This month Penguin Classics launches a series of "Victorian Bestsellers", a collection of sensationalist-romantic novels from the 18th and 19th centuries, from the Sweeney Todd classic The String of Pearls to The Woman in White. From the moment each of these books appeared, they were staggeringly popular, the bestsellers of their day, and they continued to be read for years afterwards throughout the Victorian era (The coinage 'Victorian Bestsellers' refers not only to when they were published—half of them were published before Victoria came to the throne—but also to when they were being read). Each one a page-turner, heavy on rollicking plot and suspense, these novels were considered immoral in their day, dealing as they do with criminals, night-time absconsions, kidnappings, highway men and the legendary Dick Turpin, and women were warned off reading them by their nervous husbands and the clergy due to their contagious depravity. The novelists attempted to meld together the Gothic and Romance novel, transplanting the exotic trappings of the Gothic onto the English domestic scene. The settings are gloomy chambers, ancient Halls, and old English manorial residences, haunted by English highwaymen, Italian marcheses, brigands and outlaws.
By grouping these titles together in a series, Penguin have tried to give them an identity for contemporary readers. They really are compulsive, strange and engaging, and in selecting the books for the series Penguin Classics wanted to emphasise the purely pleasurable readability of each novel. It is from Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Paul Clifford, after all, where the phrase 'It was a dark and stormy night...' originally comes from.
Sarah Waters has said "A wonderful series, bringing together some of the best examples of gothic and sensation fiction, and taking the reader on a thrilling, irresistible journey through the shadowy back streets and secret passages of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century life."
