Hatred and Civility

To understand hatred and civility in today's world, argues Christopher Lane, we should start with Victorian fiction. Although the word "Victorian" generally brings to mind images of prudish sexuality and well-heeled snobbery, it has above all become synonymous with self-sacrifice, earnest devotion, and moral rectitude. Yet this idealized version of Victorian England is surprisingly scarce in the period's literature--and its journalism, sermons, poems, and plays--where villains, hypocrites, murderers, and cheats of all types abound.

Christopher Lane is professor of English at Northwestern University. He is the author of The Ruling Passion and The Burdens of Intimacy: Psychoanalysis and Victorian Masculinity and the editor of The Psychoanalysis of Race (Columbia, 1998).

Caroline Reitz, author of Detecting the Nation: Fictions of Detection and the Imperial Venture, 1788-1927:
Lane's excellent book [provides] fascinating close readings while always keeping the bigger picture--the relationship between the individual and society--in full view.

David G. Riede, author of Allegories of One's Own Mind: Melancholy in Victorian Poetry:
[Lane] convincingly shows that the aesthetic and moral premises of Victorian literature are powerfully undermined by a constantly resurfacing belief that hatred and malice are more potent ontological imperatives in human nature than are love and sympathy."

Nicola Bradbury:
Lane achieves a remarkable recasting of the Victorian age, revealing a pervasive Victorian 'willingness to let hatred and civility collide in Jekyll-and-Hyde fashion.' His range of reference is impressive.... [This book] is a major contribution to Victorian studies.

Stephanie Cross:
A valuable and engaging book.

Tanya Agathocleous:
Lane's vision of the period as one rife with antisocial sentiment is provocative and convincing, and amply demonstrated through the breadth of his analysis and the strength of his readings.

John Plotz:
An impressive successor... [that] mark[s] him out...as the most renowned psychoanalytic critic in his generation of Victorianists.

Ilana M. Blumberg:
Lane's study succeeds in prompting readers to confront a deep, simple, and problematic truth: that it is no small feat to live successfully among people.

P. W. Stine:
Will be welcome in all collections of Victorian literature...Highly recommended.