Abstract
For over forty years contemporary English author, biographer and popular historian Peter Ackroyd, CBE FRSL, has produced a vast collection of writing that can be broadly classified as neo-historical because of his insistent return to the past and its texts within his own, but it is worth noting that many of his works are concerned with or clearly influenced by the nineteenth century in particular and often referenced in neo-Victorian scholarship. For instance, Dana Shiller employs Ackroyd’s Chatterton (1987) alongside A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990) to exemplify one of the earliest definitions of the neo-Victorian as “texts that revise specific...