Frontcover -- Contents -- List of Figures -- Preface and Acknowledgements -- Chronology of Newman's Life and Works -- Abbreviations -- 1 Ernest Newman and the Challenge of Critical Biography -- PART I The Freethought Years -- 2 Formation of a Critical Sensibility: The 1880s and 1890s -- 3 Social, Literary and Musical Criticism: 1893-1897 -- 4 A Rationalist Manifesto: Pseudo-Philosophy at the end of the Nineteenth Century, 1897 -- 5 Music History and the Comparative Method: Gluck and the Opera, 1895 -- PART II The Mainstream Years -- 6 From Manchester to Moscow: Essays on Music, 1900-1920 -- 7 'The World of Music': Essays in the Sunday Times, 1920-1958 -- 8 Biographical and Musicological Tensions: The Man Liszt, 1934 -- 9 Sceptical and Transforming: Books on Wagner, 1899-1959 -- 10 Conclusion: Ernest Newman Remembered -- Appendix: Newman's Freethought Lectures, 1894-1896 -- Bibliography -- Index

A major new source for research of the 19th century and history of ideas, this dictionary covers all of the major, and a range of the less well-known, thinkers and writers of the time.

In this title, first published in 1984, Peter Morton argues that in late Victorian Britain a group of novelists and essayists quite consciously sought and found ideas in post-Darwinian biology that were susceptible to imaginative transformation. The period between 1860 and 1900 was a time of great confusion in biology; the natural selection hypothesis was in retreat before its acute critics, and no extension of evolutionary theory to human affairs was too bizarre to attract its quota of enthusiasts. Writers capitalised on this prevailing uncertainty and used it to their own artistic or polemic ends. A fascinating and interdisciplinary title, this reissue will interest students of late Victorian literature, as well as historians of biological theory between The Origin of Species and Mendel.