Jess Nevins’ mammoth survey of Victorian popular fiction is a hugely entertaining and handy tome for anyone with more than a passing interest in the era and its bewildering array of literary heroes and villains. As the title suggests this is in fact a straightforward encyclopedia, featuring listings and write-ups summarizing background, explaining character traits, etc…for hundreds of characters, ranging from the obvious to the obscure. Perhaps a bit less objective than I’d like, with Nevins’ injecting a strongly personal bias to some listings, it still proves to be highly useful and vastly entertaining. Sherlock Holmes is, of course, given a fair bit of coverage, roughly three plus pages, with further separate entries for other Arthur Conan Doyle characters including Irene Adler, Edward Bellingham, Jack Brocket, Micah Clarke, Brigadier Gerard, Sir Nigel Loring, Professor Moriarty, Professor Van Baumgarten and Duncan Warner. Well worth the expense and perfect for either extended reading or to dip into here and there as time and interest require. Highly recommended to Sherlockians and students of the Victorian pop literature scene alike! ( )

The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana is a marvel: a comprehensive reference guide to authors, characters, and works of the fantastic in Victorian times, stuffed to bursting with tidbits and nuggets of information about those folks who laid much of the groundwork for today’s literature of the fantastic. 1200 pages, people! And did I mention it’s pretty? So very, very pretty. ( )

A thick, beautiful, well-researched comprehensive look at British and European sci-fi, pulp and fantasy in the Victorian era. If you're the least bit interested in any of those, pick it up.

Anyone who's more than remotely interested in the above genres needs to have this book on their shelf: it is a voluminous and addictive tome citing all the usual suspects (the major "scientific romances" of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne; Sherlock Holmes; Dracula; Alan Quatermain) as well as several who are off the beaten path (Baron Metzengerstein, Barbara Lovel, Karl Von Moor) and many whom you've likely never even heard of (Professor Parkins, Richard of the Raven's Crest, Edith Tarleton). The book naturally focuses on the fiction of the UK, France, Germany and the U.S., although some sidetrips are not out of the question: Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio gets an entry, as does Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg's Señor Nic-Nac (and who'd've thought that Argentina had a science fiction literature going back to 1875?). If the author casts his net a goodly bit wider than a strict definition of the Victorian era would permit, for the most part I didn't regret the presence of the extra information. My main disappointments with Fantastic Victoriana lie with the lack of an index (a lack that the author has corrected by posting an index on-line: http://www.monkeybrainbooks.com/Fantastic_Victoriana_author_index.html) and a certain languidness about the editing, from niggling errors in punctuation (no tilde in "Señor Nic-Nac," for example) and tense (the entry for "New York Nell" is one example), to occasional stylistic infelicities and repetition, to out-and-out wrong information, as when Jules Verne is credited as the author of The First Men in the Moon (p. 585) and the creator of Professor Cavor (p. 660; thankfully, neither instance is the entry for Professor Cavor). There's nothing that can't be cleaned up with relative ease in a second edition, though, and despite such bobbles, Fant Vic remains a fascinating and enticing read. ( )