Author Archives
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Analysis of Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit
Charles Dickens first published his sixth novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, as a 10-part serial between January 1843 and July 1844. He later stated that he thought the lengthy tale of a young man’s emotional and ethical maturation the “best” of his… Read More ›
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Analysis of Susan Ferrier’s Marriage
Susan Ferrier’s first novel, Marriage, has been labeled “shrewdly observant” by one critic and a novel “justified by its painting of Scottish manners” by another. Compared to her contemporaries Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen, Ferrier develops her plot mostly within… Read More ›
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Analysis of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park
Jane Austen began writing Mansfield Park in 1811 but did not publish it until 1814. With this, the penultimate novel published during her lifetime, she focused on financially comfortable small communities of individuals, raising the quotidian to a level of… Read More ›
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Analysis of Henry Mackenzie’s A Man of Feeling
Henry Mackenzie’s A Man of Feeling owed a debt to Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random (1748). Like Smollett’s protagonist, the good-hearted Harley of Mackenzie’s tale is a naive traveler in a too-sophisticated world, sacrificed to professional cardsharps. A narrator that readers… Read More ›
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Analysis of Aphra Behn’s Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister
While Aphra Behn’s Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister is not a well-known work, it remains crucial to the development of the novel. Many sources, including Ian Watt in his landmark work The Rise of the Novel (1957),… Read More ›
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Analysis of Benjamin Disraeli’s Lothair
Benjamin Disraeli wrote Lothair 23 years after his last novel, Tancred (1847). His political career had prevented his pursuit of fiction, but when the general election of 1868 propelled Gladstone to power in Disraeli’s place, he decided to return to… Read More ›
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Analysis of George Meredith’s Lord Ormont and His Aminta
When George Meredith wrote Lord Ormont and His Aminta, he focused on a theme he would use again: incompatibility in marriage. Many critics considered it a slight work; some felt Meredith wrote it during a break after the far more… Read More ›
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Analysis of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy
In one of history’s best-beloved novels for children, Little Lord Fauntleroy, Frances Hodgson Burnett emphasizes the importance of love over material wealth. Before the birth of the little lord, Cedric Errol, his aristocratic father, Captain Cedric, marries beneath himself, angering… Read More ›
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Analysis of Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit
First published as a 20-part serial between December 1855 and June 1857, Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit served to expose several social abuses of interest to its author, including rampant financial corruption and an incompetent civil service, where members were appointed… Read More ›
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Analysis of Robert Paltock’s The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins
The sole novel written by Robert Paltock, The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, is one of the earliest written examples of science fiction in English, enjoyed as children by notables including the poet Robert Southey; critic, poet, and journalist… Read More ›
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Analysis of Sir Walter Scott’s The Legend of Montrose
The Legend of Montrose became the third in Sir Walter Scott’s Tales of My Landlord series. As with most of Scott’s novels, this one is actually based on a “tale” popular in his day, explained by Scott in his introduction…. Read More ›
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Analysis of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii
Edward Bulwer-Lytton found an opportunity to capitalize on his interest in the past and wrote the historical fiction The Last Days of Pompeii. While he had looked to the past for novel plots before, his choice of ancient Italy as… Read More ›
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Analysis of Anthony Trollope’s The Last Chronicle of Barset
Victorian readers enjoyed reunions with familiar characters in Anthony Trollope’s final entry into his Barsetshire series, The Last Chronicle of Barset, claimed by Trollope to be his favorite of all his novels. He approaches his topic of everyday people living… Read More ›
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Analysis of Mary Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret
First serialized in Robin Goodfellow and then in The Sixpenny Magazine, Mary Braddon’s most famous novel, Lady Audley’s Secret, became an instant hit with the reading public, if not with critics. In its year of publication in volume form, 1862,… Read More ›
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Analysis of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped
Robert Louis Stevenson continued in the vein of writing adventure stories for boys when he published Kidnapped, first as a serial in a boy’s magazine. However, adults had taken notice of his accomplished style in earlier novels, such as Treasure… Read More ›
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Analysis of Sir Walter Scott’s Kenilworth
In his novel Kenilworth, Sir Walter Scott tells his romanticized version of the death of Amy Robsart, wife to Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, favored by Queen Elizabeth I. Set in 1560, the novel seeks to, as Scott writes… Read More ›
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Analysis of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure
Like other novels by Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure offers a bleak picture of the choices available to the working man. First published as a serial in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine between December 1894 and November 1895, the novel upset… Read More ›
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Analysis of Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year
While it purports to be a journal, Daniel Defoe’s novel, A Journal of the Plague Year, is an imaginatively drawn “history” of the Great Plague that seized England from 1664 to 1665. Defoe likely based his narrator, a Whitechapel saddler… Read More ›
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Analysis of Henry Fielding’s The History of the Life of the Late Jonathan Wild the Great
Henry Fielding received some criticism for romanticizing a common criminal in his novel The History of the Life of the Late Jonathan Wild the Great. Based on the career of a well-known criminal executed earlier in the 18th century, the… Read More ›
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Analysis of Dinah Maria Mulock Craik’s John Halifax, Gentleman
Dinah Mulock (Craik) emphasized nonconformist ideals in her popular fifth novel, John Halifax, Gentleman. Nonconformist churches believed that each member should freely respond to the Gospel and take responsibility for their own membership, while the church should maintain its congregation’s… Read More ›
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