[Colby is an American educator and critic who has written several studies of Victorian literature. In the following excerpt, she examines the appeal of Ward's works to Victorian readers.]

It is a telling comment on Victorianism that one of its leading family dynasties was not Marlborough, Medici, Borgia, Fugger, or Rothschild, but Arnold. The founder of this line was not a warrior, a statesman, a banker, or a patron of the arts, but a clergyman and schoolmaster. Though some of his descendants practiced the arts of criticism, poetry, and fiction, not one of them deviated from the family mission of public service and education.…

The Arnolds were not a royal dynasty, but early and permanently associated with them was a cachet of noblesse oblige. In a bourgeois, secular society they represented an ideal—the cultivated mind and conscience, the aristocracy of learning, dedicated public service and ethical conduct...