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Characteristics of Victorian Literature
Characteristics of Victorian Literature
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.
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.
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: The First Reform Bill
1837: Victoria becomes queen
1850: Tennyson succeeds Wordsworth as Poet Laureate
1851: The Great Exhibition in London
1859: Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species published
1870-71: Franco-Prussian War
1901: 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.
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.
13. Darwin The Descent of Man (1871) – raised more explicitly the haunting question of our
identification with the animal kingdom.
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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
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4. Married women could not own or handle their own property.
5. 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.