Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rcrh6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-29T09:16:34.675Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2012

Deirdre David
Affiliation:
Temple University, Philadelphia
Get access

Summary

Novels are in the hands of us all; from the Prime Minister down to the last-appointed scullery maid. We have them in our library, our drawing-rooms, our bed-rooms, our kitchens – and in our nurseries.

Anthony Trollope, 1870

How was it that the Victorian novel appeared to be in the hands of all social classes in 1870, even if not everyone was reading the same novel? What brought the Prime Minister and his servant together was the sheer pleasure of reading exhilarating fiction, despite the fact that William Gladstone was probably devoting himself to the two hefty volumes of Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right (1869) and his scullery maid was snatching a few pages of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s latest piece of popular fiction. Like most readers of the Victorian novel, they immersed themselves in a world teeming with vital characters jostling through different social landscapes; they encountered people from town and country, from the outposts of empire, and from across the Atlantic; they read about London high life, the Yorkshire moors, and African adventure. And in addition to being moved to tears by the death of characters such as Paul Dombey in Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848) and terrorized by ghosts and villains in sensation novels such as Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860), readers of Victorian fiction also received an education in such matters as intellectual debate about scientific discovery, the possibility and consequence of a loss of religious faith, and the urgent need for parliamentary political reform.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Parrish, M. L. (ed.), Anthony Trollope: Four Lectures (London: Constable, 1938)
Eigner, Edwin M. and Worth, George W., in Victorian Criticism of the Novel (Cambridge University Press, 1985)Google Scholar
Gissing, George, The Odd Women (1893; London: Virago, 1980)Google Scholar
Briggs, Asa, Victorian People: A Reassessment of Persons and Themes 1851–67 (University of Chicago Press, 1955)Google Scholar
Preface to The Tragic Muse: The Art of the Novel, ed. R. P. Blackmur (New York: Scribners, 1934)
Eliot, George, Adam Bede [1859], ed. Waldron, Mary (Ontario, Canada: Broadview Editions, 2005)Google Scholar
Gilmour, Robin, The Novel in the Victorian Age: A Modern Introduction (London: Edward Arnold, 1986)Google Scholar
Houghton, Walter, The Victorian Frame of Mind 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957)Google Scholar
Childers, Joseph W., James Buzard, and Gillooly, Eileen (eds.), Victorian Prism: Reflections of the Crystal Palace (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007)
Collins, Philip, Dickens and Crime (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968)Google Scholar
Dickens, Charles, Oliver Twist (1838; London: Oxford University Press, 1949)Google Scholar
Slater, Michael, Charles Dickens (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009)Google Scholar
Conrad, Joseph, Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897; London: J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd., 1947)Google Scholar
Author’s Note, Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard (1904; London: J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd., 1947)
Strachey, Lytton, Eminent Victorians (1918; New York: Capricorn Books, 1963)Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Introduction
  • Edited by Deirdre David, Temple University, Philadelphia
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel
  • Online publication: 05 December 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9780511793370.002
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Introduction
  • Edited by Deirdre David, Temple University, Philadelphia
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel
  • Online publication: 05 December 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9780511793370.002
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Introduction
  • Edited by Deirdre David, Temple University, Philadelphia
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel
  • Online publication: 05 December 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9780511793370.002
Available formats
×