‘Merely telling the truth’: Servants’ Stories in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights

Abstract

Since contemporary critics accused sensation fiction of undermining morality, glamorizing vice, and pandering to lower or even criminal classes, sensation authors often defended their work by asserting that they were simply `telling the truth.' For example, Wilkie Collins' first sensation novel, Basil (1852), contains a dedication in which the author claims:I have founded the main event out of which this story springs, on a fact within my own knowledge. In afterwards shaping the course of the narrative thus suggested, I have guided it, as often as I could, where I knew by my own experience, or by experience related to me by others, that it would touch on something real and true in its progress. (3)Collins further suggests that any critics who accuse the book of immorality are simply making a pretense of `shrink[ing from] …subjects which they think of in private and talk of in public everywhere' (5). Thus, Collins proposes that his text, while fictional, is actually a means of telling harsh truths, which is why it inspires his critics' contempt. George Augustus Sala would later defend sensation fiction using the comparable claim that `[i]n the opinion of dolts and dullards and envious backbiters, everything is ``sensational'' that is vivid, and nervous, and forcible, and graphic, and true' (457).