ABSTRACT
Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding were likely to be positioned for Victorian readers as raising issues of class and gender. Those who commissioned, wrote, or published literary histories of the eighteenth century in the Victorian period were well aware that the books and articles would be read as much for their attitude to contemporary issues as for any information they might yield about their literary forebears. It was Thackeray's consequent intellectual commitment to undermining his audience's desire for emotional engagement with particular characters or positions that resulted in his finding less favour with a Victorian readership than Carlyle as a historian, or Dickens as a novelist. The John Blackwood saw Maga, renowned primarily for its literary coverage, as also exercising a political force, is clear from the extraordinary step he took next of commissioning George Eliot to use her fictional hero as a mouthpiece for radical Tory views.
