This chapter focuses on sensation novels including Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, Ellen Wood’s East Lynne, Collins’s Armadale, and Rhoda Broughton’s Cometh Up as a Flower. The chapter argues that novels in this tradition help readers covertly manage their mood. These novels deal, in particular, with the management of socially pathologized emotions, with earlier novels focusing on addiction-induced excitement and later novels focusing on nervousness. After close-reading the novels, the chapter addresses readers who were accused of being addicted to popular literature and readers who have used fiction to interpret pathologized negative emotions in terms that are more flattering.