Nobody comes of age: essays on the Victorian novel

"The word "Nobody" in the title of this Catherine Gallagher's new book describes the generic novel character, whom readers understand to be Nobodies by virtue of being fictional and who during the Victorian era were usually of middling social status-not, in other words, Somebodies. Having arrived on the fictional scene in the eighteenth century, Nobody came of age during the Victorian age. The novel achieved cultural hegemony, and the Victorian novelists who populated it with Nobodies explored their fictionality in tandem with the great intellectual developments of their time. Nobody Comes of Age gathers in revised form a selection of Catherine Gallagher's field-defining essays on the Victorian novel. These classic and still influential essays take up such questions as how writers explored the novel's ability to represent types of people without defaming actual individuals; the relation of fiction to the decline of religious belief in the period; and how novelists worked the tension between characters that seemed typical and plots that were unpredictable. Other essays explore the problem of time in the novel.