'The Newspaper Novel’: Nation, News, and Fate in the Nineteenth- Century Sensation Novel

Abstract

Benedict Anderson argues that the daily ceremony of newspaper reading fosters a horizontal identification with other imagined readers and thereby facilitates the ability to “think” nation. This paper argues, however, that the nineteenth-century sensation novel transforms the newspaper into a source of superstition and exclusion. In Wilkie Collins’s novel, Armadale(1866), Lydia Gwilt invests the newspaper with mythic meaning, as she reads it for signs of a larger providential plot in which she plays the villain. Such a perspective reconfigures the temporal orientation of the newspaper; it no longer creates a sense of simultaneity with fellow readers but rather offers clues to Lydia’s pre-determined future. Lydia’s superstitious faith takes readers’ customary belief in the news to the extreme, so that the news becomes more like an oracle than a product of the modern print marketplace.