Crowds and Bodily Sympathy in Wood and Clive

Chapter four explores ways in which bodily sympathy takes shape in sensation fiction, specifically linking sympathy to crowd behaviour. While late-Victorian crowd psychology and much contemporary affect theory imply that the crowd offers a release from social hierarchies, Victorian fiction depicts the crowd, and especially the mob, as a site in which social distinctions matter and become visible. The chapter focuses on crowds in the work of Ellen Wood and Caroline Clive, an under-studied early sensation. Wood represents the dark side of contagious feeling in her depiction of a mob in A Life’s Secret, a novel that features both a sensational plot and a critique of what Wood saw as immoral Trade Unionists. In a striking convergence of fictional and actual bodies, the serial publication of the novel led to an actual mob, in which rioters protested her anti-union stance. Clive depicts the mob differently in her proto-sensation novel Paul Ferroll: she understands the mob as an innately human phenomenon and uses it to highlight her protagonist’s disturbingly incongruous affects. Throughout, I link their depictions of shared feeling to the ways in which the narrators direct our sympathy towards (or away) from certain characters.