Tact

The social practice of tact was an invention of the nineteenth century, a period when Britain was witnessing unprecedented urbanization, industrialization, and population growth. In an era when more and more people lived more closely than ever before with people they knew less and less about, tact was a new mode of feeling one's way with others in

"One of the brilliances of this book is to suggest that tact as a mode of thinking can be linked to a type of independence, and imaginative intelligence. . . . [It is] at once provocative and generously open-ended, raising questions about what is at stake in any attempt to read and interpret." ---Kirsty Martin, Times Literary Supplement

"Learned, beautifully written, and crafted with evident care, Tact is one of those works that, from cover to content, exemplifies the ethos that is its subject."

"Russell’s Tact is a brilliant and frequently moving study, arguing passionately for the ways in which a greater openness may lead us into richer engagements with our world and doing this by lifting off the film of familiarity that so often obscures from us the canonical writers of the nineteenth century." ---Uttara Natarajan, Review in English Studies

"[A] joyful and stylish book." ---Diane Josefowicz, Victorian Web

David Russell is associate professor of English at the University of Oxford and a tutorial fellow of Corpus Christi College.