Andrew Lang’s Essays in Little is a collection of literary essays that discusses writers and works ranging from Alexandre Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, Thackeray, Dickens, Walter Scott, and John Bunyan to Rudyard Kipling in a personal, lively, and approachable critical voice. Beginning with the enduring excitement of Dumas’s romances, Lang moves through Stevenson’s imaginative fiction, Homer and Greek studies, sagas, buccaneer narratives, fashionable novels, journalism, and the changing literary culture of his own age. Rather than limiting himself to formal analysis or literary history, he combines affectionate reading, biographical anecdote, personal taste, praise, and playful criticism to explain why particular books continue to attract or disappoint their readers. Across its varied subjects, the collection expresses Lang’s belief that lasting literature survives not merely through scholarly reputation but through its continuing power to offer adventure, humor, emotion, and imaginative delight.
