Dickens Fur Coat and Charlottes Unanswered Letters The Rows and Romances of Englands Great Victorian Novelists

The industry that produced the great Victorian novels & the 50,000 other English novels published during Victoria's reign was a shared business of publishers, writers, & book distributors. This book is the story of how that industry rose from virtual obscurity to dominate English literature &, for a time, world literature as well. But the story is not one merely of economics & literary formats. There was a good deal of interaction, sometimes friendly, sometimes rivalrous, & sometimes hostile between its members. Gathers together the facts of daily life in 19th cent. England & presents an entertaining social history that is indispensable to lovers of Victorian literature. Illus.