In 1862, a riot formed outside of the Religious Tract Society in London, with ‘protesters storming … Paternoster Row and threatening to put the windows out’ (Arnold 148). The rioters were pro-unionists, and they formed not as the result of some political agitation or legislation but in protest of a sensation novel, Ellen Wood's A Life's Secret. The novel was serialised anonymously that year in The Leisure Hour, a periodical published by the Religious Tract Society. A Life's Secret depicts an attempted strike and lockout, and it is pointedly critical of trade unions and the impact of strikes on workers’ families. As Wood herself put it in the preface to the 1867 edition of the novel, ‘The appearance of the story in 1862 did not please everybody, and angry remonstrances came down on the managers of “The Leisure Hour”’ (vi). This is a rare instance in which a novel that expressed a fear of a working-class mob actually provoked one.

I will return to the specific example of Wood's novel, but my broader focus in this chapter is the way in which sensation authors depicted crowd and mob behaviour and how such depictions of the transmission of affect are related to the narrator's directive sympathy. The mob, which might be understood as the crowd with intention, is a deeply affective entity, in which people can experience a loss of inhibition and act spontaneously and even violently. In his 1895 study of the crowd, French psychologist Gustave LeBon argues that a crowd exhibits intense affects and lower intellectual functioning than separated individuals. In a crowd, the individual ‘is no longer himself, but has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will’ (32). In this chapter, I explore the notion of the crowd as a space for heightened affects and wilful abandon. The crowd demonstrates what Stephen Ahern calls the most central insight of affect theory, that ‘no embodied being is independent, but rather is affected by and affects other bodies, profoundly and perpetually as a condition of being in the world’ (‘Introduction’ 4).