April 23, 2004

The Undercurrent of Misanthropy in Victorian Writings

By SCOTT McLEMEE

All those episodes of "Masterpiece Theater" have left an indelible image of the Victorian era as a time of civility and restraint. People of that time may have been hypocrites, but at least they were polite.

A much more complex picture of the age emerges when you read its imaginative writers, according to Christopher Lane, a professor of English at Northwestern University. In Hatred & Civility: The Antisocial Life in Victorian England, published by Columbia University Press, Mr.