Although now overlooked, Marmion Savage was one of the most popular satirical novelists of the 1840s and 1850s. In witty novels dealing with Irish politics, the Oxford Movement, and the ambitions of young men, Savage obtained a large readership in both England and America. An optimistic writer with a positive sense of human nature, he did not set out to reform society as much as to expose it. Thomas Love Peacock is his precursor, George Meredith his heir. His "wholesome wit and airy vivacity," as the Athenaeum phrased it, characterize his novels. Informed about his society but critical of its shortcomings, Savage remains a minor novelist but one worth serious study from the perspectives of Victorian popular fiction and the use of satire.

The son of a clergyman, Marmion Wilmo Savage was born in Ireland and graduated in classics from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1824. Until 1856 he was a...