This is a comprehensive and fully annotated anthology with a flexible design that allows teachers and students to pursue traditional or innovative lines of inquiry, from the canon to its extensions to its contexts. It incorporates recent scholarship with 5 contextual sections and innovative sub-sections on topics like environmentalism and animal rights; mass literacy and mass media; sex and sexuality; Victorian childhood; melodrama and comedy; the Irish question; ruling India and the Indian Mutiny; innovations in print culture; and the science of race.