This volume covers the great novelists of the high Victorian age, from the death of Scott in 1832 to the death of George Eliot in 1880. In this period, as the political unease of the first two decades of the century gave way to stability, the novel came into its own. Providing an overview of both the major and minor novelists, The Victorian Novel devotes separate chapters to Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontës, George Eliot, Trollope, and Meredith and sets the writers and their works against the social and historical background that produced them. A chronological table shows the other literary works and events of this popular time in English writing.