Victorian Age

In English literature, the period from 1832 to 1901 is known as the Victorian period. It is named after Queen Victoria who reigned the United Kingdom from 1837 to 1981.

The period is marked by the reformation bill, Charles Darwin’s evolution theory, Carl Marx’s concept of socialism, the industrial revolution, philosophical positivism, the conception of feminism, and the middle-class respectability. Disbelief, hypocrisy, affluence, prudery, and complacency characterized the age.

However, it was a period of prolific literary production. Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, E. B. Browning, and Matthew Arnold are the famous poets.

Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy are the greatest novelists, and Carlyle, Arnold, Huxley, J. S. Mill, Ruskin are the well-known essayists of this period.

Attitudes of compromise, moral earnestness, purity both religious and secular, didacticism, and social equity dominated the Victorian literature