Books: Who Can Escape Grandfather?

CHARLES DICKENS AND EARLY VICTORIAN ENGLAND (308 pp.)—R. J. Cruikshank—Chanticleer ($4.50).

It may be legal to call a man a Victorian, but it is always safer to say it with a smile. No word in the language is so pointed a synonym for pious smugness and stuffy taste. Victoria became Queen in 1837, died in 1901. During the course of her long reign the British Empire reached the peak of its prestige and power; for much of it the English working classes lived at a level close to brutishness. It was a time of...