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Victorian Literature

Victorian literature refers to works written during Queen Victoria's reign from 1837 to 1901. While poetry dominated the preceding Romantic period, the novel was the most popular genre during the Victorian era. Some key developments included Charles Dickens becoming the most famous Victorian novelist, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning's love affair expressed through poetry, and genres like farces and comic operas competing with Shakespeare in drama. Children's literature also grew as an industry as education became more widespread.

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Victorian Literature

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Victorian literature

is literature, mainly written in English, during the

reign of Queen Victoria (1837–1901)
(the Victorian era). ... While in the preceding
Romantic period, poetry had been the dominant
genre, it was the novel that was
most important in the Victorian period.
Prose Fiction
• Charles Dickens is the most famous Victorian
novelist. Extraordinarily popular in his day with
his characters taking on a life of their own
beyond the page; Dickens is still one of the most
popular and read authors of the world. His first
novel, The Pickwick Papers (1836–37) written
when he was twenty-five, was an overnight
success, and all his subsequent works sold
extremely well.
Poetry
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning conducted
their love affair through verse and produced many tender
and passionate poems. Both Matthew Arnold and Gerard
Manley Hopkins wrote poems which sit somewhere in
between the exultation of nature of the romantic Poetry and
the Georgian Poetry of the early 20th century. However
Hopkins's poetry was not published until 1918. Arnold's
works anticipate some of the themes of these later poets,
while Hopkins drew inspiration from verse forms of Old
English poetry such as Beowulf.
Drama
• In drama, farces, musical
burlesques, extravaganzas and comic operas competed
with Shakespeare productions and serious drama by the likes
of James Planché and Thomas William Robertson. In 1855,
the German Reed Entertainments began a process of
elevating the level of (formerly risqué) musical theatre in
Britain that culminated in the famous series of comic operas
by Gilbert and Sullivan and were followed by the 1890s with
the first Edwardian musical comedies.
Children’s literature
• The Victorians are credited with 'inventing childhood',
partly via their efforts to stop child labour and the
introduction of compulsory education. As children
began to be able to read, literature for young people
became a growth industry, with not only established
writers producing works for children (such as
Dickens' A Child's History of England) but also a new
group of dedicated children's authors.
Science, philosophy and discovery
• The Victorian era was an important time for the
development of science and the Victorians had a
mission to describe and classify the entire natural
world. Much of this writing does not rise to the level
of being regarded as literature but one book in
particular, Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species,
remains famous. The theory of evolution contained
within the work challenged many of the ideas the
Victorians had about themselves and their place in the
world.