Robert Cleland

Robert Cleland was a Victorian novelist about whom public information is limited: neither his dates of birth and death nor his nationality can be verified, and few details of his life are known. Six of his works are held in the collection, including Inchbracken (1883), A Rich Man's Relatives (1885), and True to a Type (1887). Inchbracken is set against rural life during the period of the Scottish church schism, while the others draw chiefly on family entanglements and social observation, attending to personal relationships and everyday ethics in a realistic vein tinged with irony. These novels were later digitized and reissued by Project Gutenberg, and so have survived to offer today's readers a sample of Victorian popular fiction and its themes.