The Victorian Novel: Laying the Foundations for ‘Bibliotherapy’

This chapter takes up, historically, from the last chapter. Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads offered a blueprint for the nineteenth-century novel’s realist project of committing literature to ordinary experience during an era when—with the spread of education, literacy and written material—reading itself was becoming democratised. The contention here, however, is that Victorian realism’s mission was not simply to represent real life for its own sake, but to reach into the real life of the reader, transformatively. Literary realism, as it developed from Charles Dickens to George Eliot, offers a model and rationale for modern-day reading therapies.