Introduction : what kind of knowledge does the novel teach?
William Thackeray, the character sketch, and the portrait of a novelist in literary history
Charles Kingsley and the novelist as poetry instructor
Great expectations and Dickens's spelling book predicament
Elizabeth Gaskell and the ambiguity of useful knowledge
George Eliot's "graceful mark of instruction" and the novel as "shallow" knowledge
George Gissing and the elusive art of fiction
Coda : can there ever be an endgame for the novel's intellectual rise?.