Introduction

Summary

Novels are in the hands of us all; from the Prime Minister down to the last-appointed scullery maid. We have them in our library, our drawing-rooms, our bed-rooms, our kitchens – and in our nurseries.

Anthony Trollope, 1870

How was it that the Victorian novel appeared to be in the hands of all social classes in 1870, even if not everyone was reading the same novel? What brought the Prime Minister and his servant together was the sheer pleasure of reading exhilarating fiction, despite the fact that William Gladstone was probably devoting himself to the two hefty volumes of Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right (1869) and his scullery maid was snatching a few pages of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s latest piece of popular fiction. Like most readers of the Victorian novel, they immersed themselves in a world teeming with vital characters jostling through different social landscapes; they encountered people from town and country, from the outposts of empire, and from across the Atlantic; they read about London high life, the Yorkshire moors, and African adventure. And in addition to being moved to tears by the death of characters such as Paul Dombey in Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848) and terrorized by ghosts and villains in sensation novels such as Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860), readers of Victorian fiction also received an education in such matters as intellectual debate about scientific discovery, the possibility and consequence of a loss of religious faith, and the urgent need for parliamentary political reform.