Victorian Period Years: 1832-1900 Historical Context:

1. Victorian PeriodYears: 1832-1900Historical Context: • Paper becomes cheap; magazines and novels cheap to mass produce • Unprecedented growth of industry and business in Britain • Unparalleled dominance of nations, economics and trade abroad

2. Victorian PeriodYears: 1832-1900Effect: • Literature begins to reach the masses

3. Victorian PeriodYears: 1832-1900Content of Literature • Conflict between those in power and the common masses or laborers and the poor • Shocking life of sweatshops and urban poor is highlighted in literature to insist on reform

4. Victorian PeriodYears: 1832-1900 Content of Literature • Country versus city life • Sexual discretion (or lack of it) • Strained coincidences

5. Victorian PeriodYears: 1832-1900 Content of Literature • Romantic triangles • Heroines in physical danger • Aristocratic villains • Misdirected letters • Bigamous marriages

6. Victorian PeriodYears: 1832-1900 Genres/Syles: • Detective novels • Sherlock Holmes • novels becomes popular for first time, mass produced for the first time • Bildungsroman: “coming of age” • a type of novel concerned with the education, development, and maturing of a young protagonist. • Political novels • Serialized novels (A Tale of Two Cities)

7. Victorian PeriodYears: 1832-1900 Genres/Syles: • Elegies a mournful, melancholy, or plaintive poem, especially a funeral song or a lament for the dead. • Poetry: easier to understand • Dramatic monologues • Drama: comedies of manners • Magazines offer stories to the masses

8. Victorian PeriodYears: 1832-1900Key Literature/Authors: • Charles Robert Darwin, 1809 –1882 • an English naturalist and geologist, best known for his contributions to evolutionary theory. • On the Origins of Species • in 1879 he wrote that "I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God. – I think that generally ... an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind."

9. Victorian PeriodYears: 1832-1900Key Literature/Authors • Alfred Lord Tennyson • 1809 –1892 • Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson, FRS was Poet Laureate of Great Britain and Ireland during much of Queen Victoria's reign and remains one of the most popular British poets.

10. Alfred Lord Tennyson • King Arthur story • “The Eagle” He clasps the crag with crooked hands; Close to the sun in lonely lands, Ring'd with the azure world, he stands. The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; He watches from his mountain walls, And like a thunderbolt he falls.

11. Victorian PeriodYears: 1832-1900Key Literature/Authors: • Robert Browning • 1812 –1889 • was an English poet and playwright whose mastery of dramatic verse, especially dramatic monologues, made him one of the foremost Victorian poets. Robert Browning • ''You called me, and I came home to your heart.''

12. Victorian PeriodYears: 1832-1900Key Literature/Authors: • Charles Dickens • 1812 – 1870 • Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's most memorable fictional characters and is generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian period.

13. Charles Dickens’ Novels • The Pickwick Papers – 1836Oliver Twist – 1837Nicholas Nickleby – 1838The Old Curiosity Shop – 1840Barnaby Rudge – 1841Martin Chuzzlewit – 1843 • Dombey and Son – 1846David Copperfield – 1849Bleak House – 1852Hard Times – 1854Little Dorrit – 1855A Tale of Two Cities – 1859Great Expectations – 1860Our Mutual Friend – 1864The Mystery of Edwin Drood – 1870

14. Victorian PeriodYears: 1832-1900Key Literature/Authors: • Charlotte Bronte (Diacritic) • 1816 - 1855 • Jane Eyre, Shirley, Agnes Grey • Charlotte Brontë was an English novelist and poet, the eldest of the three Brontë sisters who survived into adulthood and whose novels have become classics of English literature. • The deaths of the Brontë siblings are almost as notable as their literary legacy. Her brother, Branwell, and Emily (Wuthering Heights) died in 1848, and Anne died the following year.

15. Victorian PeriodYears: 1832-1900Key Literature/Authors: • Mary Ann Evans, known by her • pen name George Eliot,1819 –1880 was • an English novelist, journalist, translator • and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era • Novels • Adam Bede, 1859 • The Mill on the Floss, 1860 • Silas Marner, 1861 • Felix Holt, the Radical, 1866 • Middlemarch, 1871–72 • Daniel Deronda, 1876

16. Victorian PeriodYears: 1832-1900Key Literature/Authors: • Robert Louis Stevenson • 1850 - 1894 was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer • Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

17. Victorian PeriodYears: 1832-1900Key Literature/Authors: • Rudyard Kipling • 1865 -1936 was an English short-story writer, poet, and novelist • Jungle Book • “If” • If you can keep your head when all about you    •     Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,    • If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, •     But make allowance for their doubting too;    • If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, •     Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, • Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, •     And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise: