SOURCE: "Our Female Sensation Novelists," in Christian Remembrancer, Vol. CXXI, July, 1863, pp. 209-36.

In the following essay, the anonymous author presents an overview of the sensation novel and evaluates the works of Wood, Norton, and Braddon—in the negative manner characteristic of critics of the period.

We have been counselled not to ask why the former times were better than these, and are thus instructed to beware of enhancing the past in peevish depreciation of the present, the scene of our labours and trials. The check is constantly needed by those whose past is long enough ago to melt into harmonious, golden, defect-concealing distance; but we are disposed to think that such check is never more required than when a comparison is forced upon us of the popular ideal of charming womanhood in the times we remember, and what seems to constitute the modern ideal of the same...