A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture

On both sides of the Atlantic, there is nowadays a profound and varied interest in both Victorian literature and Victorian culture (the two, of course, continue to reflect and to denote the dominant role of printed pages in the life of that society, and the relatively unified culture assumed then to be valid and acceptable). In prose, this was the distinguished age of Dickens, Thackeray, Bulwer Lytton, Elizabeth Gaskell, the Brontes, and “George Eliot”. That is sufficient to denote the full emergence of the “social problem” novel, the contest between religion and science, and the unease between the individual and...