Altick, Richard Daniel, The Presence of the Present: Topics of the Day in the Victorian Novel, Ohio State University Press, 1991.

This informative companion to British novels of the mid-nineteenth century provides historical context by discussing the people, events, or places of everyday Victorian life and explaining references that Victorians understood but the modern reader may not.

Baker, Margaret J., Anna Sewell and Black Beauty, George Harrap, 1956.

Written for children, this biography of Sewell also describes the times in which she lived.

Barrows, Susanna, and Robin Room, eds., Drinking: Behavior and Belief in Modern History, University of California Press, 1991.

This book is a collection of social science conference papers illuminating drinking practices and societal responses to the effects of drinking—including the Temperance Movement—at various points in history around the world.

Chitty, Susan, The Woman Who Wrote "Black Beauty," Hoder & Stoughton, 1971.

A full-length biography on...