The Silence of Dean Maitland, a very little known text from the mid-Victorian period, offers us a glimpse of the concerns of the period – the problem of crime and its detection and punishment; questions of conscience and behaviour in the post-Darwinian world – all set amongst a panorama of characters in rural mid-century Britain. In this novel, Mrs Henry Wood meets Mrs Humphry Ward and they both nod politely towards the world of Thomas Hardy. Wolfreys’ edition of this text gives us comprehensive notes to aid the reader’s understanding and a brilliant selection of contemporary commentary on the issues the novel raises. It gives us the chance to broaden our canon of Victorian fiction into realms that are resolutely not part of the old ‘Great Tradition’.
Ruth Robbins, Leeds Beckett University