Victorian Fiction and the Insights of Sympathy

Acknowledgements; Introduction: Critical Missiles and Sympathetic Ink; Charles Dickens, Uncommercial Space-Time Traveller: Dombey and Son and the Ethics of History; Other People’s Shoes: Realism, Imagination and Sympathy; The Personal, the Political and the Human, Part I: Sympathy – a Family Affair?; The Personal, the Political and the Human, Part II: Which Family Values?; The Personal, the Political and the Human, Part III: ‘The Torn Nest is Pierced by the Thorns’ – Sympathy after the Family; Envoi: Symathetic Magic; Bibliography; Index

'An ambitious, intelligent and courageous book... Lowe presents an unusually forceful answer to the question of what we might learn from reading Victorian fiction.' —Adrian Poole, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Cambridge