This lively, accessible account of works by Edward Bulwer, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Robert Browning, and Joseph Conrad explains why many Victorians nursed a hostile vision of man and society and how misanthropy - once a means of conveying integrity and justified disdain of society"s excesses - turned immoral and quasi-criminal. Delivering a surprising new perspective on the past, Christopher Lane shows that the fanatics troubling us today share many qualities with our supposedly moral ancestors.