About the Book: Dickens to Hardy 1837 1884
This authoritative survey examines how the Victorian middle classes perceived
themselves, through analyses of the literature of the period. Asking how the
middle classes distinguished themselves from their forbears, Julian Wolfreys
reads in detail major novels by:
Charles Dickens
Elizabeth Gaskell
Wilkie Collins
George Eliot
Thomas Hardy.
Wolfreys explores the novelists constructions of modernity, national identity
and their understanding of becoming historical in distinction from that of
previous generations. He offers illuminating close readings of texts and
examines narratives set in a recent past in order to investigate the role of
cultural memory in the making of