This is a gathering of Stephen Wall's writings about the great nineteenth- century novelists to which he devoted so much of his generous critical intelligence. It is, naturally, dominated by Wall's major study, Trollope and Character, published in 1988. Alongside that, I have put his account of Trollope as a letter writer; the historical commentary he wrote for his invaluable Penguin anthology of Dickens criticism; and a number of other pieces, mostly about Dickens, which originally appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books and Essays in Criticism, the journal he edited from 1973 until his death in 2010. Among other pieces first to appear in Essays in Criticism was an important essay about the editing of English novels – the implications of which range far beyond Victorian literature – which it also seemed proper to include. The resulting book by no means constitutes a complete collection of Stephen Wall's criticism: he was a prolific reviewer of new fiction for the Observer, and many of his notices have a lasting value; his essay on Iris Murdoch's The Bell (Essays in Criticism, 1963) remains one of the best accounts of that novel; and the piece he wrote about his former pupil Ian Hamilton (‘Ian Hamilton and the Poet's Life’, Essays in Criticism, 2002) memorably captures the achievement of a great man of letters. This volume cannot even pretend to include all his criticism of nineteenthcentury subjects. I have not included the introduction to Can You Forgive Her?, written for his Penguin edition (1974), which was largely reworked in Trollope and Character, as were the essays ‘Trollope, Balzac, and the Reappearing Character’ (Essays in Criticism, 1975) and ‘Trollope, Satire, and The Way We Live Now’ (Essays in Criticism, 1987). The excellent introduction to Little Dorrit, which appears in the edition he co- edited for Penguin with Helen Small (2003), remains readily available. Finally, I reluctantly accepted that space did not allow me to print some of Stephen Wall's shorter fiction, much of which shows the distinct impress of the Victorian literature in which he was so expert.