Table of Contents -- James Theodore Hillhouse -- The Makers of the British Novel -- The Background of Mansfield Park -- Critical Realism in Northanger Abbey -- Scott's Redgauntlet -- History on the Hustings: Bulwer-Lytton's Historical Novels of Politics -- Thackeray, a Novelist by Accident -- A Note on Dickens' Humor -- Self-Help and the Helpless in Bleak House -- Form and Substance in the Brontë Novels -- Charlotte Brontë's 'New' Gothic -- Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell -- Trollope's Orley Farm: Artistry Manqué -- Anthony Trollope: the Palliser Novels -- George Eliot's Originals -- Middlemarch, George Eliot's Masterpiece -- Charles Reade's Christie Johnstone: a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Pre-Raphaelite -- George Meredith's One of Our Conquerors -- Hardy's Major Fiction -- The Spiritual Theme of George Gissing's Born in Exile -- Samuel Butler and Bloomsbury -- Apology for Marlow -- The Old Novel and the New -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z.