William De Morgan's novels present a difficulty for many present-day readers. In many ways they resemble the works of William Makepeace Thackeray and Charles Dickens, but De Morgan was a contemporary of such early modernist writers as Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad, and James Joyce. The critical attention his works have received falls into two camps: that of the 1920s, which tends to emphasize his early Victorian parallels; and the scant and usually scathing glimpses thereafter, which tend to dismiss his work as an aberration. Apart from brief mentions in literary histories, De Morgan's work has been neglected since his death in 1917, although his last two novels--The Old Madhouse (1919) and The Old Man's Youth and the Young Man's Old Age (1921)--completed by his wife after his death, helped to sustain some popular interest in his writing into the early 1920s, as did the publication of A. M...