Contained in this volume are key extracts from Victorian writers and critics essential in the understanding of the principles on which the literature of the age was written. The passages selected reveal the leading preoccupations and issues of the period 1830-70, be they the gradual displacement of poetry by the novel; the debate over subject-matter, which pitted the exponents of artistic freedom against the defendants of public morality; or the increasing importance of women writers, which is seen in the context of the patriarchal assumptions which lay behind male critical positions of the period.