Romanticism can be seen as a fundamental change in some men's way of looking at the world: meaning was no longer immanent in external reality but derived from the nature of the mind and projected onto the world. As Romanticism developed, this form of thinking received an increasingly radical expression. George Eliot's intellectual development was towards the most radical Romantic thought. Her agreement with Peuerbach's and G. H. Lewes's philosophical positions illustrates this. This way of thinking had possibly nihilistic implications which she did not accept, but Darwinism, which justified in different terms some of these nihil¬ istic ideas, forced her to face them. Though she is commonly thought not to have been seriously affected by Darwin, it can be shown that she was well aware of his ideas and their implications. She accepted Darwin's basic position but resisted the negative interpretations that could be derived from this: most importantly that society like nature was a struggle with the fittest surviving and that the individual should therefore view his situation as one of struggle and adaptation, and also that in a world of chance there was no moral order which could justify moral values. A character like Tito in Romola who bases his life on implicitly Darwinian principles finds no tenable sense of identity. This is related to her concern with egoism. For her, the Romantic egoist who denies all values not derived from the self can only lead an alienated existence. There are two main groups of Romantics: organicist Romantics who seek a new orientation for the individual ana. for society at large, and egoistic or demonic Romantics who reject any authority superior to the ego and its right to selfrealisation. George Eliot belongs to the former and radically criticises the latter. A major difference between the two groups is over feeling. Though George Eliot had many philosophical ideas in common with a radical Romantic egoist like Metzsche, she fundamentally disagreed with him over feeling, which she thought could be the basis of a purely human world-view that could express Christian moral values in a new form. But feeling needed control and direction and this was in part provided by her vision of the good society. She believed that society must be organic, that the traditions and values of the past must develop organically so as to create continuity. Sooiety must have a sense of corporate consciousness which would prevent the development of a moral and intellectual relativism that could only lead to sterile forms of egoism or alienation. Related to the organic conception of society, is her view of memory as a means of creating continuity in the individual's life. Without this he is subject to alienation or swept along by feelings and impulses, and this provides no possibility of a secure sense of identity. The Mill on the Floss is oonoerned with memory both as a form of human transcendence and as a means of creating control and direction for feeling. Both Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda can be seen to be greatly concerned with Romantic ideas and their implications.

This thesis is a study of the different aspects of Dickens's religions as these are expressed in the novels from the earliest works onwards. The central argument is that the different beliefs reflecting Dickens's position emerge with unique force at different times during his career; and that this becomes apparent to a closer historically informed and sensitive reading of the important scenes in his works. The approach is a combination of the chronological and the thematic, beginning with an account of the 'fall' of innocent goodness in Pickwick Papers, and ending with an exploration of religion itself as a theme in Little Dorrit, Dickens's most profound attempt to find a religious 'answer' to life's painful mysteries. The last novels, from A Tale of Two Cities to Edwin Drood, are dealt with briefly in a concluding chapter, as further examples of the expression of themes and attitudes already discussed in depth. The intervening chapters explore different aspects of the novelist's fundamental position as a liberal, even radical Protestant with Romantic leanings, the affirmation of Christian charity in Oliver Twist; the growing obsession with death and the possibility of establishing a personal, unorthodox but representative faith in immortality in The Old Curiosity Shop; the complex treatment of contemporary fanaticism and Catholicism in Barnaby Budge and related non-fiction; the overriding belief in the need for a 'change of heart' in the Christmas books, Martin Chusslewit and Dombey and Son; and the demand for a 'social gospel' in David Copperfield and Bleak House.

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The following dissertation examines Thackeray's working habits and methods in the composition of his six major novels; Vanity Fair, Pendennis, Esmond, the Newcomes, the Virginians and Denis Duval. The method of the examination is not to attempt a comprehensive account of the production of these novels but to consider a particular, illuminating aspect in each. The Introduction discusses Thackeray's notorious and self-confessed 'carelessness'. His habitual indifference to narrative detail, accuracy and consistency has often pained those who admire his fiction and justified those who do not. Trollope, a noted disciple, is especially interesting for his attack on the pervasive 'touch of vagueness' in Thackeray's work. Even if his attack is wrong or overstressed Trollope helps us focus on the characteristic quality of Thackeray's writing, its unforced, opportunistic nature which can as easily produce 'touches of genius' as of 'vagueness'. The first chapter deals with Vanity Fair. The function of improvisation is examined at three ascending levels in Thackeray's novel; at the level of the scene, the monthly number and of the whole work. In the first the evolution on the MS. page of the 'Iphigenia' scene is analysed. In the second some fragmentary plans Thackeray made for the Waterloo number are compared with the very different published text. The third section follows the chronology of the story as a whole. At each of these levels one finds the same spontaneous adaptability to new narrative situations and possibilities. The second chapter traces the working compromise Thackeray made between his temperamental inclination towards autobiographical fiction and his disinclination to reveal too much of himself. The surviving fragment of the Pendennis MS. (substantially chapter 41) is unusually instructive on this question of self-revelation. Moreover it offers a model example of the way in which Thackeray would work out problems in the very act of writing his novel. The third chapter takes up a long-standing controversy about the writing of Esmond which is alone among Thackeray's major works in having been finished entirely before publication was begun. Was it composed 'carefully' or dashed off in the same way as the previous serial novels? Some alterations to the Rachel-Harry-Beatrix love-plot suggest the latter as does the haphazard emergence of the editorial apparatus in the second volume. The fourth chapter considers the prize item in the scanty catalogue of Thackeray's surviving working materials, an advance number plan for the last part of the Newcomes. Yet how far this plan-making was Thackeray's normal practice or even how far it improved the novel in this particular instance, is doubtful. The MS. of the magnificent death-scene of Colonel Newcome suggests that at the most important moments of composition Thackeray relied less on preparation than on a more immediate power of inspired improvisation. The fifth chapter considers the Virginians in the light of its failure when judged by the standard of Thackeray's best fiction. This failure seems to stem from mixed causes among which the principal are: confusion of aims, undue deference to American sensitivities and a certain timidity when dealing with the inner lives of his characters. The last chapter considers whether or not serialism was injurious to Thackeray's fiction. Denis Duval, the novel whose composition we have most material on, would seem to show a happy collaboration between the serialist - Thackeray's need to write fast - and the scholar - Thackeray's love of steeping himself in miscellaneous sources of information for the background to his historical fiction. The four appendices offer supporting evidence on Thackeray's ways of writing his fiction. The first gives some of the working plans made for Duval. The second follows the process of revision (and the muddle it causes) in a chapter of Esmond. The third gives a brief account of Thackeray's use of secretarial assistance in writing his fiction. The fourth contradicts, on the evidence of the MS., the received idea of the six-paragraph interpolation at the end of the eighth chapter of Vanity Fair.

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The thesis concentrates on the illustrations of Dickens's novels in their original publication. In some ways, it is a reaction against recent studies which make much of the beliefs that the illustrations are part of a tradition reaching back to Hogarth, and that they contain important contributions to the work. Instead, this study, looking at the illustrations in a nineteenth century context, seeks to establish their importance to Dickens and his contemporaries. It traces the tenor of criticism and reviews from sketches by Boa through Edwin Drood - noting the emphasis on Dickens's visually-oriented language, and the dearth of references to the illustrator or the illustrations. Seeking to establish Dickens's attitude to the role of pictures in his novels, it considers the "working relations" of Dickens with each of his illustrators, looks at comments he made about specific drawings or engravings, and traces the various forms his illustrated, and unillustrated, works assumed. Then, it explores the effect of cultural changes, especially in the realms of journalism and Art, and discusses the influence of bibliographic and typographic developments. Dickens emerges as an author who obtained illustrations for the novels of his early and mid-career almost solely to satisfy a cultural demand. He demonstrated great interest in them, but not out of an aesthetic concern that word and picture should form an inseparable whole: the text always came first; and whatever else the illustration did, it must agree, in letter and in spirit, with that text. Then, with reissued sets of the works and with novels first published in weekly papers, it became clear that the public would gladly accept his novels with little or no graphic embellishment. Finally, by providing young artists the opportunity of showing their work to a large public, he became less an illustrated novelist that a patron of Art.

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