This study aims to place English fiction in the context of a culture in the throes of dynamic change. The period that produced Trollope, Stevenson, Wilde, Henry James and Virginia Woolf also encompassed Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle, Ethel M.Dell, H.de Vere Stacpole, Boys' Own Paper and the Religious Tract Society, and ran from the heyday of the triple-decker to the birth of the cheap reprint, and the commercial devices for selling books ran in harness with the developing profession of authorship. The author sets this flowering of literacy firmly in the social context of the developing attitudes that shaped a society in transition. While late Victorian notions were subject to traumatic change under the impact of post-Darwinian social theory, new approaches to economics, radical concepts of religion, the family, empire, there were parallel forces in play in the business of authorship and the trade of publishing.