1. THE VICTORIAN AGE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE (1837-1901)

2. The Victorian Age: General Characteristics
Queen Victoria was only 18 when she ascended the throne, and she ruled not only the world’s most powerful nation but also an empire extending to Canada, Australia, India and parts of Africa. She remained Queen until her death 64 years later at the age of 82. Her long reign was a period of progress and prosperity for the nation.
This era was characterized by various social, political, religious, technological and scientific developments, all of which had an impact on the English literature of the time. Victorian Age saw a remarkable boost of literature.

3. Literary trends:
Critical Realism - a literary trend characterized by truthful description of life and criticism of its social and economic aspects
Naturalism - an extreme form of realism in which the author shows the relation of a person to the environment and surroundings.

4. Literary trends (cont’d):
Pre-Raphaelites – Victorian poets who aspired to the simplicity and directness in poetry similar to that of medieval Italian art and existing before the Renaissance painter Rafael came on the scene. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a poet and painter, was at the center of the group.

5. Literary trends (cont’d):
Chartist literature aroused from the revolutionary movement of the English workers, which lasted till Chartist movement marked the emergence of working class literary voice. The Chartists used the motives of folk poetry and dealt with the burning problems of life: the struggle of the workers for their rights, the ruthless exploitation, and the miserable fate of the poor.

6. Notable Victorian Poets
Alfred Tennyson
Matthew Arnold
Gerald Manley Hopkins
Robert Browning
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

7. Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) most eminent of the Victorian poets
poems demonstrate conservatism, optimism, and self-assurance
poetry collections:
Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830)
The Idylls of the King

8. Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems
poetry collections:
The Strayed Reveller and
Other Poems
Empedocles on Etna
and Other Poems
literary criticism
Essays on Criticism
On Translating Homer
Literature and Dogma

9. Gerald Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)
religious poems; their musical patterns are often elaborated
God’s Grandeur
The Windhover: To
Christ Our Lord
The Habit of Perfection
Back to Beauty’s Giver

10. Robert Browning (1812-1889) Bells and Pomegranates (1841-1846),
a series of poems and dramas entitled
Bells and Pomegranates ( ),
notable for short dramatic
monologues in which characters
reveal themselves in informal
offhand remarks
- collection of dramatic monologues:
The Ring and The Book (1869)

11. Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)
poems and sonnets:
volume Poems
Sonnets from the
Portuguese
verse novel:
Aurora Leigh

12. Notable Victorian Novelists:
Charles Dickens
William Makepeace Thackeray
George Eliot
Robert Louis Stevenson
Charlotte Bronte
Wilkie Collins
Thomas Hardy

13. Charles Dickens (1812-1870) - one the greatest Victorian novelists
- authored 15 novels, e.g.:
Posthumous Papers of the
Pickwick Club
Oliver Twist
Nicholas Nickleby
David Copperfield
Great Expectations
Bleak House

14. William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863)
- the greatest representative of critical realism in English literature
novels:
Vanity Fair
The Book of Snobs
The Newcomers
Henry Edmond
The Virginians

15. George Eliot (1819-1880) Middlemarch The Mill on the Floss
real name - Mary Ann Evans
novels:
Middlemarch
The Mill on the Floss
Silas Marner
Felix Holt
Daniel Deronda

16. Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)
- novelist, poet, essayist
created a remarkable series of adventure prose with exotic historical settings, e.g.:
Treasure Island
The Strange Case
of Doctor Jekyll
and Mister Hide
The Black Arrow
Kidnapped

17. Charlotte Brontë (1816-1864) Emily Brontë (1818-1848)
- novels by Ch. Brontë:
Jane Eyre
Shirley
Villette
Professor
novel by E. Brontë:
Wuthering Heights

18. Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) novels: Antonina Basil Hide and Seek
The Woman in White
The Moonstone
*mystery novel - a type of fiction in which a mysterious secret/fact is revealed by a detective or some other character (predecessor of ‘detective story’)

19. Thomas Hardy (1840-1929) Wessex Poems and Other Verses
poetry collections:
Wessex Poems and Other Verses
Moments of Vision
naturalistic novels:
Jude the Obscure
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Tess of the D’Urbervilles

20. Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) - prose: The Happy Prince and Other Tales
The Picture of Dorian
Gray (novel)
comedies:
Lady Windermere’s Fan
An Ideal Husband
The Importance of Being Earnest