The Victorian period was, in Tennyson's phrase, an awful moment of transition. A society largely based on agriculture and traditional values and social hierarchies was transformed into one both stimulated and disordered by unprecedented growth in science, technology, industry, urbanization and population, and profound questioning of politics, morality and religion. Apart from visiting commentators such as the Americans Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne, the writers featured include Henry Mayhew, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, William Cobbett and Charles Dickens himself. A miscellany some of the best, wittiest and most unusual Victorian writing, this work brings to life the variety and energy of the society that produced and inspired one of England's most famous authors.