Originally published in 1979. Carl Dawson looks at the year 1850, which was an extraordinary year in English literary history, to study both the great and forgotten writers, to survey journals and novels, poems and magazines, and to ask questions about dominant influences and ideas. His primary aim is descriptive: How was Wordsworth's Prelude received by his contemporaries on its publication in 1850? How did reviewers respond to new tendencies in poetry and fiction/ Who were the prominent literary models? But Dawson's descriptions also lead to broader, theoretical questions about such issues as the status of the imagination in an age obsessed by mechanical invention, about the public role of the writer, the appeal to nature, and the use of myth and memory. To express the Victorians' estimation of poetry, for example, Dawson presents the contrasting views help by two eminent Victorians, Macaulay and Carlyle. In Macaulay's opinion, the advance of civilization led to the decline of poetry; Carlyle, on the other hand, saw the poet as a spiritual liberator in a world of materialists. The fusion of the poet's personal and public roles is witnessed in a discussion of the two mid-Victorian Poet Laureates, Wordsworth and his successor, Tennyson. In analyzing the relationship between the two writers' works, Dawson also highlights the extent of the Victorians' admiration for Dante. To give a wider perspective of the status of literature during this time, Dawson examines reviews, prefaces, and other remarks. Critics, he shows, made a clear distinction between poetry and fiction. Thus, in 1850, a comparison between, say, Wordsworth and Dickens would not have been made. Dawson, however, does compare the two, by focusing on their uses of autobiography. Dickens surfaces again, in a discussion of Victorian periodical publishing. Here, Dawson compares the Pre-Raphaelites' short-lived journal The Germ with Dickens' enormously popular Household Words and a radical paper, The Red Republican, which printed the first English version of "The Communist Manifesto" in 1850. In bringing together materials that have often been seen as disparate and unrelated and by suggesting new literary and ideological relationships, Carl Dawson has written a book to inform almost any reader, whether scholar of Victorian literature or lover of Dicken's novels.

Victorian England produces some the the greatest novelists in Western history, including Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and George Eliot. Critical analysis focuses on the development of the Victorian novel through the second half of the 19th century.

Professor Wheeler's widely-acclaimed survey of the nineteenth-century fiction covers both the major writers and their works and encompasses the genres and "minor" fiction of the period. This excellent introduction and reference source has been revised for this second edition to include new material on lesser-known writers and a comprehensively updated bibliography.

Although 150 years have passed since Princess Victoria became Queen, the first twelve months of her reign remain relatively unexplored. In the first literary history to focus specifically on the year 1837-1838, Richard L. Stein examines a wide variety of cultural products--in visual art and architecture, statistics and maps, scientific writing and popular journalism, and literature itself--to reconstruct the thought and experience of England in "Victoria's Year." Surveying such figures as Carlyle, Cruikshank, Darwin, Dickens, Martineau, Ruskin, Tennyson, and Turner, this wide-ranging volume examines the connections and discontinuities within the values, beliefs, and modes of representation of this brief cultural moment, describing how various arts struggled to produce new, legible, and stable signs to reflect unprecedented modes of experience in a rapidly changing culture. Stein shows how this quest for legibility and certainty was often undermined from inside and out, and the ways in which "the order of things," in Foucault's sense of the phrase, was constantly being reasserted or broken down. Revealing how this particular historical moment was understood by those who lived it, and how an array of cultural products served to mediate the most radically new and unfamiliar aspects of the age, Victoria's Year offers new insights into the process that created the myth of Victorianism.

Macabre tales of death and mourning in Victorian America.