Things little girls have no business to know anything about: the crimes of Aurora Floyd.

• Author: Ward, Ian
• Position: United Kingdom

The case of Aurora Floyd horrified mid-Victorian England. It is true that her fate evinced sympathy too, but the horror was the greater. We would not be so horrified today, though the offence she committed remains proscribed in English criminal law. Aurora Floyd was a bigamist; her crime, and even more so her sin, was to have two husbands living concurrently. And newspaper editors knew then, as they know today, that the English-reading public likes nothing better than to speculate on a spot of sex and crime over the breakfast table. Aurora was pretty too, and had married fortunately, or at least she had the second time. Her husband was a stolid member of the landed Yorkshire aristocracy. The story of Aurora Floyd came to the attention of mid-Victorian middle England over the winter of 1862, as the nation struggled to come to terms with the murderous bigamy of Lucy Audley, discovered the year before. Aurora and Lucy had something else in common too, aside from their shared criminality, They were fictive, the eponymous heroines of the two "sensation" novels with which Mary Elizabeth Braddon had taken literary England by storm in the first years of the 1860s. The fact that Aurora and Lucy were fictional did not, of course, lessen the threat that many perceived in their creation. On the contrary, it made their crimes all the greater. The case of Lucy Audley has long attracted critical commentary; Lady Audley's Secret is still recognised as the one of the canons of mid-Victorian fiction, more particularly still mid-Victorian "sensation" fiction. Literary history has not been so kind to Aurora Floyd, which has in comparison, largely evaded critical attention during the last century and a half. (1) The purpose of this article is to revisit Aurora Floyd, and more particularly the crimes of its protagonist, as an exercise in legal and literary history.

The 'sensational' novel: vain if not vicious

During the early 1860s, sensation novels enjoyed an extraordinary popularity, not just amongst the novel-buying public, but also, and just as importantly, amongst the novel-borrowing public. It is estimated that the reading audience for the sensation novel during the decade was around five million, predominantly female, and middle class. (2) This audience was greatly shaped by newspaper editors and the acquisitions policy of the circulating libraries favoured by middle-class women. (3) The "queen of the circulating libraries" was undoubtedly Mary Elizabeth Braddon.

Everyone, it seemed, wanted to read the latest Braddon. As Fraser Rae testified in 1865:

Others before her have written stories of blood and lust, of atrocious crimes and hardened criminals, and these have excited the interest of a very wide circle of readers. But the class that welcomed them was the lowest in the social scale, as well as in mental capacity. To Miss Braddon belongs the credit of having penned similar stories in easy and correct English, and published them in three volumes in place of issuing them in penny numbers. She may boast, without fear of contradiction, of having temporarily succeeded in making the literature of the Kitchen the favourite reading of the Drawing Room. (4) Aristocratic daughters and their scullery maids were brought together in one voracious common readership. Rae was not, however, an admirer. Sensation novels, he observed, were "one of the abominations of the age." (5)

Anthony Trollope described the public as reading sensational novels "as men eat pastry after dinner not without some inward conviction that the taste is vain if not vicious." (6) Few were so sanguine. "There is," wrote one of the more vehement critics, Dean Mansel, "something unspeakably disgusting in this ravenous appetite" for this particular species of literary "carrion." (7) Critical anxieties were various. (8) First was a concern about decency. Sensation novels were, almost invariably, about sex and crime. Sensation literature, it was often argued, appealed to the "animal part of our human nature." (9) Unsurprisingly the depiction of female sexuality and passion attracted especial critical ire. (10) Writing in 1868, the Reverend Paget railed against a generic "teaching" that was "so infamous," its principles "so utterly demoralising," the "conversations" so "revolting for their looseness, wickedness, and blasphemy," the presentation of scenes "so licentious or so horrible." (11) A year later, Alfred Austin expressed similar regret in the distasteful species of "love had we better call it lust?" that seemed to pervade the sensation novel, one "which begins with seduction and ends in desertion ... whose agreeable variations are bigamy, adultery, and, in fact, illicit passion of every conceivable sort." (12)

Perhaps the most vociferous critic of the sensation novel was Margaret Oliphant. Oliphant was particularly troubled by the presentation of a "fleshly and unlovely" sexuality. (13) The heroines of sensation novels "marry their grooms in fits of sensual passion," lust after "flesh and muscles, for strong arms that seize her, and warm breath that thrills her through, and a host of other physical attractions that she indicates to the world with charming frankness." (14) As often as not, rather than tending to their domestic responsibilities, they "pray their lovers to carry them from husbands and homes they hate." (15) But the "peculiarity of it in England," she added, is that "this intense appreciation of flesh and blood, this eagerness of physical sensation, is represented as the natural sentiment of English girls, and is offered to them not only as the portrait of their own state of mind, but as their amusement and mental food." (16) Oliphant constantly opined the potential negative effect on the readers:

It is a shame to women so to write; and it is a shame to the women who read and accept as a true representation of themselves and their ways the equivocal talk and fleshly inclination herein attributed to them. It may be done in carelessness. It may be done in that mere desire for something startling which the monotony of ordinary life is apt to produce; but it is debasing to everybody concerned. (17) Sensation novels, it was quickly appreciated, were too often written by women for women. (18) Mansel likewise accused sensation novelists of irresponsibility, not appreciating that their novels would play "no inconsiderable part in moulding the minds and forming the habits and tastes of its generation." (19) The reading of women was anyway a matter of no little concern, it is hardly surprising that intimations of young women eagerly devouring tales of sex and violence were viewed with horror.

Such anxieties chimed with the rather broader mid-century debate regarding the "question" of women, a question that imported a distinct matrimonial and necessarily jurisprudential dimension. The law of marriage was written, not just to confirm the cultural presumptions inscribed in the verses of Coventry Patmore's iconic Angel in the House, but to strengthen the collateral regulation of sexuality. In essence, the law of marriage was written as a "discourse of containment." (20) Most notoriously, the principle of coverture legally erased the married woman, subsuming her person in that of her husband, and matrimonial property law, as well as ancillary jurisprudence relating to such matters as separation and child custody, were written in due deference. (21) Increasingly, however, it was argued that any resolution to the "question" of women would require legal reform. Most famously, in 1857 and 1859 Parliament passed two marriage acts, the first of which established a civil court of divorce, something that would, in due course, prove to be a treasure-trove of titillation for readers of newspaper court reports. In so pointedly engaging matters of law, criminal and matrimonial, in their novels, Braddon and her fellow sensationalists invited their readers, predominantly women, to reflect further upon the nature of these innovations and arguments, their merits and demerits. (22) It is not that Braddon was critical of marriage. On the contrary, as we shall see, she was entirely supportive of the institution. She would probably have agreed with the journalist W. R. Greg's famous observation that a woman who did not marry was fated to lead an "independent and incomplete existence." (23) But she was critical of the jurisprudence that sought to regulate it, and wrote Aurora Floyd in this spirit. As the Westminster Review noted in 1864, sensation novels such as Aurora Floyd put the "institution of marriage ... now upon its trial." (24)

But it was not, of course, simply a matter of legal reform, Indeed, it would have been plain to any reader of Aurora Floyd that Braddon had only limited faith in the role of law in making any marriage happier. The "subjection" of women, to borrow John Stuart Mill's resonant phrase, was culturally inscribed. (25) A "woman's power is for rule, not battle," Ruskin confirmed, "her intellect is not for invention and creation, but for sweet ordering." (26) Henry Maudsley agreed, "the male organisation is one, and the female organisation is another." But for Maudsley and others, this prejudice was further justified and the proper "sphere" of women was determined by biology as well as culture, in particular the biology of reproduction. (27) For example, William Acton's Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs declared that a "modest woman as a general rule ... seldom desires any sexual gratification for herself." (28) It was for this reason that "modesty" should not be corrupted by ill-advised exposure to the "disease of reading." (29) Critics of such diseased literature preferred a pathological strain, commonly declaiming sensation literature in particular to be a "morbid phenomenon." (30) Sensation literature appealed to women, it was commonly assumed, because it worked by "drugging thought and reason, and stimulating the attention...