The Victorians and Race is a major interdisciplinary reconsideration of Victorian discourses of race as represented through visual culture and both canonic and non-canonic texts. Representations of race in art and literature are analysed for what they reveal about constructions of 'other' races during the Victorian period.

The book also considers the problem of British 'races' and the conflicting ideas of Anglo-Saxonism and Celticism in the nineteenth century. However, the authors seek not only to uncover the oppressions, misrepresentations and abuses of 'white' patriarchy, but they examine the complexities of racial experience, including anti-racism and the relationships between feminism and colonialism.

The authors adopt a number of theoretical and historical strategies, and deal with both general considerations of imperialism, racial identity and social Darwinism, and specific case studies of works by such writers as Dickens, Schreiner and Bulwer Lytton, and such artists as Mulready, Winterhalter and the Langham Place Group.