The Presence of the Present: Topics of the Day in the Victorian Novel is the first comprehensive study of Victorian novelists use of the eras everyday culture and common knowledge in their writings. Victorian novelists knew that the men and women who bought and borrowed their books had an insatiable appetite for reading books about people like themselves in the instantly recognizable world in which they lived. They catered to this appetite by, among other devices, scattering through their pages allusions to people, places, and events in the news at the moment a novel was published, as...