Francis O’Gorman 
A Concise Companion to the Victorian Novel 

This volume presents fresh approaches to classic Victorian fiction from 1830-1900.

* Opens up for the reader the cultural world in which the Victorian novel was written and read.

* Crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries.

* Provides fresh perspectives on how Victorian fiction relates to different contexts, such as class, sexuality, empire, psychology, law and biology.

Table of Content

Notes on Contributors ix

Acknowledgements xii

List of illustrations xiii

Chronology xiv

Introduction 1
Francis O’Gorman

1 ‘The sun and moon were made to give them light’: Empire in the Victorian Novel 4
Cannon Schmitt

2 ‘Seeing is believing?’: Visuality and Victorian Fiction 25
Kate Flint

3 ‘The boundaries of social intercourse’: Class in the Victorian Novel 47
James Eli Adams

4 Legal subjects, legal objects: The Law and Victorian Fiction 71
Clare Pettitt

5 ‘The withering of the individual’: Psychology in the Victorian Novel 91
Nicholas Dames

6 ‘Telling of my weekly doings’: The Material Culture of the Victorian Novel 113
Mark W. Turner

7 ‘Farewell poetry and aerial flights’: The Function of the Author and Victorian Fiction 134
Richard Salmon

8 Everywhere and nowhere: Sexuality in the Victorian Novel 156
Carolyn Dever

9 ‘One of the larger lost continents’: Religion in the Victorian Novel 180
Michael Wheeler

10 ‘The difference between human beings’: Biology in the Victorian Novel 202
Angelique Richardson

11 ‘One great confederation?’: Europe in the Victorian Novel 232
John Rignall

12 ‘A long deep sob of that mysterious wondrous happiness that is one with pain’: Emotion in the Victorian Novel 253
Francis O’Gorman

Index 271

About the author

Francis O’Gorman is Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Leeds. He has written widely on Victorian poetry and non-fictional prose, including the books John Ruskin (1999), Late Ruskin: New Contexts (2001), and the Victorian Novel (2002) in the Blackwell Critical Guide Series, and also co-edited the collection Ruskin and Gender (2002). He has published on Milton, Robert Browning, Michael Field, Charles Kingsley, Robert Frost, Henrietta Huxley, Victorian agnosticism, Victorian masculinities, and co-edited a collection of essays on Margaret Oliphant (1999) and on Landscape, Writing and Community (2001). His most recent book, Victorian Poetry: An Annotated Anthology, was published by Blackwell in 2004.