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This book explores the importance of sympathy as a central idea behind Victorian fiction, and an animating principle of novel reading generally. Sympathy, Brigid Lowe argues, deserves a much more important role as both a subject and a guiding principle for literary criticism.
'This book is a great and not-to-be missed treat for anyone with an interest in Victorian cultural history.' —‘The Dickensian’
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