This lecture offers a survey of the novel as a literary genre and a medium of entertainment in Britain between c. 1830 and c. 1900, the era defined by the reign of Queen Victoria. We will look at the 19th-century novel in the context of its time, a period of social change characterised both by rapid modernisation and tenacious conservatism. The lecture will introduce the novel as the first popular mass medium, investigating its conditions of publication and readership, its genre differentiation, and its most important authors: Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot, Trollope, Gaskell, Disraeli, Collins, Braddon, Meredith and Hardy.