‘Wilkie! Have a Mission’: The Demise of Sensation Fiction

Abstract

It has been suggested earlier that the virtual restriction of the sensation novel to the one decade of the 1860s asks to be related to a wider than a purely literary history. This chapter is preoccupied less with discussing Collins’s later fiction for the sake of completeness as regards the career of the particular novelist, than with using the somewhat notorious case of the later fiction and what has been almost unanimously perceived therein as a decline in scope and quality from the fiction of the 1860s as a paradigm of the demise of sensation fiction. There remains much truth in Algernon Swinburne’s explanation of the ‘perdition’ of the genius of Collins in terms of his developing a ‘mission’:

What brought good Wilkie’s genius nigh perdition? Some demon whispered — ‘Wilkie! have a mission’.¹