A maverick Brit. Lit. Teacher presents 50 works from the "other side" of the Victorian era - Gothic excess, sensation fiction, ghost stories and supernatural terror, ripping yarn adventure stories, darkly twisted crime stories, penny dreadfuls, and explicit erotica. While some of these works grudgingly have been given Academic respectability in recent years, most of them still remain in the academic ghetto known as "popular literature", and are considered to be crudely ( or at least carelessly) written, overly excessive and/or explicit, openly xenophobic and racist, or merely cheap entertainments. They are also fascinating, and fun, to read.
