How we spend our days, Annie Dillard writes, is how we spend our lives. Dillard’s remark invites us to think of the everyday as a source of enduring meaning. “Desiring the Everyday in Victorian Literature” analyzes the urge to do just this: to turn to the everyday as a neglected site of self-awareness and human fellowship. This urge has proven especially powerful in the face of our intensely mediated information age. It's an attractive and abiding proposition, the historical roots of which lie in the secularizing nineteenth-century, at the dawn of a different, but not entirely dissimilar, media explosion. But conceiving of the everyday as the measure of meaningfulness makes only more evident its limits—and our limits within it. As a site of repetitive, ordinary, often isolating experience, unmarked by heroic behavior or profound change, the passage of day after day can be painfully circumscribing, a diurnal reminder of how contained and finite the self truly is. The considerable literature on everyday life has paid little attention to this fraught idealization of the everyday as an object of pervasive desire; and yet, it textures our daily experience and our most cherished narratives, from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first. To study this desire, I attend to the writing of four Victorian novelists and essayists as they articulated the first great urge to redeem the everyday from the tides of distraction and information overload, secularization and the constant flux of history. In our vexed encounters with these four writers, I suggest, we might come to understand our own desire for the everyday anew, in all its strange vitality, as a pervasive-yet-elusive condition of daily life now.