A Companion to the Victorian Novel

The reign of Queen Victoria is rightly still regarded as the “The golden age of the English novel”. Between 1837 and 1901 some 60,000 novels were published in Britain: involving such great names as Dickens, Thackeray, Bulwer Lytton, Charles Kingsley, Elizabeth Gaskell, the Brontës, George Eliot and George Meredith. G.K. Chesterton, in The Victorian Age in Literature (1913, p. 90), regarded the novel as having been by far the most varied and characteristic literary product of the whole Victorian period: despite the evident change of its nature and its message, which occurred in the last stages of its history, with...