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 ›
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 ›
Anna Marie Porter’s novel of the French Revolutionary War, The Hungarian Brothers, proved her most popular romance. It either delighted or repulsed readers in later centuries, depending on their fondness for the genre. One contemporary review of the novel read,… Read More ›
When Tobias Smollett published the last of his novels, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, he used the familiar epistolary novel form first made famous by Samuel Richardson. Five of his flat, predictable characters wrote letters that differed in their points… Read More ›
The first three volumes of Thomas Holcroft’s Hugh Trevor appeared in 1794. In October of that year, before he could add the final three volumes to his novel, Holcroft went to Newgate Prison on a charge of high treason due… Read More ›
Upon beginning Charles Reade’s sequel to his novel Love Me Little, Love Me Long (1850), a reader might believe the book is purely romance. Mrs. Dodd and her children, Edward and Julia, keep one another company in the absence of… Read More ›
Also known as rhetorical criticism and New Criticism, formalism constitutes one of the many lenses through which critics view and interpret literature. A formalist critic pays attention to the form of a literary work, including aspects such as plot, character,… Read More ›
Thomas Hardy’s fourth novel, Far from the Madding Crowd, became his first commercially successful venture, allowing him to leave his vocation of architecture and write full time. First published as a serial in The Cornhill Magazine from January through December… Read More ›
The third in his sequence of Palliser novels, The Eustace Diamonds represents one of Anthony Trollope’s darkest tales. He departs from his gently ironic presentations of everyday human relationships with their small but important emotional battles. This novel focuses on… Read More ›
Bram Stoker followed the lead set by Robert Louis Stevenson in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) to write horror fiction. Such stories were enjoying a renewed prestige among the French, and Stevenson proved that modern… Read More ›
When George Meredith published his 1885 novel, Diana of the Crossways, women readers welcomed his heroine as representative of recent social reforms. The novel reflects its era’s obsessive interest in the breakdown of standards, which had been part of a… Read More ›
In his novel David Copperfield, Charles Dickens produced his own favorite work and the favorite of many of his readers. He had honed his style through previous novels, and David Copperfield reflects his mature skill, partially accounting for the novel’s… Read More ›
The last of George Eliot’s seven novels, published in eight parts between February and September 1876, Daniel Deronda has a double structure that follows two protagonists, Daniel Deronda and Gwendolyn Harleth, in their intertwined search for self-fulfillment. Eliot breaks new… Read More ›
Sir Walter Scott based his novel The Bride of Lammermoor, second in his Tales of My Landlord series, on a true tragic love story about a Scottish family named Dalrymple, supported by fictional accounts, poetry, and popular ballad versions. He… Read More ›
Barchester Towers was Anthony Trollope’s second in a group of novels, following The Warden (1855), later called the Barsetshire sequence. Published in 1857, it featured Trollope’s trademark interest in religion as politics. In his focus on who would receive the… Read More ›
Anne Brontë’s autobiographical novel about a young woman governess features themes of social injustice, class consciousness, education, and isolation. Brontë’s first-person narrative alerts readers in its opening sentence that, by presenting a “history,” it intends to instruct and will be… Read More ›
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