The Good, the Bad, and the Popular: The Question of a Popular Canon and Other Methodological Contemplations
Julia Kuehn and Diane Eveline van den Brink
Abstract
This article challenges the critical hierarchies that continue to shape the study of popular Victorian fiction by questioning not only the distinction between “high” and popular literature but also the emergence of a “popular canon” within Victorian studies. While writers such as Charles Dickens, Ellen (“Mrs Henry”) Wood, Elizabeth Gaskell and Wilkie Collins have become established objects of scholarly attention, equally successful contemporaries including Ouida, Charles Reade, Hall Caine, Florence Marryat and Marie Corelli remain comparatively neglected. We argue that this disparity reflects value judgements inherited from nineteenth-century criticism that continue to shape academic research, teaching and adaptation.
Drawing on debates about aesthetic value and mass appeal, the article reconsiders the assumptions that underpin literary distinction and scholarly legitimacy. Through two case studies – Wilkie Collins and Marie Corelli – we demonstrate how textual, contextual and author-centred approaches can illuminate the cultural and affective work of popular fiction without reproducing hierarchies of literary merit. In particular, we examine Collins’s and Corelli’s own poetics and theories of the novel, genre and the reader as alternative frameworks for understanding their work.
Rather than asking which popular Victorian writers are more deserving of scholarly attention, the article interrogates the criteria by which such distinctions are made. It argues that popular fiction is inherently a complex site of readerly engagement, authorial practice and social reflection, and therefore merits critical study regardless of its “canonical” status. In doing so, it offers a methodological intervention into Victorian popular fiction studies by challenging the notion of a “popular canon” and proposing more reflexive ways of engaging with the category itself.
Keywords
Wilkie Collins; Marie Corelli; aesthetics; canon; distinction; taste; critical approaches to popular literature
Date of Acceptance: 1 July 2026
Date of Publication: 3 July 2026
Double Blind Peer Reviewed
Recommended Citation:
Kuehn, Julia, and Diane Eveline van den Brink. 2026. “The Good, the Bad, and the Popular: The Question of a Popular Canon and Other Methodological Contemplations.” Victorian Popular Fictions, 8.1 (Spring): 1-28. ISSN: 2632-4253 (online) DOI: https://doi.org/10.46911/MMCR7271
Return to Contents page of VPFJ 8.1
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
