Introduction: Genre painting and the novel -- pt. 1. Romanticism turns bourgeois: Coleridge and Wordsworth -- Sir Walter Scott -- Charles Lamb -- Thomas De Quincey -- Thomas Love Peacock -- Macaulay -- pt. 2. Decline of the hero: Charles Dickens -- William Makepeace Thackeray -- Anthony Trollope -- George Eliot -- [pt. 3.] Appendixes: Epic of the everyday: Coventry Patmore's "The angel in the house" -- Rome and the Victorians.