Queen Victoria ruled Britain from 1837 to 1901 during a period known as the Victorian Age. Her long reign saw both progress, including industrialization and expanding trade, as well as conflicts as Britain sought to defend its vast global empire. Victorian society was characterized by morality, social reform, and optimism fueled by economic and technological advances. However, toward the end of the era, unease and doubts emerged as the limits of progress became apparent. Literature of the period reflected both the positivity of the early Victorian era as well as growing pessimism later on.

1. THE VICTORIAN AGE (1837-1901)
Queen Victoria and the Empire
Queen Victoria was only eighteen 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.
After the death of her uncle, William IV, the young Princess Victoria was awakened from a sound
sleep and brought downstairs in her dressing gown. Her diary for that day records that on the staircase
that morning she had felt quite prepared to be queen. She remained queen until her death sixty-four
years later at the age of eighty-two Her long reign was a period of progress and prosperity for the
nation.
Victoria's personal life was rich also She married her cousin Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (a
name that their successors would eventually change to the more British-sounding Windsor). Victoria
and Albert had a happy family life with four sons and five daughters, and they traveled often to visit
royal relatives on the Continent, especially in Germany. The queen's exemplary personal life, along
with her famous honesty, sense of morality, and propriety, won a new respect for the monarchy
The Victorian Age did contain conflict, inevitable in an empire that canned the globe, an empire upon
which the sun literally never set. A dispute between Upper and Lower Canada led to union between the
two and the beginning of self-government. In the Crimean War (1853-1856) Britain joined France in
an effort to prevent Russia from gaining a Mediterranean port. Mutiny in India in 1857 caused the
British government to take control of the entire Indian subcontinent from the East India Company,
which besides handling trade had always shared the responsibility of governing the colony. Britain was
also economically involved in the American Civil War because factories in northern England
depended upon raw cotton from the Confederate states.
British interests in China were threatened in 1900 by the Boxer Rebellion against foreign influence.
In addition, British troops were fighting in Africa to defend British possessions there. The Boer War, a
destructive war against Dutch settlers in South Africa, had begun in 1899. Its end, in 1902, marked the
end of British empire building, but by that time the Empress of India (as Parliament had dubbed Vic-
toria in 1877) had died.
Although she was a successful and well-loved monarch, Victoria's powers were only advisory, and
she was fortunate to have an array of distinguished ministers. Wellington, the hero who had defeated
Napoleon at Waterloo, was a statesman as well as a military leader. Sir
Robert Peel served the queen well in domestic affairs; he initiated the practice of unarmed police
officers, nicknamed bobbies after him. The British political scene was dominated, however, by the
dramatic rivalry between Liberal Party (Whig) leader W. E. Gladstone, a "Little Englander" opposed to
the expansion of the empire, and Conservative (Tory) Benjamin Disraeli. Disraeli was the queen's
favorite and prevailed. Later, however, the "Little England" philosophy would become an inevitable
reality because of world events in the years after Victoria's death.

2. Life in Victorian Times
Victoria's reign saw important developments in transportation, manufacturing, and commerce. The
queen herself became a patron of the growing railways when she took her first train trip in 1842 from
Windsor Castle, west of London, into the city. According to reports, the
queen's coachman insisted that duty called for him to drive the engine. Steamship lines also grew
during this period, facilitating trade with colonies and the United States. British commerce flourished
as raw materials were imported and manufactured goods were exported.
Newly powerful industrialists and merchants rapidly expanded the British middle class, a group
whose attitudes increasingly came to represent the age. Their values included hard work, strict
morality, social reform, and pragmatism. Progress inspired self-assurance and optimism. At the same
time, however, new ideas in government, science, and economics fostered curiosity, doubt, and
controversy.
One innovative and positive aspect of the Victorian Age was that many people, including the lower
classes, could share in the great events of the time. News, sent by train, steamship, and telegraph,
traveled faster than ever before, and there was good news to be shared. In spite or their lack of political
influence. their long working hours and inadequate wages, in spite of the danger of poor sanitary
conditions and disease (even the plague returned in 1849 and 1853), the working class enthusiastically
cheered reports of overseas victories and domestic advances. They flocked to London for the Great
Exhibition of 1851. This display of British industrial success was held in the Crystal Palace, a
construction of glass that continued to symbolize Britain's triumphs until destroyed by fire in 1936.
Although the lives of British workers remained difficult, major steps were taken to correct abuses
against the working class. Women and children no longer worked in coal mines and could not be
expected to work more than ten hours a day in factories. Workers in the textile industry were granted a
half-day holiday on Saturday.
Although diseases like the plague could still remind people of the limits of science, progress was
made in sanitation and medicine. Adequate sewers were becoming a reality, and people were using the
clean water now being piped into cities instead of contaminated wells and springs. The use of
anesthetics in hospital operating rooms became widespread; Victoria herself aided their acceptance
by agreeing to an anesthetic during the birth of her seventh child. During the plague in London, by-
standers were surprised to see an elegant, wealthy woman working as a nurse in the makeshift hospital
rooms that were set up on the city's streets. Horace Nightingale would later win fame in the same role
in hospital tents on the Crimean front.
Life in England, especially in London, changed in other ways. Parliament prohibited the use of
“climbing boys” to clean chimneys in 1840, more than ten years after William Blake’s death.

3. Debtors' prisons were abolished in 1869. The first underground railroad in London was completed
in 1884, and in the first year of the twentieth century, horses in the streets began to grow accustomed
to the few steam-driven cars that sped about the city at more than four miles an hour.
Poetry in the Victorian Age
The Romantic poets - Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, and Keats - were revolutionary poets.
They wrote when they were young and, except for Wordsworth, died young. William Wordsworth
(1770-1850) survived into the Victorian Age, turned away from rebellion, and became Queen
Victoria's poet laureate, the official poet writing verse custom-made for state occasions. When he died,
Wordsworth was succeeded as poet laureate by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, then in the midst of a long and
illustrious poetic career. Unlike the poetry of the Romantic Age, Tennyson's poems demonstrate the
conservatism, optimism, and self-assurance that marked the Victorian Age. The Brownings - Robert
Browning and his wife, Elizabeth Barren Browning - were not rebels either; they too were positive
poets for a positive time.
Other original poetic geniuses of the period include Matthew Arnold, who was also an educator and
essayist, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, who was also a scholar and priest. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a
poet and painter, was at the center of a group that called themselves the Pre-Raphaelites because they
sought to bring to their poetry the simplicity and directness notable in medieval Italian art before the
Renaissance painter Raphael came on the scene. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Victorian
optimism began to wane. Even Tennyson and Browning had acknowledged the darker side of life in
some of their best verses, but now A. E. Housman and Thomas Hardy added distinguished and
pessimistic poetry to the Victorian Age. Both at its patriotic height and during the end-of-century
reaction to mainstream optimism, the Victorian Age gave us memorable poetry by Rudyard Kipling
(1865-1936), Algernon Swinburne (1837-1909), and Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), writers who—like
Thomas Hardy—achieved fame for work in other genres as well.
Drama in the Victorian Age
Drama did not thrive during the Victorian Age. Although Tennyson and Browning tried to create
poetic dramas, the real theater celebrities of the age were actors—William Macready, Henry Irving,
and Ellen Terry— rather than playwrights. When the Victorians finally produced great drama, the age
was approaching its close. An accomplished critic, novelist, and poet, Oscar Wilde also wrote several
comic plays that satirize upper-class manners and morals. Lady Windermere's Fan (1892) and The
Importance of Being Earnest (189 5 )—considered by many to be a perfect comedy— still delight
audiences today. Arthur Wing Pinero (1855-1934) represents a movement toward the well-made play,
a play with carefully Grafted plot, characters, and setting; The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (1893) is an
example. For audiences of Victoria's day, the high point of theatrical enjoyment was a series of light

4. comic operas by William Gilbert (1836-1911) and Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900), including The Pirates
of Penzance (1880) and The Mikado (1885).
Prose in the Victorian Age
A highly imaginative and satirical masterpiece of the Victorian Age was written as a children's story.
Charles Dodgson, using the pen name Lewis Carroll (1832-1898), wrote Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland (1865) and its companion piece, Through the Looking Glass (1871), for the
entertainment of a friend's daughter. John Ruskin (1819-1900) achieved fame with books about art
such as Stones of Venice (1851-1853). The era also produced great historical works. Thomas
Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) was the most popular historian of his day; publication of his five-
volume History of England was completed after his death. The Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle
(1795-1881) wrote a major history of the French Revolution. In his philosophical work Carlyle decried
the materialism and lack of purpose of his day. Another philosopher, John Stuart Mill (1806-1873),
championed individual liberty and the power of reason. John Henry Newman (1801-1890) wrote a
series of essays intended to inspire religious reform, and Walter Pater (1839-1894) wrote
impressionistic essays on Romantic poets.
The Novel in the Victorian Age
During the reign of Queen Victoria, the English novel came of age suddenly, swiftly, and dramatically.
One innovation of Victorian novelists was Realism which presented a detailed portrait of life in
nineteenth-century England. The novel dominates the literary scene of the period; even Prime Minister
Benjamin Disraeli was a novelist. Many of the great novels of the day were also rousing popular
successes, making authors like Charles Dickens celebrated public figures. Some of these novels were
published in installments in weekly magazines. This style of presentation often affected the content of
the work, as popular novels were stretched out to prolong their success and unpopular works were
altered in attempts to win the public's affection.
Among the most popular and productive Victorian novelists is Charles Dickens, whose work
combined social criticism with comedy and sentiment to create a tone that the world identifies as
Victorian. Like Chaucer and Shakespeare before him, Dickens enjoyed inventing a vast array o
memorable characters in novels such as Oliver Twist (1837 - 1839), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and
Great Expectations (1860-1861). His heartfelt criticism helped to change British institutions that badly
needed reform, especially prisons and schools.
William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), like Dickens a journalist of humble
background, was a satirist of the morality, the hypocricies, and the manners of the English middle
class. Thackeray is best remembered today as the creator of Becky Sharp, heroine of Vanity Fair
(1847-1848). Becky is a schemer who prettily but cold-heartedly plots her way from poverty to social
success. Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), the third major midcentury novelist, set much of his fiction—
for example, Barchester Towers (1857)—against a background of Anglican Church life. By focusing

5. on British institutions, these three novelists dissected an age as well as entertained their readers and
commented on life itself.
George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880). Her novels include The Mill on the
Floss (1860), Silas Mamer (1861), and Middlemarch (1871-1872) Charlotte (1816-1855) and Emily
(1818-1848) Brontë made literary history while living in almost complete seclusion in a Yorkshire
village. From their pens came two particularly remarkable and well-loved novels, Charlotte's Jane
Eyre and Emily's Wuthering Heights, both published in 1847.
A fascination with history is revealed in novels like Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil (1845), Edward
George Bulwer-Lytton's Last Days of Pompeii (1834), Charles Reade's Cloister and the Hearth
(1861), and Charles Kingsley's Westward Ho! (1855). The Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson
(1850-1894) created a remarkable series of adventure novels with exotic, historical settings. Best
known are Treasure Island (1882), The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde (1886), and
Kidnapped (1886). Another famous storyteller was Rudyard Kipling, whose novels include Captains
Courageous (1897) and Kirn (1901). Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) wrote what may be the first widely
admired mystery novel, The Moonstone (1858). Toward the end of the era, two of the best-known
characters in literature came into being when Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) created his master
detective, Sherlock Holmes, and Bram Stoker (1847-1912) created Count Dracula.
The novels of Thomas Hardy are set in the lonely farm country of Wessex, and they slice
pessimistically through manners and social customs to touch on the nature of life itself. They include
Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), Return of the Native (1878), Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891),
and Jude the Obscure (1896). Samuel Butler (1835-1902) also satirized his own time; his novel The
Way of All Flesh (1903) was such a strong attack on Butler's own Victorian family that it was not
published until after his death.
In an age when literature was a major form of popular entertainment, British novelists provided a
remarkably diverse body of work that appealed to a mass audience. Today many of these novels are
still read and enjoyed, and they also provide us with much of our knowledge of life and thought during
the age of Queen Victoria.