Speaking the deepest and truest thoughts of humankind in the language available only to the gifted, the Victorian poets elected to do more than merely sing as versifiers. By coming to grips with thorny contemporary issues and suggesting workable solutions, they struggled to lead their people out of the wilderness. Tennyson, who came to be known as the voice of Victorianism, is the poet most often credited with this ambition. But Matthew Arnold and the other major poets had a similar aim. Their poems, while not devoid of feeling, are charged with the main currents of social, scientific,...

In 1831, the beginning of a cruel decade in iron times for England, Thomas Carlyle observed: "Man has walked by the light of conflagrations and amid the sound of falling cities, and now there is darkness and long watching till it be morning." Thirty years later Matthew Arnold counseled a faltering friend who had lost his way: "Roam on The light we sought is shining still." When the nineteenth century ended, having generated more questions than answers, more problems than solutions, a journalist writing for a London newspaper summed up the struggle in one short sentence: "They searched in...

In the autumn of 1850 the man called Mose, a fixture on the Horton plantation in North Carolina, is sold to a wily slave trader to settle a debt. Traveling southward, he sinks into cruel bondage while a woman sold by Horton at the same time runs northward to freedom. In Savannah Mose becomes the property of a kind master, but in Alabama under the thumb of Cody Hawk he suffers intensely. With some help from a slave named Pearl, he shakes off the deadly grip of a dark force, experiences a kind of rebirth, and gains the strength to escape the hell created by Hawk. Saving himself, he is not able...

After a checkered career at sea and on land Leo Mack settles down in Blue Anchor shortly before the Civil War. A solitary man living in Ida Crabtree's boarding house, he earns his living as a tinker but finds his worth and mission when the war begins. As a traveling tinker he carries news of military events to isolated farmhouses and becomes in effect a broadcaster of war news. In time just about every person in the county knows Leo by name but nothing of his background. Isaac Brandimore takes it upon himself to tell Mack's story but dies before the work is finished. Emily Kingston comes...

Even though his books never sold as well as those of more popular novelists, women in particular liked George Gissing's work and often wrote to him for advice. They could see he was keenly interested in the lives of women and the long struggle to improve their condition in a gender-restrictive society dominated by males. Though Gissing tried to champion the women's cause, he did not entirely succeed. Perhaps he was too close to the changes affecting women to understand their situation fully. Perhaps with individual women a tenacious idealism blurred his vision. Perhaps the facts of his life...