This inspiring survey challenges conventional ways of viewing the Victorian novel.

• Provides time maps and overviews of historical and social contexts.
• Considers the relationship between the Victorian novel and historical, religious and bibliographic writing.
• Features short biographies of over forty Victorian authors, including Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Robert Louis Stevenson.
• Offers close readings of over 30 key texts, among them Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), as well as key presences, such as John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (Pt 1, 1676, Pt 2, 1684).
• Also covers topics such as colonialism, scientific speculation, the psychic and the supernatural, and working class reading.

Louis James’s writing reflects his interests in Victorian and postcolonial literature, and his main publications include Fiction for the Working Man 1830-50 (1963), Print and the People (1976) and Caribbean Writing in English (1999). After a much-travelled academic life he now lives with his wife and two cats near the University of Kent at Canterbury, where he is an Emeritus Professor of English.