Today we grapple with numerous kinds of hatred, turning past ages into models of civility. However, by probing cultural history and the works of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Robert Browning, and Joseph Conrad, Lane cogently undermines the myth of Victorian respectability. In lively, provocative prose, Hatred and Civility invites conservatives and radicals alike to rethink their assumptions about our supposedly moral precursors.