Complete and unabridged, with 58 full-page plates by William Quiller Orchardson, William Corden the Elder and John Watson Gordon. Where the Victorian novelists were laughing at their readers - Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, Meredith - and what the joke was about in each case. An early academic study, and unusually readable for one. This edition is bound with a gallery of 58 plates of paintings, among them works by William Hogarth, John Everett Millais and John Watson Gordon.