A Companion to the Victorian Novel

I still preserve, and occasionally read, G.K. Chesterton’s small and battered book, entitled The Victorian Age in Literature (1913), which I purchased, already second‐hand, while I was still an undergraduate at Cambridge. It is perhaps for me a treasured souvenir of times long since past: interesting and stimulating it was probably even then rather a superficial appraisal of the varied riches of the Victorian literary harvest, a major feature of that vanished but crucial period of our history. The Victorian novel, in particular, constituted a huge diversity of literary talent and insight: Dickens, Thackeray, George Borrow, Disraeli, Elizabeth Gaskell, the...