostitutes, even Queen Victoria. The carte-de-visite medium, circulating women’s portrait photographs in millions of paper copies, perfectly encapsulated sensation’s dialectic between embodiment and mediation, and between individual celebrity and the democratized mass. These themes drive the plots of sensation novels, especially Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White and M. E. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret.