The Presence of the Present Topics of the Day in the Victorian Novel is the first comprehensive study of Victorian novelists use of the eras everyday culture and common knowledge in their writings. Victorian novelists knew that the men and women who bought and borrowed their books had an insatiable appetite for reading books about people like themselves in the instantly recognizable world in which they lived. They catered to this appetite by among other devices scattering through their pages allusions to people places and events in the news at the moment a novel was published as well as to objects scenes and fashions that were particularly characteristic of the presentday setting. References to this body of common knowledge helped in addition to strengthen the intimate rapport with their readers that authors so much prized in the period and they also contributed to the realistic effect that authenticated characters and scenes and thus encouraged readers imaginative assent to the fiction. The Presence of the Present has been derived from approximately 150 novels of the era from Pickwick Papers to Trollopes last novels and The Mayor of Casterbridge. All the great names of Victorian fiction are hereDickens Thackeray Disraeli George Eliot Charlotte Bront Trollope Wilkie Collins Elizabeth Gaskell Hardy Meredithas well as a representative selection of the lessthangreatCharles Reade Mary Elizabeth Braddon Edward BulwerLytton Samuel Warren and the unjustly neglected Robert Smith Surtees. The many illustrations drawn principally form the Illustrated London News and Punch and from the novels themselves recreate for a reader at the end of the twentieth century the same images that were evoked in the minds of the novels first readers. The book therefore surveys that manner in which Victorian fiction draws upon the observations and experiences of the readers for whom the novelists wrotenot posterity but readers of the daily press and riders on the new railways. Here we meet the