Domestic melodrama, situated at the emotional and moral centre of life, is the most important type of Victorian melodrama; it is here that we see primal fears clothed in everyday dress.

(Vicinus 1981:128)

A small country town in the heart of England was the scene some years ago of a sad tragedy. I must ask my readers to bear with me while I relate it. These crimes, having their rise in the evil passions of our nature, are not the most pleasant for the pen to record; but it cannot be denied, that they do undoubtedly bear for many of us an interest amounting to fascination.

(Lord Oakburn’s Daughters:1)

Few of us are without some secret skeleton that we have to keep sacred from the world.

(Lord Oakburn’s Daughters:339)

These last two quotations from Ellen Wood’s now-forgotten Lord Oakburn’s Daughters contain many of the key elements of her sensation novels (or, more correctly, sensation-influenced novels) from the 1860s. All of these works are tales of ‘sad tragedy’, set in fairly closed communities on the edges of small English country towns. They are tales of crime and passion involving secret skeletons and the masks and strategies by which those secrets are both generated and concealed. They

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