Charles Dickens and other Victorians

A series of critical essays and lectures by a Cambridge literary scholar surveying mid-Victorian writers and the practices of reading and writing. It provides sustained judgments on major novelists—detailed examinations of Dickens and Thackeray as full novelists, a thematic pairing of Disraeli and Mrs. Gaskell, and a defense of Trollope’s scope—alongside an essay on the Victorian social and literary background. Combining close reading, biographical context, and candid lecturing, the pieces discuss style, narrative technique, public reception, and the moral and social themes that shaped Victorian fiction.