Name: 19th century sensationalism in the 21st century
Item: Trilby
Author: specialberry

Trilby →

by George du Maurier

19th century sensationalism in the 21st century

specialberry

Jan 06, 2026

I think the modern reader is immune to much of the Sensationalism of the 19th century. I remember finishing The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, which was supposedly scandalous and shocking for the time, and being entirely unmoved.

Of course, this 19th century trend really had its natural death once too many had been written, and the criminal plots became expected rather than shocking, but that hasn't stopped the slow escalation into the violent media that assaults modern audiences today.

So many of the most popular movies and television shows and best-selling books feature murder, adultery, abuse and deception that it's almost surprising if it doesn't, and so visiting the Sensational after this gradual escalation of what is considered 'shocking' makes these previous iterations quite droll.

Trilby is a book about an evil Jew who uses hypnosis to enslave and transform a beautiful (but tone-deaf) woman into a world celebrity known for her singing. It doesn't quite live up to a biopic of a serial killer.

Why, she's deformed-she squints she's a dwarf, and looks like an idiot! Millions or no millions, the man who marries her is a felon! As long as there are stones to break and a road to break them on, the able-bodied man who marries a woman like that for anything but pity and kindness and even then-dishonours himself, insults his ancestry, and inflicts on his descendants a wrong that nothing will ever redeem—he nips them in the budhe blasts them for ever! He ought to be cut by his fellow-men-sent to Coventry—to jail-to penal servitude for life! He ought to have a separate hell to himself when he dies he ought to