About

**Image in header above is a view inside this**: Lane’s Telescopic View: The Interior of the Great Industrial Exhibition. The George Peabody Library, The Sheridan Libraries, The Johns Hopkins University

Curate, v. To act as curator of; to look after and preserve
Curator, n. One who has care or charge of a person or thing. (OED)

The “Victorian Sensation” Creative Curation Project aims to showcase objects, issues, and events that caused “sensations” in the Victorian era.

“Sensation” in the Victorian era is most commonly associated with a popular genre of fiction in the 1860s and 1870s labeled “sensation fiction.” Epitomized by novels like Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, these novels were full of intrigue adapted from the headlines, from popular trials, cases of adultery, madness, and murder. And they were also some of the earliest detective stories.

But just what is “sensation”?

Nineteenth century thinkers picked up the tradition of British empiricism–the idea, credited to thinkers like John Locke, that sensation is at the root of all human ideas–and they added a new set of concerns about the relationship between body and mind. The newly codified disciplines of psychology and physiology debated questions such as: What does sensation do? What is the relationship between consciousness and sensation? What do we sense when we are unconscious? Do we know everything that our bodies sense?

When reviewers of novels by Collins, Braddon, and others labeled these novels “sensation fiction,” they did so by picking up ideas from psychology, arguing that the texts were dangerous because they spoke directly to the nerves rather than to reason.

Of course in popular, colloquial use, “sensation” refers also to the creation of excitement by an event, issue, or person. As James A. Secord puts it in his book Victorian Sensation, “A ‘sensation’ came to mean an excited or violent emotion felt by an entire community and produced by a common experience: the death of a monarch, a terrible accident, a shocking discovery, a public hanging, a remarkable book” (12).

The Victorian Sensation Project

The pages on this website present, curate, interpret, and analyze a collection of object, texts, and events–“sensational” things–from the Victorian era. They present the cultural significance of these objects and illuminate and interpret them.

This website showcases work by students at North Carolina State University (ENG453 Fall 2022) and Duquesne University (ENG420W Fall 2017) and is presented with their permission.