“A brilliant companion, not only to Victorian nonfiction prose, but to the Victorian Age itself. Rees combines scholarly erudition with vivid life-drawing, so that each subject seems to leap off the page to escort the reader into their particular region of Victorian life. Although it is designed as a work of reference, to be ‘dipped into’, I found it almost impossible to put down. The entry on Charles Spurgeon (‘the most published English-speaking Christian of all time’) led me to W.T. Stead then to Robert Louis Stevenson and on to John Addington Symonds and I emerged with a much richer sense of the texture of life of a period I thought I already knew well. This is a tour de force of scholarship which should become indispensable, not only to the 19C scholar, but to anyone needing a deeper understanding of the Victorian Age.”—Valerie Purton, emeritus professor of Victorian literature, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge
