A Companion to the Victorian Novel

Acknowledgments viii

The Contributors ix

Introduction 1
Patrick Brantlinger and William B. Thesing

PART I Historical Contexts and Cultural Issues 9

1 The Publishing World 11
Kelly J. Mays

2 Education, Literacy, and the Victorian Reader 31
Jonathan Rose

3 Money, the Economy, and Social Class 48
Regenia Gagnier

4 Victorian Psychology 67
Athena Vrettos

5 Empire, Race, and the Victorian Novel 84
Deirdre David

6 The Victorian Novel and Religion 101
Hilary Fraser

7 Scientific Ascendancy 119
John Kucich

8 Technology and Information: Accelerating Developments 137
Christopher Keep

9 Laws, the Legal World, and Politics 155
John R. Reed

10 Gender Politics and Women’s Rights 172
Hilary M. Schor

11 The Other Arts: Victorian Visual Culture 189
Jeffrey Spear

12 Imagined Audiences: The Novelist and the Stage 207
Renata Kobetts Miller

PART II Forms of the Victorian Novel 225

13 Newgate Novel to Detective Fiction 227
F. S. Schwarzbach

14 The Historical Novel 244
John Bowen

15 The Sensation Novel 260
Winifred Hughes

16 The Bildungsroman 279
John R. Maynard

17 The Gothic Romance in the Victorian Period 302
Cannon Schmitt

18 The Provincial or Regional Novel 318
Ian Duncan

19 Industrial and “Condition of England” Novels 336
James Richard Simmons, Jr.

20 Children’s Fiction 353
Lewis C. Roberts

21 Victorian Science Fiction 370
Patrick Brantlinger

PART III Victorian and Modern Theories of the Novel and the Reception of Novels and Novelists Then and Now 385

22 The Receptions of Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy 387
Elizabeth Langland

23 Victorian Theories of the Novel 406
Joseph W. Childers

24 Modern and Postmodern Theories of Prose Fiction 424
Audrey Jaffe

25 The Afterlife of the Victorian Novel: Novels about Novels 442
Anne Humpherys

26 The Victorian Novel in Film and on Television 458
Joss Marsh and Kamilla Elliott

Index 478