Hours in a Library

First issued in 1874 and later enlarged into three series, this is a collection of critical essays on English and a few foreign writers, not a single thesis. Stephen examines novelists and poets including Defoe, Richardson, Pope, Scott, Fielding, Johnson, Wordsworth, Hawthorne, Balzac, George Eliot, and Coleridge, placing each against the morals and habits of their period. He asks what a book is for, how character is made, and whether a writer's ethics hold together on the page. The pieces began as periodical articles. The work is literary criticism: close, comparative reading rather than biography or a history of genres.

Bound in blue-green cloth with a design in black and gold by Caroline Archer. Dark blue endleaves. Dark blue three-volume slipcase.