In the Marketplace: The New Romance and the Penny Dreadful

‘It is not needful, nor indeed is it possible, to define Romance,’ Sir Walter Raleigh, first Oxford Professor of English Literature, told his Princeton audience in 1915, and immediately went on to contradict himself. He discussed the origins and development of romance, ‘a perennial form of modern literature’ recurring in every period, and most notably in the ‘romance revival’ of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which rediscovered the medieval as the Renaissance had rediscovered the classical. The romance revival with which this book deals happened much closer to Raleigh's own time, in the 1880s and 90s. It was a historically specific and therefore unique phenomenon, ‘an oddity, not a quiddity’, to borrow Raleigh's words (1916, 8, 44, 10). But in what did its novelty consist? Was the ‘New Romance’ new because it was a tale of the marvellous and supernatural, of strange happenings in far-away times and places, or a narrative of improbable events and coincidences peopled by psychologically unrealistic heroes and villains, or simply a book with an adventure-dominated plot and a minimum of discursiveness and didacticism? What could such different works as H. G. Wells's The Time Machine, Marie Corelli's The Sorrows of Satan and Stanley Weyman's The Red Cockade have in common, besides their year of publication (1895) and the fact that all three were called romances, whether scientific, supernatural or historical?