Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Series Editor's Preface
- Introduction
- 1 ‘These Acres of Print': Charles Dickens, the News and the Novel as Pattern
- 2 Arrested Development: Characterisation, the Newspaper and Anthony Trollope
- 3 ‘The End is No Longer Hidden': News, Fate and the Sensation Novel
- 4 Israel Zangwill, or ‘The Jewish Dickens': Representing Minority Communities in the Novel and Newspaper
- Postscript
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - ‘The End is No Longer Hidden': News, Fate and the Sensation Novel
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 October 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Series Editor's Preface
- Introduction
- 1 ‘These Acres of Print': Charles Dickens, the News and the Novel as Pattern
- 2 Arrested Development: Characterisation, the Newspaper and Anthony Trollope
- 3 ‘The End is No Longer Hidden': News, Fate and the Sensation Novel
- 4 Israel Zangwill, or ‘The Jewish Dickens': Representing Minority Communities in the Novel and Newspaper
- Postscript
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Early in the 1866 sensation novel, Armadale, middle-aged clergyman Mr Brock reads The Times to his friend and neighbour Mrs Armadale. The narrator emphasises the repetitive habit of their reading:
Mr Brock and his newspaper, appearing with monotonous regularity at her tea-table three times a week, told her all she knew, or cared to know, of the great outer world which circled round the narrow and changeless limits of her daily life.
This introductory scene at first seems to illustrate Benedict Anderson's famous theorisation of the newspaper and its construction of national community. The newspaper reading sessions organise the monotony of Mrs Armadale's mundane life and give her a sense of the outer world that encircles her own changeless reality. The narrator continues,
On the evening in question, Mr Brock took the arm-chair in which he always sat, accepted the one cup of tea which he always drank, and opened the newspaper which he always read aloud to Mrs Armadale, who invariably listened to him reclining on the same sofa, with the same sort of needlework everlastingly in her hand.
The structure of this long and meandering sentence underscores the repetitive regularity of their habitual reading and thus crafts a sense of an eternal present.
Yet this time the reading ceremony is suddenly disrupted; Mr Brock sees an advertisement on the front page requesting communication from ‘Allan Armadale’, a boy of the same name as Mrs Armadale's son. The newspaper ceases to invoke an imagined community but calls specifically for someone Mr Brock knows in his ‘little group of characters’. An agitated Mrs Armadale insists that the advertisement's Allan Armadale must be another person: ‘Another family, and other friends… . The person whose name appears in that advertisement is not my son.’ In asserting her son's singularity, Mrs Armadale resists the serial imagining that associates her with the world of the newspaper and its readers. In the meantime, Mr Brock has the uncanny sense that their lives are affected by influences outside his knowledge and control. This is affirmed six years later, after Mrs Armadale's death, when Mr Brock sees another newspaper advertisement for this Allan Armadale, causing him to intuit that events ‘were tending steadily to some unimaginable end’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Plotting the News in the Victorian Novel , pp. 93 - 123Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020