Dark Victorians is a highly readable study that builds on debates surrounding issues of diasporic transnationalism and black internationalism via a focussed examination of the various cultural and intellectual exchanges between African Americans and white Britons during the Victorian age. Drawing on scholarship from the likes of Paul Gilroy and Edward Said and utilizing a plethora of literary and historical sources, Dickerson provides a decidedly detailed vision of African American and British relations built through documented encounters between leading literary and cultural figures from both sides of the Atlantic.

Chapters 1 and 2 deal with British observations of black America and African American impressions of Britain respectively, through an analysis of the biographical writings of prominent public figures. Whilst both are academically thorough in terms of sources consulted (figures such as Trollope, Barrett Browning, Douglass and Jacobs appear, among others) and do much to highlight the extent to which the two groups were highly influenced by each other, there is a slight tendency here to homogenize Victorian Britain and overlook the social nuances of the era. The study is predominantly concerned with prominent social figures and is thus focussed on the upper classes and/or the highly educated. Issues of class which may complicate Dickerson's argument remain largely unacknowledged. Much is made of African Americans' romanticization of Britain due to their perception of it as a haven of liberation and racial tolerance, yet there is a distinct lack of developed discussion of the specific characteristics of racism in polite British society or of the complexities of white paternalism and patronage. Although the author does take into the consideration the tensions between Victorian Britain's support of abolition and its simultaneous development of its empire at the expense of “darker-skinned people” (4), and includes a section on African Americans as spectacle in British society, an expansion of these issues could have gone some way to explicating some of these problematic historical concerns.

Dickerson does much to rectify these issues in the final two chapters of the book as she focusses her analysis through case studies of Carlyle and Du Bois. By highlighting the problems of British “racist–imperialist thinking” (74) through a consideration of the intersections between African Americans, the Irish and the British, and by acknowledging the active engagement of African American intellectuals with such thinking, Dickerson provides a fresh perspective on the impact of Carlylean thought on the colonized and disenfranchised. The final – and strongest – chapter on Du Bois adeptly addresses the influence of Victorian culture on his seminal text The Souls of Black Folk (1903). What begins as a compare-and-contrast between him and Carlyle develops into a richer discussion of Du Bois's immersion in European art, music and literature and a convincing reinforcement of the author's argument regarding transnational and racial cultural exchange through detailed close readings of the many epigraphs of Souls. All in all this is an ambitious, thought-provoking and well-researched volume on the nature of black–white cultural and intellectual exchange, but one which, at 135 pages, suffers mainly from its brevity.