Victorian Era (1837 – 1901)
McIlvain
Name: _______________________
Period: 1 2 3 5 (CIRCLE ONE)
Characteristics of Victorian Literature
“British history is two thousand years old, and yet in a good many ways,
the world has moved farther ahead since the Queen was born than it
moved in all the rest of the two thousand put together.”
~Mark Twain during Queen Victoria’s 60th anniversary, 1897
Overview
The literature of the Victorian age (1837 – 1901, named for the reign of Queen Victoria)
entered in a new period after the romantic revival. During this period, Britain became the
wealthiest nation in the world, due to the rapid and widespread expansion of the British
Empire. In addition, the Victorians made the first real attempts to fix the massive social
problems caused by the industrial and democratic revolutions of the Romantic period.
The term “Victorian” is still used as a synonym for “prude” today, a term that reflects the
extreme repression of the age (even chair legs had to be covered, because they were thought
to be too suggestive). But this is a pretty limited view of the Victorians. A huge segment of
society was engaged in the discussion and debate of new ideas and theories, almost everyone
was a voracious reader, and intellectual seriousness and liveliness formed the basis for the
larger process of growth, change, and adjustment through the era. The Victorian Age was a
time of HUGE social and political development, and it can be more easily managed when
broken down into three phases: early, middle, and late.
The Literature
The literature of this era expressed the fusion of pure romance to gross realism. Though, the
Victorian Age produced great poets, the age is also remarkable for the excellence of its prose.
The discoveries of science have particular effects upon the literature of the age. If you study all
the great writers of this period, you will mark four general characteristics:
1. Literature of this age tends to come closer to daily life which reflects its practical
problems and interests. It becomes a powerful instrument for human progress. Socially
& economically, Industrialism was on the rise and various reform movements like
emancipation, child labor, women’s rights, and evolution.
2. Moral Purpose: The Victorian literature seems to deviate from "art for art's sake" and
asserts its moral purpose. Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Ruskin - all were the teachers of
England with the faith in their moral message to instruct the world.
3. Idealism: It is often considered as an age of doubt and pessimism. The influence of
science is felt here. The whole age seems to be caught in the conception of man in
relation to the universe with the idea of evolution.
4. Though, the age is characterized as practical and materialistic, most of the writers exalt
a purely ideal life. It is an idealistic age where the great ideals like truth, justice, love,
brotherhood are emphasized by poets, essayists and novelists of the age.
The Style of the Victorian Novel
Victorian novels tend to be idealized portraits of difficult lives in which hard work,
perseverance, love and luck win out in the end; virtue would be rewarded and wrongdoers are
suitably punished. They tended to be of an improving nature with a central moral lesson at
heart. While this formula was the basis for much of earlier Victorian fiction, the situation
became more complex as the century progressed.
Victorian literature is the literature produced during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901)
and corresponds to the Victorian era. It forms a link and transition between the writers of the
romantic period and the very different literature of the 20th century.
The 19th century saw the novel become the leading form of literature in English. The works by
pre-Victorian writers such as Jane Austen and Walter Scott had perfected both closely-observed
social satire and adventure stories. Popular works opened a market for the novel amongst a
reading public. The 19th century is often regarded as a high point in British literature as well as
in other countries such as France, the United States and Russia. Books, and novels in particular,
became ubiquitous, and the "Victorian novelist" created legacy works with continuing appeal.
Significant Victorian novelists and poets include: Matthew Arnold, the Brontë sisters (Emily,
Anne and Charlotte Brontë), Christina Rossetti, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
Joseph Conrad, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli,
George Eliot, George Meredith, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Gissing, Richard Jefferies, Thomas
Hardy, A. E. Housman, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Algernon Charles
Swinburne, Philip Meadows Taylor, Alfred Lord Tennyson, William Thackeray, Oscar Wilde,
Lewis Carroll and H. G. Wells (although many people consider his writing to be more of the
Edwardian age).
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Timeline
1832:
1837:
1850:
1851:
1859:
1870-71:
1901:
The First Reform Bill
Victoria becomes queen
Tennyson succeeds Wordsworth as Poet Laureate
The Great Exhibition in London
Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species published
Franco-Prussian War
Death of Victoria
Changes
Industrialization:
 Shift from life based on ownership of land to a modern urban economy based on trade
and manufacturing.
 London population “exploded” from 2 million in 1837 to 6 ½ million in 1901.
 Host of social and economic problems.
 Also an enormous increase in wealth.
Reaction of Victorian Writers
Various
 Celebration of progress
 Celebration of superiority of the English people.
Macaulay:
“the greatest and most highly civilized people that ever the world saw”
 Leadership in commerce and industry being paid for at a terrible price in human
happiness.
 So-called progress gained by abandoning traditional rhythms of life and traditional
patterns of human relationships.
 Anxious: something lost, displaced, “alien” world.

Matthew Arnold:
For what wears out the life of mortal men?
‘Tis that from change to change their being rolls
‘Tis that repeated shocks, again, again,
Exhaust the energy of strongest souls.
Early Period (1830-48): A Time of Troubles
1. 1830 – Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened, the first steam-powered, public
railway line in the world.
2. Burst of railway construction followed:
3. By 1850, 6,621 miles of RR connected major cities
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4. By 1900, England had 15,195 miles of track and an underground RR system in London
5. Train transformed England’s landscape.
6. Manufacturing interests refused to tolerate exclusion from political process, led working
men in agitating for reform.
7. 1832 – First Reform Bill extended the right to vote to all males owning property worth
£10 or more.
8. 1836 – Second Reform Bill extended franchise to working class men.
9. Crash in 1837, followed by bad harvests, period of unemployment, desperate poverty,
rioting.
10. Conditions in new industrial and coal-mining areas were terrible.
11. Workers and families in slums – horribly crowded, unsanitary housing.
12. Women and children toiled in mines and factories - unimaginably brutal conditions.
13. Seemingly hopeless through 1840s.
Mid-Victorian Period (1848-70)
1. Economic Prosperity
2. Growth of Empire
3. Religious Controversy
4. Time of prosperity.
5. Monarchy proving its worth in a modern setting.
6. Queen and Prince Albert models of middle-class domesticity and devotion to duty.
7. Aristocracy discovering Free Trade enriching and agriculture flourished together with
trade and industry.
8. Factory Acts restricted child labor and limited hours of employment.
Expansion
1. 1851 Prince Albert opened the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park.
2. Enormous expansion/influence throughout the globe.
3. Annual export of goods nearly trebled in value between 1850 and 1870.
4. 1876 – Queen Victoria named empress of India
5. QV claims: imperial mission “to protect the poor natives and advance civilization.”
6. Missionary societies flourished, spreading Christianity in India, Asia, Africa.
7. Increasing debate about religious beliefs
8. Science – impact of scientific discoveries seemed consistently damaging to established
faiths – “scientific” reading of Bible as “mere text of history”
9. Geology – extended history of earth backward millions of years reduced the stature of
the human species in time.
10. Astrology – extended knowledge of stellar distances to dizzying expanses proved
disconcerting
11. Biology reduced humankind even further into “nothingness.”
12. Darwin The Origin of Species (1859) – theory of natural selection conflicted with concept
of creation and long-established assumptions of the values attached to humanity’s
special role in the world.
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13. Darwin The Descent of Man (1871) – raised more explicitly the haunting question of our
identification with the animal kingdom.
Mid-Victorian Period – writers reactions
1. Some Victorian writers, such as Dickens, continue to make critical attack on the
shortcomings of the Victorian social scene.
2. John Ruskin denounces evils of Victorian industry—predicts doom of technological
culture.
3. Anthony Trollope – realistic novels
Late Period (1870-1901): Decay of Victorian Values
For many, a time of serenity & security, the age of house parties and long weekends in the
country, exhilarating sense of London’s delights, proliferation of commodities, inventions,
products apex of imperialism
But cost of the empire became increasingly apparent . . .
1. Rebellions, massacres, bundled wars
2. Indian mutiny 1865
3. Massacre of General Gordon and troops in Khartoum in 1885
4. Boer War – long bloody, unpopular struggle in south of Africa
5. “Irish Question”
6. Emergence of Bismarck's Germany confronted England with powerful threats to naval
and military position.
7. Recovery of United States after Civil War provided new and serious competition.
8. Expansion of U.S. and Canada produced grain-rich prairies – threat to English farmer.
Literature of the Period
1. Overall change of attitudes
2. Attacked major mid-Victorian idols
3. Satirized family life, particularly the self-righteousness of Victorian father
4. No answers to our problems – enjoy “fleeting moments of beauty”
5. Nineties
6. Studied languor, weary sophistication, search for new ways of titillating jaded palates.
From Dickens to Wilde
1. In Dickens’ David Copperfield (1830): Hero affirms, “I have always been thoroughly in
earnest.
2. Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest turns this typical mid-Victorian word “earnest”
into a pun, a key joke in his comic spectacle of Victorian values being turned upside
down.
The Role of Women
1. Reforms of the period did not extend to women.
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2.
3.
4.
5.
Could not vote.
Could not hold political office
Married women could not own or handle their own property.
Men could divorce their wives for adultery, but wives could divorce their husbands only
if adultery were combined with cruelty, bigamy, incest, or bestiality.
6. Educational and employment opportunities limited.
Literacy, Publication, and Reading
1. Literacy increased significantly – compulsory national education.
2. Explosion of things to read
3. Technological changes in printing—pressed powered by steam, paper made from wood
pulp, typesetting machines. The number of newspapers, periodicals, and books
increased dramatically.
Growth of Popular Press
1. Growth of periodical
2. 170 new periodicals in London alone
3. Magazines for every taste
4. Novels and long works of nonfiction prose were published in serial form.
5. The age of the “essay”
6. Readers shared the expectation that literature would not only delight but instruct, that
it would be continuous with the lived world, and that it would illuminate social
problems.
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