“That Fiction is an art in every way worthy to be called the sister and the equal of the Arts of Painting, Music, and Poetry” was Walter Besant's argument before the Royal Institution on April 25, 1884. The argument was self-evident to anyone of a continental mentality but not “so generally perceived as to form, so to speak, part of the national mind” (6). England did not generally consider fiction an art. To the English a novelist “is a person who tells stories; just as they used to regard the actor as a man who tumbled on the stage to make the audience laugh, and a musician a man who fiddled to make the people dance” (9). Besant tries to elevate the novel by asserting its ancient primacy, its breadth (“its field is the whole of humanity”), its value (“it creates and develops that sympathy which is a kind of second sight”), and its subtlety in selection, arrangement, and suggestion (31–32). The claim to “subtlety” would have been surprising, even to an audience not inclined to laugh and dance. That fiction is an art distinguished by real aesthetic refinement needed serious proof, and Besant gave it a try – in “The Art of Fiction,” and as part of a culture of letters eager to give the English novel the distinction necessary to claim its place among the finest arts.