Section 6: Victorian Literature

6.1 Historical Context

The Victorian period spans the reign of Queen Victoria (1837–1901) — the longest reign in British history to that point. It was an age of extraordinary contradictions: unprecedented industrial prosperity alongside crushing urban poverty; imperial expansion alongside domestic social reform; religious faith alongside Darwinian doubt. These tensions produced some of the richest literature in the English language.

Key Features of Victorian Literature

• The dominance of the novel as the primary literary form
• Social realism — detailed depiction of contemporary life
• Moral seriousness and didacticism
• The "Woman Question" — debate about women's roles and rights
• Religious doubt vs. faith — the impact of Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859)
• Serialisation — most novels published in monthly or weekly instalments
• Expansion of the reading public through literacy reforms

6.2 Charles Dickens (1812–1870)

Dickens is the greatest Victorian novelist — a social reformer, entertainer, and moralist whose novels created an entire world of vividly realised characters. He serialised most of his works and gave hugely popular public readings.

6.3 William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863)

Thackeray was Dickens's great rival and contemporary. Where Dickens was sentimental and passionate, Thackeray was ironic and satirical. His masterpiece Vanity Fair (1847–48) — subtitled "A Novel without a Hero" — follows the social climbing of Becky Sharp and the passive goodness of Amelia Sedley through the Napoleonic Wars era. Thackeray's other major works include Pendennis (1848–50), The History of Henry Esmond (1852), and The Newcomes (1853–55).

6.4 The Brontë Sisters

The three Brontë sisters — Charlotte (1816–55), Emily (1818–48), and Anne (1820–49) — grew up in Haworth, Yorkshire, and published their first poems under male pseudonyms (Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, 1846).

6.5 George Eliot (1819–1880)

Mary Ann Evans, who wrote as George Eliot, is widely regarded as the greatest Victorian novelist — perhaps the greatest English novelist. She combined philosophical depth, psychological subtlety, and social breadth with extraordinary narrative intelligence. She lived with George Henry Lewes (who was married to another) — a scandalous arrangement that isolated her socially but gave her creative freedom.

6.6 Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)

Hardy straddled the Victorian and Modern periods — his novels belong to the Victorian age, his poetry to the 20th century. His "Wessex novels" are set in a fictional version of his native Dorset and chronicle the destruction of traditional rural life by modernity, indifferent fate, and social convention.

Hardy's Poetry

After the hostile reception to Jude the Obscure, Hardy abandoned fiction and wrote poetry for the rest of his life. His major collections include Wessex Poems (1898), Poems of 1912–13 (the "Emma poems" — elegies for his first wife), and Satires of Circumstance (1914). Key poems: "The Darkling Thrush," "Channel Firing," "Neutral Tones," "The Convergence of the Twain."

6.7 Victorian Poetry

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892)

Tennyson was Poet Laureate from 1850 to his death and the most popular poet of the age. His major works:

• In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850) — elegy for Arthur Hallam; 133 sections; faith vs doubt
• "The Lady of Shalott" (1832, revised 1842) — Arthurian; isolation and art
• "Ulysses" (1842) — dramatic monologue; "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield"
• "Tithonus" (1860) — dramatic monologue; immortality as curse
• Maud (1855) — monodrama; psychological study
• Idylls of the King (1859–85) — Arthurian cycle; decline of an ideal order
• "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (1854) — Crimean War; heroism and futility
• "Crossing the Bar" (1889) — last poem; death as voyage

Robert Browning (1812–1889)

Browning perfected the dramatic monologue — a poem spoken by a character (not the poet) to a silent listener, revealing character through speech. His major works:

• "My Last Duchess" (1842) — Duke of Ferrara reveals his murder of his wife
• "Fra Lippo Lippi" (1855) — the painter defends sensuous art
• "Andrea del Sarto" (1855) — the "faultless painter" laments his wasted talent
• "Bishop Blougram's Apology" (1855) — a bishop defends his comfortable faith
• The Ring and the Book (1868–69) — 12-book poem; Roman murder case; multiple perspectives
• "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" (1855) — quest poem; nightmare landscape

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)

EBB was one of the most celebrated poets of the age. Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) — 44 sonnets recording her love for Robert Browning — contains "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways." Aurora Leigh (1856) is a verse novel in blank verse — a feminist Bildungsroman about a woman poet.

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)

Arnold was poet and cultural critic. His major poems: "Dover Beach" (1867) — the "Sea of Faith" withdrawing, leaving the world "with neither joy, nor love, nor light"; "The Scholar-Gipsy" (1853); "Thyrsis" (1866) — elegy for Clough. His prose: Culture and Anarchy (1869) — Hellenism vs Hebraism; Essays in Criticism (1865, 1888) — defines criticism as "a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world."

6.8 Late Victorian Fiction: Hardy, Conrad, and Others

George Meredith (1828–1909)

The Egoist (1879) is Meredith's finest novel — a brilliant satirical study of male egotism (Sir Willoughby Patterne). His sequence of 50 sonnets Modern Love (1862) analyses the breakdown of a marriage with psychological acuity.

Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)

Trollope wrote prolifically about English institutional and social life. The Barsetshire Chronicles (6 novels, 1855–67) — including The Warden and Barchester Towers — centre on the Church of England. The Palliser novels (6 novels, 1864–80) deal with politics.

Wilkie Collins (1824–1889)

Collins pioneered the sensation novel and detective fiction. The Woman in White (1859–60) and The Moonstone (1868) — often called the first detective novel in English — are his masterpieces.

Lewis Carroll (1832–1898)

Charles Dodgson, writing as Lewis Carroll, created the greatest works of Victorian nonsense literature: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871). The poem "Jabberwocky" in the latter is the most celebrated nonsense poem in English.

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) — Aestheticism and Its Legacy

Wilde stands at the end of the Victorian period as its most brilliant and self-destructive critic. His aesthetic philosophy — "Art for Art's Sake," beauty as the supreme value — was the opposite of Victorian moral didacticism. His works span comedy (The Importance of Being Earnest, 1895; An Ideal Husband, 1895), the novel (The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1890), fairy tales, and the devastating prison letter De Profundis (written 1897, published 1905).