We’re going to read five fat novels pulled from the middle decades of the 19th century-the books you most think of in thinking of that loose baggy monster, the Victorian novel. So: Thackeray, Vanity Fair; Dickens, Bleak House; Charlotte Bronte, Villette; Trollope, Phineas Finn; and Eliot, Middlemarch, which will stand for us as the summa of the form, in all its splendors and miseries. We’ll locate these books in the context of their times, we will discuss their form and the way that form was shaped by their mode of publication (and will visit the Rare Books Room to look at first editions); and we will, I hope, laugh and cry with characters so vivid that they have always seemed more like people than like the mere words on a page that, after all, is what they’re made of.

Writing assignments will depend on the size of the class; but expect either two or three short papers and a take-home final.