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
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
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.
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