Written to celebrate Queen Victoria's reign, this 1897 study covers "sixty years of books and bookmen." Shorter focuses in turn on the poets, novelists, historians, and critics of the time—covering such figures as William Wordsworth, Alfred Tennyson, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Lord Macaulay, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, and John Stuart Mill, among many others.