Victorian Literature: Major Themes and Authors

Victoria reigned from 1837 to 1901, and the literature of those sixty-four years carries the whole argument of a society changing faster than it could explain itself to itself. For the NET paper it is unavoidable: the period supplies novelists, poets, critical terms and chronology questions in almost every cycle. This guide covers what is examined, in the order that makes it stick.

The three phases, and why the division matters

Examiners think in phases, and so should you. A question that seems to be about a novel is often really about which decade produced it.

Three dates anchor the whole period. 1847, the miracle year, gave us Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Vanity Fair within months of each other. 1859 brought Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, after which nothing in Victorian thought was quite settled again. 1895 brought the Wilde trials, which closed the aesthetic movement and, in a sense, the century.

The novel and how it was made

Victorian novels were published in monthly or weekly parts before they were books, and that fact shapes everything about them. Serialisation put fiction within reach of working readers at a few pence an instalment. It also forced episodic structure, regular climaxes, sprawling casts and plots that could respond to their own reception while still being written.

This is why Victorian novels look the way they do, and it is examined directly.

The Condition of England novel is the period’s characteristic form: fiction taking on social crisis directly, hoping to reform by moving readers. Dickens’s Hard Times, Gaskell’s North and South and Mary Barton, Disraeli’s Sybil, Kingsley’s Alton Locke. Carlyle supplied the phrase and much of the diagnosis, including the cash nexus — his term for a society where money is the only bond left between people.

The five themes that generate questions

Industrialisation and its costs

England became an industrial nation within living memory, and the literature registers the shock. Dickens satirises the system but keeps faith in individual goodness. Gaskell, who lived in Manchester and knew both sides, gives masters and workers a hearing.

Three terms recur in questions: utilitarianism, Bentham’s calculus of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, which Dickens attacks through Gradgrind; the cash nexus; and Condition of England itself.

Watch the symbols. The factory stands for the machine against the human; the city for opportunity and corruption together; the railway for connection and destruction in the same image.

The Woman Question

Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House (1854) gave the age its ideal of womanhood — pure, self-effacing, domestic. Victorian women writers spent fifty years dismantling it.

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane refuses to be a bird in a net and refuses Rochester until she can meet him as an equal. Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) is the more radical book, arguing that a woman may leave a husband who is destroying her — a position with no legal standing at the time. George Eliot’s Dorothea has a first-rate mind and nowhere to put it.

By the 1890s the New Woman had arrived: educated, working, sexually candid. Hardy’s Sue Bridehead is the figure most often named in questions; Gissing’s The Odd Women is the other standard reference.

Know the legislation, because chronology questions use it. The Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882; Queen’s College founded 1848; Girton 1869.

Science against faith

Darwin did not simply challenge Genesis. He unsettled the assumption that human beings occupied a special place in creation, and Victorian writing spent forty years absorbing the blow.

Tennyson’s In Memoriam was written before Origin but anticipates its bleakness — nature red in tooth and claw belongs to Tennyson, not Darwin, a distinction worth remembering. Arnold’s response was to propose culture as a replacement for religion. Hardy’s was to treat natural selection as a form of tragic fate.

Four terms: Higher Criticism, the scholarly analysis of biblical texts as historical documents; natural theology, the older argument for God from design in nature; agnosticism, a word Huxley coined in 1869; and secularisation.

The Oxford Movement (1833–41) ran the other way — Newman, Keble and Pusey seeking to recover Catholic tradition within Anglicanism. Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua is the text most likely to be named.

Empire

Victorian literature both celebrated the empire and grew uneasy about it, often on the same page. Questions tend to test whether you can see the second thing.

The civilising mission supplied the justification. Adventure fiction supplied the romance. But imperial anxiety runs underneath — fear of colonial revenge, doubt about moral authority, the sense that what was sent out might come back. That anxiety produces the imperial gothic: Collins’s The Moonstone, Stoker’s Dracula, Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four.

Two dates recur: the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869.

The empire also appears where you might not look for it. Bertha Mason arrives in Jane Eyre from the Caribbean, carrying the colonial wealth that made Rochester’s household possible — a reading Jean Rhys made unavoidable when she wrote Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966.

Aestheticism and decadence

Against all this moral earnestness came the counter-movement. Walter Pater’s conclusion to The Renaissance (1873) told a generation to burn with a hard, gem-like flame; Wilde turned the idea into a public style. Art for art’s sake — the phrase is Gautier’s, imported — rejects the notion that art must instruct.

The decadent strain that followed preferred artifice to nature and sensation to sentiment: Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Beardsley’s drawings, the Yellow Book. Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites feed into the same current from the 1850s onward.

How the Victorian period sits between Romanticism and Modernism →

The authors, and what each is asked about

Charles Dickens (1812–70)

The central figure of the age, and the one who appears most often in the paper.

Oliver Twist (1838) put the workhouse and the criminal underworld into respectable fiction. David Copperfield (1850) is his bildungsroman, drawing on his own childhood in the blacking factory. Hard Times (1854) is the industrial novel — Coketown, Gradgrind’s facts, Bounderby’s self-mythology, Stephen Blackpool’s decency, and the circus standing for everything a utilitarian education destroys. Great Expectations (1861) is the most tightly made: Pip’s three stages, Miss Havisham stopped at twenty to nine, Magwitch as the benefactor whose money is honest and whose origin is unbearable.

For matching questions, know the minor names. Mrs Gamp belongs to Martin Chuzzlewit, Uriah Heep and Micawber to David Copperfield, Bumble to Oliver Twist, Lady Dedlock and Jarndyce to Bleak House.

The Brontës

Charlotte‘s Jane Eyre (1847) fuses bildungsroman, gothic romance and social realism. Its examinable elements: the governess figure, the madwoman in the attic, the doubling of Jane and Bertha, and its status as a feminist bildungsroman.

Emily‘s Wuthering Heights (1847) is the formal experiment — Lockwood framing Nelly Dean framing the story, two generations, a chronology that has to be reconstructed. Heights against Grange, nature against culture, weather doing the work of emotion.

Anne‘s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) is the one candidates forget and examiners like. Diary inside letter inside novel, and a subject — alcoholism, marital abuse, a woman’s right to leave — that Victorian reviewers found coarse.

The pseudonyms are asked: Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, for Charlotte, Emily and Anne respectively. The initials match.

George Eliot (1819–80)

Mary Ann Evans brought philosophy into the English novel. She translated Strauss and Feuerbach, lived openly with a married man, and wrote the most intellectually ambitious fiction of the century.

Middlemarch (1871–72), subtitled A Study of Provincial Life, is the summit of Victorian realism. Three plots — Dorothea and Casaubon, Lydgate and Rosamond, Fred Vincy and Mary Garth — held together by the web metaphor that gives the novel its theory of society: pull one thread and everything shifts.

Also examined: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Daniel Deronda (1876).

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)

Hardy’s characters are defeated by forces larger than themselves — heredity, chance, social law, the indifference of things. He set his fiction in Wessex, a half-invented south-western England, and he wrote its passing.

Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) carries the subtitle that caused the scandal: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented. Calling Tess pure after her seduction was a direct assault on the sexual double standard. Jude the Obscure (1895) attacks the class barriers around education and the marriage law, and the reception was hostile enough that Hardy gave up fiction for poetry.

Also: Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), The Return of the Native (1878).

Alfred Tennyson (1809–92)

Poet Laureate from 1850 until his death, and the voice the age recognised as its own.

In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850) mourns Arthur Hallam across 131 lyrics in abab quatrains, written over seventeen years. It is an elegy that cannot rest in consolation, and its examinable material is the argument between grief, doubt and evolutionary time.

Ulysses (1842) is a dramatic monologue given to an ageing hero who will not stop. The Lady of Shalott (1832, revised 1842) sets art against life through the woman who weaves what she can only see in a mirror. The Charge of the Light Brigade (1854) came from his laureateship and the Crimean War.

Robert Browning (1812–89)

Browning perfected the dramatic monologue, and it is the period’s most important formal contribution to poetry.

The form needs four things: a speaker who is not the poet, a silent listener whose presence shapes what is said, a specific dramatic occasion, and a speaker who reveals more than he intends.

My Last Duchess (1842) is the model. A duke shows a portrait to the envoy negotiating his next marriage, and in the course of being charming discloses that he had his wife killed for smiling too readily. Porphyria’s Lover (1836) gives us a murderer explaining himself with perfect calm and no authorial comment at all. Fra Lippo Lippi and Andrea del Sarto both use Renaissance painters to argue about art.

Matthew Arnold (1822–88)

Poet first, then the most influential critic of the century.

Dover Beach (1867) is the poem of Victorian doubt: the Sea of Faith withdrawing down the shingle, and two people on a darkling plain with nothing left but each other. Culture and Anarchy (1869) proposes culture — the best that has been thought and said — as the thing that might hold a society together once religion cannot. The Study of Poetry (1880) gives us the touchstone method.

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)

The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), his only novel, puts aesthetic theory inside a gothic plot: the portrait ages and corrupts while Dorian does not. Lord Henry supplies the epigrams and the corruption; Basil Hallward supplies the conscience.

The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) is the comedy of manners at its most perfect, and it destroys Victorian earnestness by taking it literally.

Also examined

Elizabeth Barrett Browning — Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), Aurora Leigh (1856), a verse novel about a woman writer, and The Cry of the Children (1843) on child labour.

Christina Rossetti — Goblin Market (1862), which appears regularly and resists every reading offered to it.

Gerard Manley Hopkins — Jesuit, unpublished in his lifetime, inventor of sprung rhythm and inscape.

Elizabeth Gaskell — Mary Barton (1848), North and South (1855), Cranford (1853), and the first biography of Charlotte Brontë.

Thomas Carlyle — Signs of the Times (1829), The French Revolution (1837), Chartism (1839), On Heroes and Hero-Worship (1841). Chronology questions use him, as you will see below.

Anthony Trollope — the Barsetshire and Palliser sequences.

R.L. Stevenson — Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), the definitive Victorian double.

Terms you are expected to know

The wider set of literary terms the paper assumes →

How it has actually been asked

Every question below comes from the papers published on this site, with the official numbering. Attempt each before opening the answer.

Question patterns and how to handle them

Author and work matching. The commonest form, and increasingly it uses minor characters rather than protagonists. Anyone can pair Heathcliff with Wuthering Heights. Mrs Gamp with Martin Chuzzlewit separates the field.

Chronological arrangement. Fix the two ends first, as in the Carlyle question above. You rarely need all five dates — the outer two usually eliminate three options.

Assertion and reason. Test the two statements separately before considering whether one explains the other. Most candidates who lose these marks accepted a true assertion together with a false reason.

Genre and form identification. Know the defining features, not just the examples. A dramatic monologue needs a speaker who is not the poet, a silent auditor and unintended self-revelation. Without all three it is a lyric.

Line identification. Famous openings and closings recur. Reader, I married him closes Jane Eyre. It was the best of times opens A Tale of Two Cities. To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield ends Ulysses.

Where candidates lose marks

Confusing the Brontë novels and pseudonyms. Currer is Charlotte, Ellis is Emily, Acton is Anne. Same initial as the real first name, every time.

Placing Middlemarch and The Mill on the Floss wrongly. Both Eliot, eleven years apart, and the titles blur under pressure. Mill 1860, Middlemarch 1871–72.

Treating Tennyson and Browning as interchangeable. Both wrote dramatic monologues, but the form is Browning’s achievement. If a question asks who is most associated with it, the answer is Browning even though Ulysses exists.

Reading Victorian novels as simply pro-empire or anti-empire. They are usually both, uneasily. So are the good answers.

Overlooking the women writers. Anne Brontë, Gaskell, Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning all appear in the paper, and all are under-revised.

Reading Victorian texts through theory

Unit IX questions sometimes ask you to bring a critical approach to a nineteenth-century text. Three combinations come up most.

Marxist. The industrial novels are the obvious case, but marriage plots are equally productive — they show economic relations wearing the costume of romance. Alienation in Hard Times, class barriers to education in Jude, inherited money in Great Expectations.

Feminist. The arc from the Angel in the House to the New Woman is itself an argument, and it can be traced decade by decade. Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) takes its title and its central case from Jane Eyre.

Postcolonial. Look for where colonial wealth enters a domestic plot without explanation. Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre, Magwitch’s Australian fortune in Great Expectations, the diamond in The Moonstone.

Marxist criticism: the concepts these readings depend on →

Chronology to memorise

How to revise this period

Do not try to read the novels. There are too many and they are too long, and an aspirant who spends three weeks on Middlemarch has spent three weeks on one of ten authors.

Read one book properly — Hard Times is short and does more work per page than anything else here — and know the rest through their plots, characters, themes and dates. Then read the poetry, all of it, because the poems are short and the paper quotes them.

Build the chronology table above from memory until you can reproduce it. More marks turn on dates than on interpretation.

Common questions