Sean O'Toole is Assistant Professor of English at the City University of New York, Baruch College, USA.

Acknowledgements Introduction PART I: GENERATIVE HABITS 1 The Sensing Self: Dickens and the Space of Habit 2 Believing is Seeing: George Eliot's Past Effects PART II: PATTERNS OF CONSCIOUSNESS 3 Embodied Dispositions, Meredithian Slips 4 Passionate Possessions: Henry James's Queer Properties Coda: The Grain and the Heap, or the Afterlife of Habit Notes Bibliography Index

This book offers new perspectives on the concept of habit in the nineteenth-century novel, delineating the complex, changing significance of the term and exploring the ways in which its meanings play out in a range of narratives, from Dickens to James.