I. Fiction in Shakespeare's time -- II. The seventeenth century -- III. Defoe and his contemporaries -- IV. Psychological realism begins : Samuel Richardson -- V. Fielding and the prose epic -- VI. Smollett and the novel of humors -- VII. The triumph of sensibility : Laurence Sterne -- VIII. Sentimentalists and revolutionaries -- IX. The renascence of wonder -- X. The romance of the tea-table -- XI. The heights -- XII. From Scott to Dickens -- XIII. White magic -- XIV. The disciples of Dickens -- XV. Counter-blast : W.M. Thackeray -- XVI. The novelist as novelist : Anthony Trollope -- XVII. Fire over Yorkshire -- XVIII. The "new" novel : George Eliot -- XIX. The poetic comedy of George Meredith -- XX. Hardy and the cosmic drama -- XXI. Romance resurgent : Robert Louis Stevenson -- XXII. Victorian sunset -- XXIII. Towards a new century -- XXIV. Values and Joseph Conrad -- XXV. Novelist of being : Arnold Bennett -- XXVI. H.G. Wells, "realist of the fantastic" -- XXVII. Pity, irony, and John Galsworthy -- XXVIII D.H. Lawrence, pilgrim of the rainbow -- XXIX. "Stream-of-consciousness" -- XXX. News of Tishnar : Walter De La Mare.