From Dickens to Hardy

This sixth volume covers the period from Dickens to Hardy. It begins with an account of the social and intellectual context of English literature during this, the Victorian, period, followed by a survey of the literature itself. The rest of the book is made up of a series of essays dealing in detail with Dickens, Thackeray and Trollope, the Bronte sisters, George Eliot, Hardy, Carlyle and Ruskin, three autobiographical novelists (Rutherford, Gissing, and Butler), Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and others. There is also an essay on the architecture of the Victorian Age. Finally the volume contains an Appendix of biographies and bibliographies.