Victorian Humor

Humor and the novel both belong, in important ways, to the nineteenth century. It is in the nineteenth-century that we saw an unprecedented outpouring of novels and short-stories, and it was also in the nineteenth century when ‘humor’ emerged as the dominant term through which the comic was described. Victorian Humor argues that these two features of nineteenth-century culture shape one another in significant ways and, together, point to a broader societal shift in ways of thinking about the ind