The Victorian Novelist: Social Problems and Change

First published in 1987. Many Victorian novels that considered social problems made extensive use of contemporary source material for their descriptions. This book aims to provide a greater acquaintance with this non-literary material — illustrating and exemplifying issues that the authors treated imaginatively. The material is divided into parts dealing with: the industrial north of England, London and the agricultural poor. Extracts from writings that bear directly on the fiction of write...