Introduction: Political, Cultural and Literary Trends (1830–7)

This study was partly inspired by a comment of Kathleen Tillotson’s in Novels of the Eighteen-Forties : ‘The time has surely come to break up “the Victorian novel” into manageable segments; not by novelists, or categories, or phases, but simply by concentrating upon a decade or so at a time.’ 1 Ironically, Tillotson’s book was so dazzling in its illumination of fiction written in the 1840s that it eclipsed most interest in the first decade of Victorian fiction, the 1830s. In contrast to the attention given to the prose of Carlyle and Mill and even to the very early poetry of Tennyson and Browning that was published in the 1830s, the novels of that decade have been stigmatized by critics like Walter Allen as being written during ‘a poor time for fiction’, one cluttered by novelists whose names ‘survive in literary history with only the wannest kind of historical interest’. 2 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.