Love Me Little, Love Me Long

Lucy Fountain is orphaned, handsome and poor, and two men want her: a man of business who calculates, and a man of feeling who does not. Charles Reade researched his novels like a journalist and kept notebooks of real cases; here the subject is the slow work of an attachment that neither party will name. The title is the proverb, and the book argues it. Fifty-six plates of Victorian narrative painting, from Abraham Solomon to Augustus Egg, track courtship, money and the verdicts passed on both.