Dickens to Hardy, 1837-1884 charts the transitions of particular Victorian literary and cultural concerns across nearly fifty years of the Nineteenth century. With each chapter focusing on readings of particular novels, Julian Wolfreys questions how the Victorian middle classes identified themselves in their modernity and discusses how literature mediated the construction of identities through notions of cultural memory. Additionally, two chapters focus on particular genres, the gothic and the political, in the novel tradition of the Nineteenth century.