Victorian Period Years: 1832-1900 Historical Context: Paper becomes cheap; magazines and novels cheap to mass produce Unprecedented growth of industry

Victorian PeriodYears: 1832-1900

Historical Context:

Paper becomes cheap; magazines and novels cheap to mass produce

Unprecedented growth of industry and business in Britain

Unparalleled dominance of nations, economics and trade abroad


Effect:

Literature begins to reach the masses


Content of Literature

Conflict between those in power and the common masses or laborers and the poor

Shocking life of sweatshops and urban poor is highlighted in literature to insist on reform



Country versus city life

Sexual discretion (or lack of it)

Strained coincidences



Romantic triangles

Heroines in physical danger

Aristocratic villains

Misdirected letters

Bigamous marriages


Genres/Syles:

• Detective novels

• Sherlock Holmes • novels becomes popular for first time, mass

produced for the first time

• Bildungsroman: “coming of age”• a type of novel concerned with the education, d

evelopment, and maturing of a young protagonist.

• Political novels

• Serialized novels (A Tale of Two Cities)


Genres/Syles:

Elegies a mournful, melancholy, or plaintive poem, especially

a funeral song or a lament for the dead. Poetry: easier to understand

• Dramatic monologues

Drama: comedies of manners Magazines offer stories to the masses

Victorian PeriodYears: 1832-1900Key Literature/Authors:

Charles Robert Darwin, 1809 –1882 an English naturalist and geologist, best known for

his contributions to evolutionary theory. On the Origins of Species in 1879 he wrote that "I have never been an atheist

in the sense of denying the existence of a God. – I think that generally ... an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind."

Victorian PeriodYears: 1832-1900Key Literature/Authors

Alfred Lord Tennyson 1809 –1892 Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson,

FRS was Poet Laureate of Great Britain and Ireland during much of Queen Victoria's reign and remains one of the most popular British poets.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

King Arthur story “The Eagle”

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;

Close to the sun in lonely lands,

Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;

He watches from his mountain walls,

And like a thunderbolt he falls.


Robert Browning 1812 –1889 was an English poet and playwright whose

mastery of dramatic verse, especially dramatic monologues, made him one of the foremost Victorian poets. Robert Browning

''You called me, and I came home to your heart.''


Charles Dickens 1812 – 1870 Charles John Huffam Dickens was an

English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's most memorable fictional characters and is generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian period.

Charles Dickens’ Novels The Pickwick Papers – 1836

Oliver Twist – 1837Nicholas Nickleby – 1838The Old Curiosity Shop – 1840Barnaby Rudge – 1841Martin Chuzzlewit – 1843

Dombey and Son – 1846David Copperfield – 1849Bleak House – 1852Hard Times – 1854Little Dorrit – 1855A Tale of Two Cities – 1859Great Expectations – 1860Our Mutual Friend – 1864The Mystery of Edwin Drood – 1870


Charlotte Bronte (Diacritic) 1816 - 1855 Jane Eyre, Shirley, Agnes Grey Charlotte Brontë was an English novelist and

poet, the eldest of the three Brontë sisters who survived into adulthood and whose novels have become classics of English literature.

The deaths of the Brontë siblings are almost as notable as their literary legacy. Her brother, Branwell, and Emily (Wuthering Heights) died in 1848, and Anne died the following year.

Victorian PeriodYears: 1832-1900Key Literature/Authors: Mary Ann Evans, known by her pen name George Eliot, 1819 –1880 was an English novelist, journalist, translator and one of the leading writers of the Victorian

era Novels Adam Bede, 1859 The Mill on the Floss, 1860 Silas Marner, 1861 Felix Holt, the Radical, 1866 Middlemarch, 1871–72 Daniel Deronda, 1876


Robert Louis Stevenson 1850 - 1894 was a Scottish novelist,

poet, essayist, and travel writer Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and

Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.


Rudyard Kipling • 1865 -1936 was an English short-story writer, poet, and novelist Jungle Book“If”If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

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Victorian Period Years: 1832-1900 Historical Context: Paper becomes cheap; magazines and novels cheap to mass produce Unprecedented growth of industry