CONTENTS:

FOREWORD
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY (1811-1861)
CHARLES DICKENS (1812-1870)
ANTHONY TROLLOPE (1815-1882)
GEORGE ELIOT (1819-1880)
GEORGE MEREDITH (1828-1909)
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON (1850-1894)
BIBLIOGRAPHY

From the Foreword:

          "The great novelists whose biographies make up this book form, as it were, a little club of their own: for Thackeray knew Dickens, and Dickens was George Eliot’s great friend, and Trollope was proposed by Thackeray for the Garrick Club, and George Meredith contributed to Dickens’s magazine All the Year Round, and Stevenson met Meredith when he stayed at Burford Bridge.

          One finds it difficult to recall any other epoch of English history when so many great novelists were writing at the same time. It was a lush period, both in literature and art.

          All of these great novelists, with the exception of Meredith, died at what, nowadays, we should call an early age, though Trollope, who was sixty-seven when he died, considered himself an old man, and even when he was only fifty-five his friends reproached him for continuing to write love stories. It is no exaggeration to say that they worked themselves to death.

          They were a living contradiction of the general belief that the "classic" writers wrote at great leisure solely for art’s sake. They all wrote for money at the highest speed of which they were capable: Thackeray with the printer’s boy waiting in the hall for copy; Trollope with his watch on the table in front of him; George Eliot driven on by poverty and the furious urge of female industry; Dickens racing, like Thackeray, against the printer…"