I want to make the case for the Victorian novel as a form that is still fully alive. Not as historical artifact, but as a way of telling certain kinds of stories that no contemporary form handles as well.

The Victorian novel has scope — it can follow characters across decades, introduce many people, range across social classes, and use the narrator's direct address to position the reader in relation to events. It operates with a confidence about its own authority that contemporary literary fiction has largely abandoned. The narrator knows what things mean. The narrator will tell you.

This sounds like a flaw and in inexpert hands it is. But in Eliot or Trollope or Dickens at his best, the narrator's authority is earned through sustained engagement with the complexity of what is being narrated. The confidence is not assertion but demonstration.