SOURCE: “The Victorian Novelist,” in Robert W. Buchanan, Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1973, pp. 137-49

In the following essay, Cassidy surveys major themes in Buchanan's novels.

As a novelist, Buchanan displays the same extraordinary productivity we have seen in his poems and plays. In the twenty-four years, beginning in 1876 and ending in 1900, he published twenty-five full-length novels, or better than one a year. These figures tell once again the story of writing too rapidly and too much, and they result from the same combination of unfortunate circumstances that plagued Buchanan throughout his career. He was forced into novel-writing by his ever increasing need for money to support his family, as well as by his personal follies of betting on horse races and of permitting himself to be a “soft-touch” for impecunious friends and acquaintances.

Buchanan left no written complaint against the restrictions upon the novelist as he did against those...