So that of the novel of commerce of those days I really know very little--and I do not think that there is very much about it that anyone need know. That it existed in great numbers in three volumes apiece was obvious. In every little town in England there was in those days a circulating library and in every circulating library in every town were shelves on shelves of obfusc bindings--but even the literary textbooks of to-day give you no more names for the Victorian period than Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, the Brontës, Charles Kingsley, Robert Louis Stevenson (who died in 1894), George Meredith and Thomas Hardy. So that even the official list is a pretty meagre one and if I rack my brains really hard I cannot add many names to it. I have already given you Black, Blackmore, Besant and Rice who collaborated--and of writers of considerable merit, Mark Rutherford and Samuel Butler, but neither of these really belong to the period--and Jane Austen really precedes it, though we may well say that she originated the novel of the country-house that was followed--at such great intervals--by the swarm of commercial writers. That all the commercial writers who solidly turned out solid three-deckers produced absolute rubbish need not be assumed. Miss Braddon, authoress of _Lady Audley’s Secret_, did honest, sound journeyman’s work, year in, year out, during a very long life--and obviously such a writer as Mrs. Gaskell will not ever be entirely forgotten, if only on account of _Cranford_. I wish, myself, that more weight attached to her _Mary Barton_, a grim--and indeed an extraordinarily painful--account of Mid-Victorian labour troubles. And of course there is Trollope.