Sensation novels

Sensation novels became popular in the 1860s, and were decried by moralists who felt that they dealt with scandalous sexual behaviour and the seedy underbelly of Victorian life, with crime and sordid lifestyle and behaviour.  But there was an appetite for light and exciting fiction among people who were not interested in readying “heavy” serious novels.  Braddon admitted that while she was keen to write a “good” novel, she also wanted money and she was willing to write these stories which appealed to the public.

The novels became popular and sold well, and their heyday was soon after the first Divorce court was established by law in 1857.  Previously divorce had been in the hands of the Church and couples had to go through the church courts and then, they had also had to get an Act of Parliament to dissolve a marriage.  Now -there was a court which handled divorce and marital breakdown, and although divorce was still considered wrong by most, and unacceptable, there was a legal mechanism to allow unhappy people to find a clean and lawful way out of a bad marriage. 

Divorce was still very rare, and the grounds for men and women getting a divorce were not equal, but it was a start towards giving women more freedom to escape their marriage legally.  Under the previous system, while there was no law against a woman putting a petition to parliament -generally it was men who divorced their wives.  Now with this new court, women could sue for divorce on various grounds.  Men could do so for adultery alone, whereas women had to have another ground- such as cruelty, desertion, unnatural sexual practices etc.

Old fashioned moralists also criticised the Divorce court and thought that the sensation novels were a similar indication that morals were declining.  There were complaiants  that women were behaving in an improper and immoral fashion and taking it into their own hands to get rid of husbands instead of suffering the miseries of a cruel husband, as they had had to do previously.