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Neighboring Lives is the Thomas M. Disch collaboration with Charles Naylor that takes him out of his usual SF register and into 19th-century London. The book follows the actual residents of one Chelsea street: Thomas Carlyle and his wife Jane Welsh Carlyle, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, George Eliot, the painter James McNeill Whistler, and a rotating cast of their friends and dependents.
Disch and Naylor are doing a particular kind of historical fiction with a serious literary frame. The voices of the various Victorian intellectuals are handled with the kind of careful attention to letters and journals that the form rewards. Jane Welsh Carlyle in particular gets the kind of careful interior treatment that 19th-century history has only recently begun to give her.
The book is short, dense, and absolutely deserves a wider audience. Four stars. Recommended to readers interested in Victorian intellectual history and to Disch readers who only know him through the SF.
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