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 ›
Marmion Savage’s first novel, The Falcon Family; or, Young Ireland, satirized parasitic socialites, traditionalists within the Church of England, and the Young Ireland Party, a group of extremists who campaigned for Ireland’s independence. Published anonymously, the novel proved popular, although… 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 ›
An example of Newgate fiction, in which writers based novels on true criminal accounts, Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Eugene Aram established him as the most popular novelist of England during the same year Sir Walter Scott, to whom Bulwer-Lytton dedicated the book’s… Read More ›
George Moore’s novel Esther Waters proved his most successful work. The novel’s realistic portrayal of the hardships of a servant girl departed from the oversentimentality by which much Victorian fiction, and some of Moore’s earlier works, were marked. According to… Read More ›
George Meredith indulged himself with a comedic presentation in his 1879 novel, The Egoist: A Comedy in Narrative. It allowed him to engage in his favored approach of satirizing bourgeois stupidity. In doing so, he satirized himself. He felt he… Read More ›
East Lynne represents prototypical 19th-century sensation fiction, extremely popular with English readers. The novel was the second for Mrs. Henry (Ellen Price) Wood, who had begun publishing highly moralistic fiction at the age of 41. It became an immediate hit… 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 ›
A fiction subgenre of a realistic nature that focuses on the home scene, domestic realism evolved from the reaction against Romanticism that occurred in the mid-19th century. Following the preoccupation of the Romantic writers (1789–1837) with the superiority of intuition… Read More ›
Charles Dickens’s seventh novel, first published in 20 serial parts between October 1846 and April 1848 with the complete title Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son, Retail, Wholesale, and for Exploration, marked what many critics agree to be… Read More ›
Anthony Trollope produced the best-selling novel of its time in this, the third book in his Barsetshire sequence, Doctor Thorne, published in three volumes. He departed from his normal village setting in this novel to consider county characters, focusing on… Read More ›
Didactic literature, from the Greek didaktikos, or skillful in teaching, refers to literature that overtly demonstrates a truth or offers a lesson to readers. Not a subtle approach, didacticism delivers a specific and pointed message and was present in the… 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 ›
Mona Caird revealed her strong feminist leanings in all her writings, both fiction and nonfiction. Her 1894 novel, Daughters of Danaus, contained all the themes she stressed in her essays, including a need for female independence, both physical and emotional,… 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 ›
One of Elizabeth Gaskell’s best-known novels, Cranford, focuses on an English community of mature women, to which men seldom gain admittance. It first appeared in series form (1851–53) in Charles Dickens’s periodical Household Words and was meant only as a… Read More ›
In 1860, founder and publisher George Smith hired William Makepeace Thackeray as the first editor to write and critique material for The Cornhill Magazine. Eight other men worked as editors until the last issue appeared in 1900. Thackeray devoted issues… Read More ›
Charles Reade’s popular historical romance, The Cloister and the Hearth: A Tale of the Middle Ages, represented the labor of two years. Reade was hired in 1859 by the publishers of Once a Week to help that periodical compete with… Read More ›
While not considered among Charles Reade’s major works, Christie Johnstone provides a delightful insight into his sense of humor. Not only does the novel’s subject matter entertain, but its format also proves of interest, as Reade designed some chapters as… Read More ›
The Chartist movement, or Chartism, refers to an English social-reform movement from 1838 to 1848, based on the belief that Parliamentary legislation could correct economic and social exploitation. In 1837, the London Working Men’s Association submitted a program titled the… Read More ›
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