Serialized between January 1864 and August 1865, Anthony Trollope’s first in his Palliser series, Can You Forgive Her? proved instantly popular. Based on reworked material from his failed comedy The Noble Jilt, its plot focuses on Victorian discontent with social… Read More ›
Sir Walter Scott based his novel The Bride of Lammermoor, second in his Tales of My Landlord series, on a true tragic love story about a Scottish family named Dalrymple, supported by fictional accounts, poetry, and popular ballad versions. He… Read More ›
Founded and published by William Blackwood, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine appeared monthly between April 1817 and December 1905. Edited in the beginning by James Pringle and Thomas Cleghorn, it was titled Blackwood’s Edinburgh Monthly for its first six issues. Blackwood assumed… Read More ›
Just as writers before her sought to expose abuses against the working class, Anna Sewell, in her enduring children’s novel Black Beauty, exposed abuses against animals. Although ostensibly written for children ages nine through twelve, adults also loved the book…. Read More ›
George Meredith’s 1876 novel, Beauchamp’s Career, appeared serially in The Fortnightly Review between August 1874 and December 1875, becoming notable for its keen insight into the politics of England at the century’s end. It features the life of a politician,… Read More ›
Barchester Towers was Anthony Trollope’s second in a group of novels, following The Warden (1855), later called the Barsetshire sequence. Published in 1857, it featured Trollope’s trademark interest in religion as politics. In his focus on who would receive the… Read More ›
Called by critics a confessional “novel in verse,” Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh represented a sustained cry for human intellectual and creative freedom, more specifically, for women’s independence. A Künstlerroman, or story of the maturation of a young writer, the… Read More ›
The last of George Meredith’s novels, The Amazing Marriage resembles his previous works in its defense of women against men’s errors. In his fiction and real life, Meredith declared man to be in need of woman, who could educate and… Read More ›
Charles Kingsley’s second novel, Alton Locke, guaranteed his fame as a writer about controversial topics. A clergyman, Kingsley regularly attacked social injustice and supported laborers’ rights. Like other socially conscious writers including George Gissing, Kingsley publicized inexcusable conditions in which… Read More ›
Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures Underground, later published as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, fascinated Victorian audiences from the moment of its appearance. Ostensibly classified as children’s literature, focusing on the initiation/coming-of-age of its protagonist, seven-year-old Alice, the book also caught the… Read More ›
Anne Brontë’s autobiographical novel about a young woman governess features themes of social injustice, class consciousness, education, and isolation. Brontë’s first-person narrative alerts readers in its opening sentence that, by presenting a “history,” it intends to instruct and will be… Read More ›
George Eliot’s first full-length novel, Adam Bede, testifies to her skill in crafting a narrative of domestic realism. Although published in 1859, the story looks back nostalgically to the end of the previous century before railroads and factories had transformed… Read More ›
“Victorian poetry” is a term that does not quite coincide with the reign of Queen Victoria—a reign that began with the death of her uncle, William IV, in 1837 and lasted until her own death some 63 years later on… Read More ›
When Mabel Loomis Todd published this poem in the 1890 Poems under the rubric of nature poems, she set a precedent that would be followed by editors for more than half a century. Todd may have seen it as a… Read More ›
In 1844, Elizabeth Barrett Browning wanted to write “a poem of a new class,” one that included “[conversations & events” and “philosophical dreaming & digression.”1 She also wanted to purify George Gordon Byron‘s sexually contentious poetry, to write “a Don Juan,… Read More ›
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