Hatred and Civility: The Antisocial Life in Victorian England

This lively, accessible account of works by Edward Bulwer, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Robert Browning, and Joseph Conrad explains why many Victorians nursed a hostile vision of man and society and how misanthropy--once a means of conveying integrity and justified disdain of society's excesses--turned immoral and quasi-criminal. Delivering a surprising new perspective on the past, Christopher Lane shows that the fanatics troubling us today share many qualities with our supposedly moral ancestors.