The sensation novel was a phenomenon of the 1860s. The novels were incredibly popular with the reading public and just as passionately derided by many critics.
Sensation fiction was so called for a number of reasons. Firstly, the stories, in serialized and then in book form, were a publishing and pop culture sensation.
Secondly, they contained sensational, outrageous, and scandalous plotlines and characters, which made them so appealing to a large reading public: murder and mystery, bigamy and fraud, shockingly independent women and conniving, villainous aristocrats.
Finally, they were sensational because of their powerful effect on the senses.
Two of the best known examples are Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret and Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, which this episode focuses on, but there are many others. And, as this episode explores, the influence of the sensation novel can still be felt today.
Joining me is sensation fiction expert Dr Anne-Marie Beller
Guest
Dr Anne-Marie Beller is a Senior Lecturer in English at Loughborough University. Her research interests are in Victorian literature and culture, particularly sensation fiction, New Woman Writing of the fin de siècle, and Neo-Victorian Studies. Within these areas, she is interested in gender and identity, representations of mental health and the history of psychiatry, and genre and literary value. She has published widely on the nineteenth century novelist, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and her contemporary ‘sensationalists’, Wilkie Collins, Mrs. Henry Wood, and Amelia B. Edwards.
You can read her full bio and find all her works here
Works Referenced and Mentioned
Mary Elizabeth Braddon: Lady Audley’s Secret
Wilkie Collins: The Woman in White
Wilkie Collins: The Moonstone
Sarah Waters: Tipping the Velvet; Affinity; Fingersmith
James Harwood The Asylum
This is a useful site on Braddon
There’s also a PhD thesis I read the introduction to here
The British Library always has great short introductions to topics. The one on the sensation novel is here
This book on Victorian pop culture is a great reference too
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This episode mentions Penny Bloods, which you can read more about here
Or for more on detective fiction, closely related to the sensation novel try this episode
Got a favourite sensation novel? Leave a comment below or check out the Words To That Effect Facebook Page or the show is on Instagram too
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Transcripts: The Sensation Novel
The Sensation Novel: Script
STING
I’m Conor Reid, with Words To That Effect
Stories of the fiction that shapes popular culture
“The moon was full and broad in the dark blue starless sky, and the broken ground of the heath looked wild enough in the mysterious light to be hundreds of miles away from the great city that lay beneath it. The idea of descending any sooner than I could help into the heat and gloom of London repelled me.
The prospect of going to bed in my airless chambers, and the prospect of gradual suffocation, seemed, in my present restless frame of mind and body, to be one and the same thing. I determined to stroll home in the purer air by the most roundabout way I could take; to follow the white winding paths across the lonely heath; and to approach London through its most open suburb
[…]I was strolling along the lonely high-road—idly wondering, I remember, what the Cumberland young ladies would look like—when, in one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop by the touch of a hand laid lightly and suddenly on my shoulder from behind me.
I turned on the instant, with my fingers tightening round the handle of my stick.
There, in the middle of the broad bright high-road—there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven—stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments, her face bent in grave inquiry on mine, her hand pointing to the dark cloud over London, as I faced her.
I was far too seriously startled by the suddenness with which this extraordinary apparition stood before me, in the dead of night and in that lonely place, to ask what she wanted. The strange woman spoke first.
“Is that the road to London?” she said.
I looked attentively at her, as she put that singular question to me. It was then nearly one o’clock. All I could discern distinctly by the moonlight was a colourless, youthful face, meagre and sharp to look at about the cheeks and chin; large, grave, wistfully attentive eyes; nervous, uncertain lips; and light hair of a pale, brownish-yellow hue. There was nothing wild, nothing immodest in her manner: it was quiet and self-controlled, a little melancholy and a little touched by suspicion; not exactly the manner of a lady, and, at the same time, not the manner of a woman in the humblest rank of life.
[…]What sort of a woman she was, and how she came to be out alone in the high-road, an hour after midnight, I altogether failed to guess. The one thing of which I felt certain was, that the grossest of mankind could not have misconstrued her motive in speaking, even at that suspiciously late hour and in that suspiciously lonely place.
“Did you hear me?” she said, still quietly and rapidly, and without the least fretfulness or impatience. “I asked if that was the way to London.”
*
This is a slightly shortened version of the crucial early scene in Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, when Walter Hartright encounters the mysterious woman of the title, setting in train the events of the novel.
The novel is one of the most famous examples of sensation fiction, a hugely popular genre, at its height in the 1860s. Sensation fiction was so called for a number of reasons:
Firstly, these stories, in serialized and then in book form, were a publishing and pop culture sensation
Secondly, they contained sensational, outrageous, and scandalous plotlines and characters, which made them so appealing to a large reading public: murder and mystery, bigamy and fraud, shockingly independent women and conniving, villainous aristocrats.
Finally, they were sensational because of their powerful effect on the senses.
The short passage I just read illustrates this particularly well:
You have a mysterious encounter with a ghostly woman who seems as if she has appeared out of nowhere: Walter is terrified at first, especially as he unexpectedly feels a hand on his back. There’s a clear gothic influence to it all – the extract opens late at night, on an abandoned road, with Walter thinking about his gradual suffocation. This strange woman in white seems, at first, to be supernatural.
But there are other senses being affected here too: horror turns to curiosity at the mystery of this deeply unusual encounter. Who is this woman, and why is she on her own, late at night, dressed in this way? And Walter’s other senses are excited: as he is daydreaming about two young ladies he is soon to meet, a young, attractive woman gently places her hand on his shoulder and he turns around, struck by her appearance. He initially helps her on her way to London but his obsession with her will drive the plot of the entire story.
Soon after, with the woman now safely on her way to London, Walter sees a policeman across the road, and a carriage with two men inside pulls up to question the officer:
“Policeman!” cried the first speaker. “Have you seen a woman pass this way?”
“What sort of woman, sir?”
“A woman in a lavender-coloured gown——”
“No, no,” interposed the second man. “The clothes we gave her were found on her bed. She must have gone away in the clothes she wore when she came to us. In white, policeman. A woman in white.”
“I haven’t seen her, sir.”
“If you or any of your men meet with the woman, stop her, and send her in careful keeping to that address. I’ll pay all expenses, and a fair reward into the bargain.”
The policeman looked at the card that was handed down to him.
“Why are we to stop her, sir? What has she done?”
“Done! She has escaped from my Asylum. Don’t forget; a woman in white. Drive on.”
*
And so the story begins. This short extract alone has touched on so many of the themes and features of the genre that I’m going to look at this episode:
The mixture of horror and intrigue, attraction and repulsion
The play on the senses, in every way
The importance of a good mystery, and the beginning of Walter’s subsequent detective-like pursuit of answers
And the many contemporary questions around the place of women, inside and outside the home. Walter’s encounter is so strange because this woman is not where she should be, she’s not acting the way she should, and his subsequent encounter with the carriage forces him to question whether he has helped a dangerous lunatic remain at large, or aided in the escape of a woman falsely imprisoned.
It is a novel that is sensational for so many reasons, one which has remained in print since it first appeared as a gripping serial in 1859, and a story which is a fantastic example of a genre which would go on to influence so much later popular fiction, right up to the present today.
*
So the term sensation novel was coined at the very beginning of the 1860s, by critics who began to discern a new trend in fiction,. There were other synonyms, sometimes these novels were called crime novels or bigamy novels, newspaper novels, even fast novels. And they were used to describe novels by very popular novelists like Wilkie Collins, so Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret,
so they were novels that centred on mystery, suspense and criminal intrigue, usually in a contemporary middle / upper middle-class setting.
And often their plots would involve crime, such as murder, bigamy or fraud. And madness was also a favourite theme. And Punch magazine published a mock advertisement in the early 1860s promoting sensation fiction where they claimed that it was devoted to: “harrowing the mind, making the flesh creep, and giving shocks to the nervous system”
To help me understand the phenomenon of sensation fiction, I’ve enlisted the expertise of Dr Anne Marie Beller:
I’m Dr. AnneMarie Beller. I’m a senior lecturer in English Literature at Loughborough University. And I work on Victorian literature, but primarily the sensation novel. I’ve published extensively on Mary Elizabeth Braddon. And I’m currently working on Wilkie Collins
Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon were by no means the only authors of sensation fiction – if you’re interested in the genre you’ll find numerous others: Ellen Woods, Rhoda Broughton, Florence Marryat, Charles Reade, and many others. But Collins’ The Woman in White, and Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret – which is somewhat less well-known today but at the time was a….well…sensation – are two of the absolute classics.
Sensation novels were hugely commercially successful in the 1860s and into 70s. The reading public could not get enough of them. The critics, in many cases, were not always as enthusiastic.
One of the reasons sensation fiction was so critically maligned was because, although they were aimed at a middle-class readership, the stories were very similar to those found in the penny press – the cheap, disposable, lower-class periodicals that sensationalised crime and drew heavily on the most salacious and gruesome newspaper stories of the day. Sensation novelists too kept a careful eye on the crimes of the day:
I think this term ‘newspaper novel’ is quite useful, because it really emphasises the way that these were very contemporaneous up-to-date plots that were often negotiating, you know, very topical concerns. Quite often issues around women’s legal positionand social roles were pivotal. We see that as well, of course in canonical novels by Bronte, Dickens, Eliot, but these were much more sensationalised. The heroines were often far more transgressive. And in many ways they can be read as critiques of the middle and upper middle class home, of marriage as an institution.
Now we tend to think of these stories as novels – if you go buy The Women in White, for example, it’s most likely going to be a paperpack with maybe a nice introduction and a contents page and so on. But while stories like this were bound together and sold as novels, this was only after they’d gone out as serials in the hugely popular periodicals of the time. Literacy was on the rise, there were economies of scale and improvements in paper production, the Paper Tax was eliminated in 1861, the demand for serialised fiction had been proven by Dickens and many others. Add to this absolute page-turners full of crime and scandal and mystery, and it’s no surprise that everybody was reading sensation fiction – for good or for ill:
And this was one of the primary concerns about the sensation novel. It cuts across class boundaries. And this was a real source of anxiety that servants were reading the same stories as their masters. This also fed into anxieties that the sensationalised reading material of the lower classes, so Penny Bloods, Penny Dreadfuls, were filtering up into more respectable middle class fiction.
And for more on Penny Bloods, have a listen to ep 36 on Varney the Vampire
And just this kind of issue of the blurring of class boundaries, which again to put that into context is, can be read against debates in the decade running up to the passing of the Second Reform Act in 1867. So class is a very topical concern. Lots of more conservatively-minded commentators are extremely worried about that kind of blurring of class boundaries.
So everybody’s reading them. Gladstone, who was the prime minister at the time, was reported to have missed a theatre date because he couldn’t put down the latest instalment of Collins’ The Woman in White. And I think the enormous popularity was a key component in that kind of critical hysteria that emerged. Quite soon it became a divide between popular and more highbrow fiction. So anything that was perceived to be popular, or by a writer that wasn’t approved of by the reviewer, it was quite quickly dubbed ‘sensational’.
So everyone’s reading them. But who was writing them? Well, first up you’ve got Mary Elizabeth Braddon:
So Mary Elizabeth Brandon’s life is almost as sensational as the novels that she’s famous for. She went on the stage in her late teens, at a time when middle class, respectable girls didn’t really become actresses, it was still perceived as a disreputable thing to do. She was chaperoned by her mother constantly through that period, but she wanted to write and she worked very hard to break into the London literary scene of the time. So in her early career, she published some poems in provincial newspapers. And then she found a patron, John Gilby, who basically paid her a salary to write her first book
And early in the 1860s. She met John Maxwell, who was a publisher in London – he ran numerous magazines, most of them quite ill-fated – Maxwell was notoriously bad with money; lots of his ventures ended up going quite disastrously. And at some point in the early 1860s Braddon embarked on a romantic relationship with Maxwell. As well as working for him, contributing short stories to one of his periodicals, The Welcome Guest. Maxwell couldn’t marry Braddon because he already had a wife, who was insane. And I don’t know if your listeners might not be aware of this, but there were three main reasons in the Victorian period why you couldn’t divorce your wife.
So one of the reasons was, if your spouse was in prison for life, you couldn’t divorce them. One was if the adultery had been condoned. So this was the case with George Eliot / Mary Ann Evans, and her partner, George Henry Lewes. Lewes was unable to divorce his wife because he had condoned her adultery with his friend Hunt and put his name on the birth certificate of illegitimate children, etc.
And the third reason was you couldn’t divorce your wife if she had been declared insane. Lots of popular sources will tell you that Braddon’s, sorry that Maxwell’s first wife, Mary Ann, was in an insane asylum. There’s no evidence for that at all. It’s much more likely, from the evidence we do have that she was being looked after, at home in Ireland by family. But the situation was that he couldn’t get a divorce.
The asylum issue is important here too because lots of sensation fiction plots, including Lady Audley’s Secret, use asylums – whether as a punishment for wayward women too wealthy to go to prison, or by forcing women into asylums to gain their wealth. There were, at the time, no shortage of reasons a woman might be admitted to an asylum, including a number of flexibly defined maladies like hysteria, nervousness or overaction of the mind.
So Braddon took the quite courageous decision to live with Maxwell outside of marriage. And quite quickly, they began to have children, they had six children in all. So right from the beginning of her career she’s sort of positioned as this disgraceful woman, she’s outside of social respectability. And she has her own secrets just like the heroines of her novels.
And Lady Audley, as you might guess from the title, is one of those heroines…with a secret.
The story follows Lucy Graham, a governess who catches the eye of Sir Michael Audley and soon marries him. She’s young and beautiful, with golden hair and blue eyes and she’s loved by everyone. But when Sir Michael’s nephew, Robert, visits Audley Court he is both captivated by, and suspicious of, his new aunt. Robert is a well-off, unexcitable barrister with no dependents and very few cares in the world, but when his friend disappears in mysterious circumstances, he becomes determined to solve the case, and is increasingly sure that his new aunt is hiding something. So, there’s murder and blackmail, forgery and bigamy, arson and burglary, and with Robert’s investigations, it all reads much like a detective novel, at a time when that genre was coming together in its own right. In fact, Wilkie Collins’ other most famous novel, The Moonstone, is one of the foundational texts in the detective genre, which you can find out about in Ep 44 on the history of detective fiction.
So, at the centre of this puzzle is the fascinating character of Lady Audley:
Lady Audley, as the female protagonist was described by one critic as noxious, a female Mephistopheles, and an aberration, so a lot of the the critical kind of backlash against the novel was around this issue of its heroine and her transgressive act
Contemporary readers were both repulsed and drawn to her:
I think they were fascinated because she seems such an anomaly. Her appearance was the ideal of the angel in the house, the perfect Victorian woman, she embodies those ideals of beauty of the period, yet she concealed this monstrous inner self that was willing to commit murder, without giving any spoilers away, to act ruthlessly in protection of her own interests. And I think that was the sensationalism of the plot.
Interestingly, it wasn’t a particularly new phenomenon. It was only a kind of transgression in terms of classed forms of fiction. Because a friend of mine, Andrew King, who’s written about this, shows that there were numerous golden haired, angelic, murderous women in Penny bloods, in lower class fiction, that they kind of populate the pages of the London Journal, which was a periodical that was aimed much more at working class readers. But in middle class fiction, it hadn’t really happened before
And I think it was kind of the timing as well because this is a decade when you’ve got the emergence, for the first time, of kind of really organised feminist campaigning, moving towards things like the first Married Women’s Property Act at the end of the decade. And just you know, the Contagious Diseases Act so there was a lot of kind of public debate around women’s roles, women’s nature, what women really like, what should they be doing? What are they capable of? So Lady Audley was kind of thrown, you know – very visibly and in a high profile way because of the popularity – into this debate, and it just kind of fed those kinds of debates
The place of women in British society at this time was a fiercely debated topic. And just in case you need reminding, the legal position of women was, by modern standards, pretty grim:
So it was obviously still a long way off until women would get the vote – that wouldn’t come until 1918, and only for women over 30 and with various property qualifications.
At the time sensation fiction was at its height, a woman effectively surrendered her legal existence to her husband once she got married – her rights at this point were similar to a child’s.
She couldn’t sue, or be sued, as she didn’t exist legally. Her personal property all passed to her husband on marriage, who could do with it as he pleased. And any freehold land she owned also passed to her husband, although he needed her consent to sell it (and the machinations around these sorts of things when huge inheritances were involved form the plots of plenty of fiction from this time). Dr Beller mentioned the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870, and various acts in the latter half of the century allowed women to keep some of their earnings or property after they married, or retain them after a divorce, but these were still quite limited.
The Divorce Act of 1857 changed the way divorces could be granted, essentially allowing the better-off middle classes access to divorce. Before then, it was a complicated and hugely expensive affair only open to the very wealthy. Divorce for the less well-off, though, was still not a realistic prospect.
So legally, a woman’s property, and her body of course, belonged to her husband. Fathers also remained the sole legal guardians of any children. Oh, and the age of consent at this time was 12.
So all of this formed the basis around which so much sensation fiction was built – scheming and intrigue around marriages and divorces to gain huge inheritances; forgery; blackmail; and murder to obtain land, titles, and wealth; men and women working against each other, with and around the law, all at time of early femininst agitation for the right to vote and equality in education and work.
There was a lot going on!
But then one book changed everything.
No, it didn’t at all, I just thought that sounded sensational. I’m actually going to stop here for a quick break.
MIDROLL
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**
Back to the sensation.
I want to turn now to The Woman in White which, like Lady Audley’s Secret, is just a great story, full of twists and turns. It’s got a central mystery and a detective-like character, but it’s also quite original in how it’s presented. The story is told from multiple first-person perspectives, so as a reader you’re trying to piece together what’s happened with a narrative that keeps jumping from viewpoint to viewpoint. Collins wasn’t the first person to do this but it certainly anticipates popular works like Bram Stoker’s Dracula and a lot of the forms of later modernist fiction. It’s just a really effective way to present a mystery story. And the Woman in White is also, in large part because of its serialised publication, just such a gripping novel:
So the Woman in White began serial publication, lots of sensation novels, if not all, were initially serialised. And that’s very relevant when you’re thinking about the kind of fast-paced element of, the frequent cliffhangers you know, designed to kind of propel reader interest and bring them back for each instalment. And Collins certainly provided this with the Woman in White. So the Woman in White, unlike Lady Audley’s Secret, doesn’t feature a transgressive female at the heart of it.
But it does involve a number of women who are quite interesting in different ways. So you have Marian Halcombe who is the half sister of Laura Fairlie, and Marian is presented as a very masculine type of woman, there’s a description that even suggests that she has what borders on a moustache. She’s, you know, given by Collins the kind of, the supple and beautiful form of a woman, but the kind of personality and strength of a man.
And this is very much in contrast to her half sister Laura Fairlie who is quite insipid. Really. She again embodies that angel in the house quality. Unlike Lady Audley, she is exactly what she seems. And she is very much a victim of the machinations that surround her. But she’s doubled with a character called Anne Catherick who the hero Walter Hartright encounters on a deserted road late at night –
The other great character in the novel is Count Fosco – he’s this obese, eccentric, mouse-loving Italian count, who is, at first glance, vivacious and extravagant, but just below the surface is deeply manipulative and intimidating, terrifying to those who come to know him. Even if they are not as central as Walter and Laura, it’s Count Fosco and Marian Halcombe who really make the novel.
*
So, I’ve mentioned gothic and detective stories, penny bloods and other types of fiction in this period. Where does sensation fiction fit in all this?
So in terms of earlier forms of popular fiction, the sensation novel tended to cannibalise many of these to almost become a melting pot of ingredients that had proved to appeal to large readerships. So for example, the Gothic, the Silver Fork novel of the 1820s and 30s, the Newgate novel of the 1840s.
Silver Fork novels were stories which presented, for middle-class readers, the glamorous lives of aristocratic high society. Newgate novels, on the other hand, were named after a London prison, and were lurid and thrilling tales of real or fictional criminals.
And these sort of elements of all these popular forms were taken and kind of put within this very kind of contemporary realist setting. Lots of early critics recognised the Gothic roots of the sensation novel. Henry James famously commented, that sensation was interested in those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries that are at our own doors. So it was a kind of domesticated Gothic, a Gothic that was kind of transplanted from exotic far flung locations into kind of everyday London or suburbia. It doesn’t really go away. I think it just transmutes
it’s very much an early forerunner of the detective novelthat becomes much more fully formed in the 1880s and the 1890s. There are strong detective elements in most sensation novels. Braddon herself very much kind of hones that detective element and many of her 1880s novels are, you know, typical detective narratives. It also, I think, transmutes into, if we’re thinking about contemporary forms, into soap opera. I mean, the whole kind of, you know, family saga, secrets, betrayal, intrigue is kind of typical of of contemporary popular soap operas.
Yeah this is something I hadn’t really thought of but there are definite parallels there. The cliffhanger endings, the sensational plotlines, the family secrets.
And there are much closer successors to sensation fiction today too. There’s plenty of Victorian-inspired literature around, whether historical novels or in the form of something like steampunk (go listen to episode 30 for more on that). There’s neo-Victorian fiction, but even more specifically there’s neo-Sensation fiction:
Sarah Waters’, Tipping the Velvet, Affinity. These are very much, you know, 20th century sensation novels, and Waters is self consciously doing that, she did a PhD in Victorian literature, she’s written an introduction to a modern edition of a Braddon novel. Waters knows the sensation novel and she’s very self consciously utilising those tropes in her own fiction. But I mean, too many to mention, there are novels that rewrite the Woman in White, lots of lots of engagements with the Woman in White, there’s a novel, can’t remember the name of it, but it’s almost a kind of sequel to The Woman in White, where Walter and Marian go off as kind of detectives. There’s James Harwood’s The Asylum that kind of utilises that substitution in an asylum kind of motif. So I think sensation is very much still with us, in a variety of popular forms. And essentially, these were novels of crime and crime fiction of course is still one of the most popular forms for readers, and that kind of the puzzle element, the sensational kind of criminal element is very much something that I don’t think has ever gone away.
I’m currently reading Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith, prompted by researching all of this, and it’s so good, so clearly written by someone who loves, and deeply understands, the history and the fiction of the time.
At a more general level too, there are lots of parallels between serialised sensation fiction and TV culture today.
So when the Woman in White was first published, it was so popular, it became a phenomenon beyond just print. It spawned a whole kind of marketing industry, in the way that we’re kind of used to today, with kind of, you know, merchandise for kind of popular novels, you know, if it’d been able to at the time, there would have been a film. But there were Woman in White perfumes, there were dances, you know, there are a Woman in White quadrilles and waltzes. And I think that’s an element that is very, sort of, typical of today, that kind of tie-in factor, but also the kind of, I suppose, what we would today call ‘event TV’, you know, when there’s a big kind of new drama serial that gets very much hyped or new Netflix series, and everybody’s talking about it, because everybody’s watching it. And if it’s, you know, if you can’t kind of binge the box set, then you’ve got to kind of wait for each episode.
Just like sensation fiction was written, published, and marketed to draw people in and leave them waiting for the next instalment, so too is contemporary television shaped by whether it will be watched in one, bingeable whole, broken up over shorter series, or released week by week. And while the latest massive TV hit may not always result in its own quadrille or waltz, it will pretty much get every other spin off and piece of merchandise possible.
The height of sensation fiction’s fame may have only lasted a decade or two, a century and a half ago, but its legacy and influence is clearly recognisable today and, more importantly, if you haven’t already, there are some shocking, terrifying, sensational Victorian classics out there just waiting to be read.
Outro
That’s it for another episode of Words To That Effect, thanks so much for listening.
A huge thanks this week to Dr AnneMarie Beller, who has written extensively on this area. I’ve put a link to her research and bio on the website if you want to find out more.
You’ll find that at wttepodcast.com, where you’ll also find full transcripts, a list of all the works mentioned, images, back episodes, and lots, lots more. There are also links to the show’s facebook and instagram and twitter. So wttepodcast.com
The podcast artwork is by Matt Mahon, production assistance by Marisa Brown. This episode was recorded at The Podcast Studios, Dublin and is a part of the HeadStuff Podcast Network. For more, and to become a member of HeadStuff+ go to HeadStuffPodcasts.com
See you next time!