Black Swine in the Sewers of Hampstead: Beneath the Surface of Victorian Sensationalism

by Thomas Boyle

In a Mylar DJ cover. A very nice copy.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Victorian

273 pages, Hardcover

First published September 6, 1989

Reviews

[Tim Pendry]

Boyle's 'Black Swine' is over thirty years old but it still stands up as a literary enquiry into the relationship between early Victorian popular crime journalism and the sensation novels of the 1860s. It is not much more than that at root but it contains many interesting suggestions and potential insights into Victorian culture.

At times, it seems to be just an expanded PhD dissertation but with the virtues and vices of a practicing novelist (Boyle had written three crime novels of his own). There is a 'literariness' at times about the text that is cause for wariness but there is no reason to believe that the book is not based on a sound academic reading of the material.

Perhaps some of the core theses are a little overdone and the total effect is ruined by a final highly normative chapter in which a fashionable disrespect for Victorianism as racist, imperialist, blind to the misery at its heart yadda-yadda reminds us that the author is an Irish-American from the liberal East Coast.

Nevertheless, the less ideological claims are persuasive - that crime journalism changed with technology to become something we can recognise today as pander to popular feeling and that the sensation novel was a much more radical departure from normality than we may have thought up until that time.

The link between the two is that the 'sensationalism' of crime journalism influenced the quasi-tabloid mentality of literary production. There is an audience here that moved between these worlds with ease and sought stimulation in horrors that were realistic and not Gothick.

Boyle becomes more speculative but often persuasively so in linking this new mid-Victorian mentality to intellectual doubts about the security of beliefs that held society together as it modernised under industrialisation. Literary journals undoubtedly give us examples of critics who feared 'sensation' as disruptive.

I am persuaded that this period - just as it moved in increments towards evolutionary theory in Darwin's work - was beginning its incremental process of uncovering and discovering the subconscious that would culminate elsewhere in Europe in the theories of Freud from the 1880s.

Boyle is at his best when he sticks to the texts and the facts and works within the 'historical context' school of literary criticism. He certainly does not bore us with continental European fashions such as 'deconstruction' (though he seems to be a trifle defensive about this at one point).

Where he fails is in being a historian as opposed to a literary critic. He wants to join Dickens in being a social critic and moralist, to share in the task of values creation that often drives the high literary project. The resulting picture of Victorian society is true in the facts but less valid in some of the a-historical interpretation.

This is the liberal mind at its most frustrating - building castles in the air of normativity and retrospective judgmentalism on undoubted facts without trying to understand the sheer complexity of a culture. A set of books of cuttings and a few literary works are insufficient basis for some of the claims being made.

Nevertheless, the argument that, at least in intellectual circles, the seeds of modernism lay in Britain's urban industrial revolution as early as the 1840s is not a foolish one,. I would go further, looking back from 2020, and see the period (or perhaps the 1850s and 1860s more safely) containing the seeds of our current nihilism.

The funny thing about the Enlightenment is that, despite the atheists and 'philosophes', in practice, as an elite phenomenon, it co-existed with religion quite nicely and social order was not threatened, at least in England (though France is another matter).

It could be argued that the world Locke created was predicated on the abandonment of 'enthusiasms' and yet, here, in the mid-Victorian era, 'enthusiasms' re-emerge but as 'sensations' rather than sentiments - and not religious or political excitements either.

The disruptive nature of sensationalism is persuasively argued by Boyle not so much as actual disruption but as potential disruption (initially of 'morality') and contemporaries critics recognised this. The path from sensation to individual hysteria to mass hysteria requires the rediscovery of 'enthusiasm' and strong feelings.

Of course these tendencies are always there - humans have probably not changed much fundamentally in 12,000 years and won't do so for another 12,000 - but its social expression changes and this is where technology comes in. The Palmer case of 1856 and Diana's action replay funeral required certain technologies for construction.

What is suggestive about the book (although Boyle has to skim this because of space) is this link between the technological industrial revolution (which really was a stunning achievement of the Britons) and major changes in the way human brains construct reality in social contexts. There is evidence here for that argument.

Fast forward thirty years from the publication date and we are only a decade away, after decades of gestation, from a massive technological revolution (termed the fourth industrial revolution) that will be sped up by the creative destruction of a pandemic, probably far away from Europe.

The question that arises is what sort of culture and what sort of changes to perception (and even how will human brains rewire) will emerge in the wake of what looks to be a staggeringly total and fast transformation of our social reality. The seeds of the future may be here already if we only can step back and look more carefully.

The pandemic offers us a case study of liberal humanity faced with the complete collapse of its belief that the social is not impotent in the face of nature (unless it gives up being liberal and becomes 'Chinese'). Its attitude seems to be precisely like that of those still trying to cling on to God in the 1860s.

The mid-Victorian era saw just the first shot by liberated individuals at moral conformities that had created absurd social myths designed to hold things together. 150 years later the total destruction of all social mythologies in the West but the last - a right-based liberalism that is mere sentiment - has led us to where we are today.

And where we are today is in a world that lacks resilience, tries to deny death because of there being no hope of an afterlife (not without reason), is coming to the limits of science (though not technology), cannot adapt to change when it requires measures that are unpalatable and is collapsing into a storm of unreasonable emotion.

The crime journalism of the mid-Victorian era moves the English mind from morality tales to the shock and horror of underlying realities and serves a population who variably thrill to the dangerous and obscene and demand that things be better ordered. They have opinions on experts too.

The Victorian mind-set is no different from ours in a crisis - we thrill to the tale and demand action and we choose our experts to prejudiced taste. The Victorian moved slowly to realising that God was going to be no help. Perhaps the post-post-modern is going to realise that the social is going to be of much less help than it had believed.

And if God was going to be of no assistance because of the reality of human behaviour (and is not the reality of human behaviour precisely what drives the current pathogen?) so the social is not going to be of any help unless it is absolute (the Chinese way) or individuals learn to become more personally resilient and adaptive.

We can learn a great deal from the past. This book is a useful part of that process if we are not seduced by its American liberal ideological framework. It will be of interest to anyone interested in the Victorians and especially their literature but Boyle's account of mental processes in a rapidly changing society is useful in any case.

[Alison C]

The thesis of "Black Swine in the Sewers of Hampstead: Beneath the Surface of Victorian Sensationalism," by Thomas Boyle, is that the advent of both the steam engine train and the telegraph in the early 1800s in England led to a sharp increase (and lowered costs) of newspapers in that country, which in turn led to an increase in reporting of “sensational” crimes and newsworthy events. As the century progressed, the Victorian sense of smugness and “right thinking” was belied by what an increasingly literate public read in these newspapers, in terms of sexuality and criminal behaviours; of course, with more newspapers to choose from and with the more rapid dissemination of news and events, the papers began competing for readership and one way to successfully do that was to publish the most salacious and sensational stories the reporters could find. Within about a decade of these changes in the public sphere, that sensationalism started appearing in the form of novels by writers such as Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon (whose “Lady Audley’s Secret” is often considered the first of these “sensational novels”) and Charles Dickens, all of which led to what Mr. Boyle describes as a new era of skepticism and experimentation, permanently putting the idealized version of Victorian life to heel. I found this book interesting, and loved that it has footnotes and a bibliography, always important in works of historical interpretation, I think. On the other hand, the author tends to insert his own study habits and travels in research rather too frequently into the narrative and, given that it was published in 1989 (some 30 years ago as I write this review), his constant allusions to contemporary American fiction (largely in the form of television shows), fall somewhat flat. Still, an interesting study into a fascinating time; recommended.

[Fraser Sherman]

Boyle looks at how the Victorian newspapers scandalized England by printing the lurid details of murders, divorce cases, adultery and other shocking (by the standards of the time) matters, often happening among respectable, middle-class types who should be above such sordid filthiness. As Boyle sees it, this kind of journalism both drew on and fed Victorian fears that their society had not risen above such base animal matters as much as they wanted to believe. The book then follows with a look at "sensation novels" (so called because they engaged the feelings viscerally, rather than the intellect) which it argues taps into the same insecurity.
Interesting, though Boyle's occasional discussions of how he researched the book could have been cut (and should have been).

[Laurie]

An excellent read!! I love academic non-fiction in which the researcher discusses his/her research, where it was done, how they found things, the connections made, etc. - and this is one of those books. Read it in researching my next novel which is about Victorian London.

[Sarah]

Didn’t understand most of it. Could be my lack of knowledge in the areas discussed or that the author’s writing was overly complex. Disliked the personal stuff about how the author came up with his thesis.

[Lisa the Tech]

Dickens was my introduction into the reality that Victorian England was not nearly as genteel as other books made it sound. I like the parallels the author finds between those works and today's tabloids. Of course, now I want to take another look at 'Our mutual friend' and start investigating the works of Collins and LeFanu. A very good book.

[melvinhiddenelder]

Sensationalist journalism and fiction in the Victorian era, it seems we have always had a taste for the exploited masses.

[Leah]

A great look at sensational journalism and some of the coolest crimes of the period.