Italian Politics and Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture by Patricia Cove (review)

poor was part of a larger social movement that clarifies even larger ties to his betterremembered contemporaries, such as William Booth, W. T. Stead, Margaret Harkness, and Jack London, who worked alongside Besant in the struggle to help the working classes. In his contribution to the volume, Eliot notes that Besant believed that, for the “popular minor novelist” (130), literary success “was all ephemeral and fleeting and would eventually evaporate into nothing” (129). The essays in this volume prompt us to question Besant on this point, if not for his stodgy and misguided views then for his prolific and wide-ranging contributions to Victorian literary culture. Heidi Kaufman University of Oregon