The Victorian novel; [electronic resource] modern essays in criticism, edited by Ian Watt.

Includes bibliographical references.

Introductory, from Novels of the eighteen-forties / Kathleen Tillotson -- The comic world of Dickens / V.S. Pritchett -- The macabre Dickens / Humphry House -- Dickens and the comedy of humors / Northrop Frye -- The serial publications of Dickens's novels: Martin Chuzzlewit and Little Dorritt / John Butt -- Structure and idea in Bleak House / Robert Alan Donovan -- Expectations well lost: Dickens' fable for his time / G. Robert Stange -- Our mutual friend / J. Hillis Miller -- Wilkie Collins and Dickens / T.S. Eliot -- The industrial novels: Mary Barton and North and south, Mrs. Gaskell; Hard times. Dickens; Sybil, Disraeli; Alton Locke, Kingsley; Felix Holt, George Eliot / Raymond Williams -- Charlotte Brontë's "new" Gothic / Robert B. Heilman -- What is the matter with Emily Jane?: conflicting impulses in Wuthering Heights / Thomas Moser -- Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights (1847) / Arnold Kettle -- Mrs. Gaskell / John Gross -- On the style of Vanity fair / G. Armour Craig -- Vanity fair: one version of the novelist's responsibility / Gordon N. Ray -- Making history private: Henry Esmond / Georg Lukács -- On Adam Bede / U.C. Knoepflmacher -- Implication and incompleteness: George Eliot's Middlemarch / Barbara Hardy -- The intellectual background of (Middlemarch): Casaubon and Lydgate / W.J. Harvey -- On the Egoist / Dorothy van Ghent -- Trollope's The warden: a commentary on the "age of equipoise" / M.A. Goldberg -- On Barchester Towers / Robert M. Polhemus -- Anthony Trollope / Mario Praz -- Adventure as boy's daydream: Treasure Island / Robert Kiely -- Notes on a criticism of Thomas Hardy / Katherine Anne Porter -- On The mayor of Casterbridge / Albert J. Guerard -- Colour and movement in Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles / Tony Tanner -- On Jude the Obscure / Irving Howe -- Samuel Butler: the Victorian insolvency (The way of all flesh) / Morton Dauwen Zabel -- Victorian morals and the modern novel / John Henry Raleigh.

Also issued online.