The Victorian Era

Victorian Literature, Theatre, and the Written Word

Complete guide · Literature & Theatre · The Victorian Era, 1837–1901

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Victorian Britain produced one of the largest, most diverse, and most influential bodies of literature in the language. The period saw the novel rise to a cultural authority that no earlier form of English fiction had possessed; saw poetry move from the late Romantic manner of the early reign through the Pre-Raphaelite, the dramatic monologue, and the Aesthetic to the symbolist and decadent modes of the 1890s; saw the stage pass from a disreputable entertainment to a respectable mass medium and the theatre become a recognisable public institution; saw the rise of the mass-market periodical press, the mass-market newspaper, and the mass-market magazine; and saw the development of new literary forms — the sensation novel, the detective novel, the New Woman novel, the imperial romance, the children’s classic — that were among the most enduring creations of the period. The principal literary context of the era is set out in The Victorian Era: A Complete Historical Overview, and the social and political conditions of the readership are examined in Victorian Society, Class, and Daily Life.

The Novel

The novel was the dominant literary form of the Victorian period, and it is the form in which the period’s most celebrated names — Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës, Eliot, Trollope, Hardy — are still read. The history of the novel is examined in The Victorian Novel, but the principal figures and works may be summarised here.

Charles Dickens (1812-1870) published The Pickwick Papers (1836-37), Oliver Twist (1837-39), Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39), The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41), Barnaby Rudge (1841), Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44), A Christmas Carol (1843), Dombey and Son (1846-48), David Copperfield (1849-50), Bleak House (1852-53), Hard Times (1854), Little Dorrit (1855-57), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Great Expectations (1860-61), Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), and the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870). William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) published Vanity Fair (1847-48), Pendennis (1848-50), Henry Esmond (1852), and The Newcomes (1853-55). The Brontë sisters — Charlotte (1816-1855), Emily (1818-1848), and Anne (1820-1849) — published in 1847 Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Agnes Grey; Charlotte went on to write Shirley (1849) and Villette (1853), and Anne to write The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865) published Mary Barton (1848), Cranford (1851-53), North and South (1854-55), and the unfinished Wives and Daughters (1864-66). Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) published the Barsetshire novels — The Warden (1855), Barchester Towers (1857), Framley Parsonage (1861), The Small House at Alllington (1864), and The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867) — and the Palliser novels — Can You Forgive Her? (1864-65), Phineas Finn (1869), The Eustace Diamonds (1873), and Doctor Thorne (1858). George Eliot (1819-1880) published Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1871-72), and Daniel Deronda (1876). Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) published The Woman in White (1859-60), No Name (1862-63), Armadale (1864-66), and The Moonstone (1868). Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835-1915) published Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) and Aurora Floyd (1863). Mrs Henry Wood (1814-1887) published East Lynne (1861). Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) published Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895).

Poetry

Poetry was the second great literary form of the period. The principal Victorian poets were Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892), Poet Laureate from 1850; Robert Browning (1812-1889); Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861); Matthew Arnold (1822-1888); Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882); Christina Rossetti (1830-1894); Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909); William Morris (1834-1896); Edward FitzGerald (1809-1883), the translator of Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859); Thomas Hardy (1840-1928); and, on the threshold of the twentieth century, W. B. Yeats (1865-1939), A. E. Housman (1859-1936), and Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936). The full history of the poetry of the period is examined in Victorian Poetry, and the dramatic monologue, the form that Browning and Tennyson made canonical, is examined in What is a dramatic monologue?.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, founded in 1848, gave the period some of its most distinctive poetry, with the Rossettis, Morris, and Swinburne, and it is examined in Who was the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood?. The “Fleshly School” controversy of 1871, in which Robert Buchanan attacked the Pre-Raphaelite poetry of Rossetti, is examined in Victorian Poetry. The laureate’s career is examined in How did Tennyson become Poet Laureate?.

Drama

Drama was the third great literary form, and the only one in which a writer could count on reaching an audience of several thousand at a single sitting. The principal Victorian dramatists were Tom Robertson, T. W. Robertson, W. S. Gilbert, Arthur Wing Pinero, Oscar Wilde, J. M. Barrie, and W. B. Yeats, with the principal actor-managers being Henry Irving at the Lyceum, Herbert Beerbohm Tree at the Haymarket and Her Majesty’s, Squire and Marie Bancroft at the Haymarket, John Hare at the St James’s, Charles Wyndham at the Criterion, and Augustus Harris at Drury Lane. The wider history of the Victorian stage is examined in Victorian Theatre and Drama, the melodramatic tradition in What was Victorian melodrama?, and the principal actor-manager in Who was the most popular Victorian actor?.

Children’s Literature

The fourth great literary form was the children’s book, which, over the period, moved from the moral and religious tale of the 1840s to the imaginative fantasy and adventure story of the 1860s and after. The principal children’s authors were Charles Kingsley, Lewis Carroll, George MacDonald, Mrs Molesworth, E. Nesbit, Beatrix Potter, Kenneth Grahame, and J. M. Barrie, with their principal works including Kingsley’s The Water-Babies (1863), Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871), MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind (1871) and The Princess and the Goblin (1872), Molesworth’s The Cuckoo Clock (1877), Nesbit’s The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899), Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902), Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908), and Barrie’s The Little White Bird (1902), the play Peter Pan (1904), and Peter and Wendy (1911). The history of the children’s book of the period is examined in Children’s Literature in the Victorian Era; the question of the first Victorian children’s book in Who wrote the first Victorian children’s book?; and the history of Alice and Peter Pan in What is the history of Alice in Wonderland? and How did Peter Pan come to be written?.

Other Literary Forms

Outside the four main forms, the period saw a flowering of the essay (Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Thomas De Quincey, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde), of literary criticism (Matthew Arnold, Walter Bagehot, George Saintsbury), of history (Thomas Babington Macaulay, James Anthony Froude, Edward Augustus Freeman, J. R. Green, W. E. H. Lecky), of philosophy (John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, T. H. Green, Henry Sidgwick), of scientific writing (Charles Darwin, Thomas Henry Huxley, John Tyndall, Alfred Russel Wallace), of religious writing (John Henry Newman, Frederick Denison Maurice, Charles Kingsley, John Ruskin), of political writing (Carlyle, Mill, Bagehot, Ruskin, Matthew Arnold), and of biography (Thomas Moore, John Forster, Leslie Stephen, Sidney Lee). The period also saw the rise of the new fiction of detection (Collins, then later Conan Doyle), of imperial adventure (H. Rider Haggard, Kipling), of science fiction (H. G. Wells), and of the ghost story and the horror tale (M. R. James, Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson, Vernon Lee, Arthur Machen).

The Publication of Victorian Literature

The publication of Victorian literature was transformed by the parallel development of the periodical press, the circulating library, the railway bookstall, and the cheap reprint. The major quarterlies were the Edinburgh Review (1802-), the Quarterly Review (1809-), the Westminster Review (1823-), and Fraser’s Magazine (1830-82). The leading monthlies were the Cornhill Magazine (1860-), Macmillan’s Magazine (1859-), Temple Bar (1860-1906), Belgravia (1866-99), and The Nineteenth Century (1877-). The leading weeklies were the Athenaeum (1828-1923), the Saturday Review (1855-1938), the Spectator (1828-), the Pall Mall Gazette (1865-1923), the St James’s Gazette (1880-1905), and The Academy (1869-1916). The mass-circulation daily press was led by the Times (1785-), the Daily Telegraph (1855-), the Daily Mail (1896-), the Daily Express (1900-), and the Morning Post (1772-1937). The 1890s saw the rise of the literary magazine of art and ideas: the Yellow Book (1894-97), the New Review (1889-97), the Sketch (1893-), the Idler (1892-1911), and The Studio (1893-).

The circulation system was built on the circulating library and the railway bookstall. Mudie’s Select Library, founded by Charles Edward Mudie in 1842, was the principal circulating library, and W. H. Smith, which had set up the first railway bookstall in 1848, was the principal distributor of cheap reprints. The 1842 Copyright Act had settled the legal basis of English publishing, and the 1899 Copyright Act would extend the term. The principal publishers of the period were Macmillan (founded 1843), Longman (founded 1724), John Murray (founded 1768), Smith, Elder & Co. (founded 1816), Chapman and Hall (founded 1830), Chatto and Windus (founded 1855), Ward, Lock and Co. (founded 1854), Cassell (founded 1848), Blackwood (founded 1804), and George Routledge (founded 1836, the principal publisher of cheap reprints). The history of the serial publication of the novel is examined in How did serial publication shape Victorian fiction?.

The Movements of Victorian Literature

Victorian literature was shaped by the succession of the Romantic movement, the Realist movement, the Pre-Raphaelite movement, the Naturalist movement, the Aesthetic movement, the Decadent movement, and the Symbolist movement, with the broader intellectual context supplied by the Evangelical revival, the Oxford Movement, the scientific naturalism of Darwin, Huxley, and Tyndall, the positivism of Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill, the Utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill, the Idealism of T. H. Green and Bradley, and the pessimism of Schopenhauer and Hartmann. The Aesthetic and Decadent movements, associated with Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, John Gray, and the magazine The Savoy (1896), gave the 1890s some of their most distinctive work. The Irish literary revival of W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Douglas Hyde, the Scottish revival of Robert Louis Stevenson, J. M. Barrie, and Robert Bridges, and the rise of the regional novel in Hardy’s Wessex, in Gaskell’s Manchester, and in George Eliot’s Middle England, gave the late century its full range of voices.

The Legacy of Victorian Literature

The legacy of Victorian literature is one of the most durable in the language. The Dickens novel supplied the social criticism and the larger-than-life character; the George Eliot novel supplied the moral seriousness and the provincial realism; the Hardy novel supplied the tragic vision and the regional novel; the Trollope novel supplied the bareness of the political observer; the Brontë novel supplied the first-person intensity; the Tennyson poem supplied the elegiac and the public voice; the Browning poem supplied the dramatic and the psychological; the Pre-Raphaelite poem supplied the symbolic and the sensuous; the Wilde play supplied the epigram and the comedy of manners; the Pinero play supplied the well-made play and the problem play; the Carroll fantasy supplied the imaginative children’s book; the MacDonald fantasy supplied the Christian fantasy later taken up by C. S. Lewis and the Inklings; the Collins detective supplied the genre that Conan Doyle and then Christie were to inherit; the Stevenson adventure supplied the late-Victorian romance that Kipling, Haggard, and Buchan were to extend; the Wells science fiction supplied the form that the next century would develop; the Stoker horror supplied the modern vampire; the Pater aesthetic supplied the doctrine of “art for art’s sake” that the 1890s carried to its furthest point. The modern English novel, the modern English poem, the modern English play, the modern English essay, the modern English short story, the modern English detective story, the modern English adventure story, the modern English romance, the modern English ghost story, the modern English fantasy, and the modern English children’s book all draw on the inheritance of the Victorian era.