The essays in this volume, composed over a period of twenty years, reflect portions of my exploration of Victorian intellectual life. I commenced that effort as a graduate student suspicious that many of the categories used to understand the Victorians were inadequate and misleading. As I read further Victorian writers, I repeatedly encountered passages that did not fit the patterns of interpretation that then generally predominated. As time passed, I came to the firmer conviction that the history of the nineteenth century whether in Great Britain or elsewhere was still to be written. So long as Victorian scholars tended to interpret their field largely according to the categories and values bequeathed them by Victorian writers themselves, the scholarly enterprise could not extend beyond the intellectual and cultural boundaries established by the nineteenthcentury writers for their own purposes. Those boundaries have now begun to shift as new categories have been introduced, as Victorians previously unread by scholars have become read, and as the contemporary polemical purposes of Victorian writers have been recognized. As a consequence, the experience of the Victorians and their intellectual activity can no longer be regarded as unproblematic, inevitable, or quaint.