His first great success, and his most famous achievement, was Eminent Victorians (1918), a collection of four short biographies of Victorian heroes.

This listless movie adaptation, inspired by Alan Moore's imaginative and grisly take on Victorian heroes from his comics of the same name, has the sweat stains of wasted energy; it's drab yet frantic.

Lacking the high-spirited generosity of a typical Victorian hero, John may fall prey to bouts of misanthropic rage and frantic paranoia, but who could blame him?

The film is inspired by Alan Moore's comics of the same name, an imaginative and grisly take on Victorian heroes.

Like a typical Victorian hero, Hugh has fully developed middle-class morals and an instinctive mistrust of pretense and luxury.

The papers are attributed to Flashman, who is not only the bully featured in Thomas Hughes' novel, but also a well-known Victorian military hero.

Robert Autumn is represented as a classic Victorian hero: honourable, perceptive and brave but out of his depth in a new age of ruthless exploitation personified by the bullish, cynical government official Dr Davenport Spry.

Mr. Northam's Robert is every inch the dashing Victorian hero, perfect but for one crucial blemish.

-David Cecil, Victorian Novelists, 1935 (George Eliot) was more aware than her immediate predecessors of the complexity of characters and her creations cannot be labelled good or bad, nor accorded the wholesale approval or disapproval of the reader as readily as can many Victorian heroes or heroines.

Mr. Elliot's exploits put one in mind of the derring-do associated with those Victorian heroes of British colonialism who disguised themselves as locals, learned native dialects and bravely plotted against the Russians in the Great Game, the century-long rivalry in central Asia.