Victorian literature
[3] Famous novelists from this period include Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, the three Brontë sisters, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), Thomas Hardy, and Rudyard Kipling.
[4][5] This awareness inspired the subject matter of other authors, like poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning and novelists Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy.
While at the beginning of the 19th century most novels were published in three volumes, monthly serialization was revived with the publication of Charles Dickens' Pickwick Papers in twenty parts between April 1836 and November 1837.
[11] Dickens worked diligently and prolifically to produce the entertaining writing that the public wanted, but also to offer commentary on social problems and the plight of the poor and oppressed.
His most important works include Oliver Twist (1837–1839), Nicholas Nickleby (1838–1839), A Christmas Carol (1843), Dombey and Son (1846–1848), David Copperfield (1849–1850), Bleak House (1852–1853), Little Dorrit (1855–1857), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and Great Expectations (1860–1861).
With a similar style but a slightly more detached, acerbic and barbed satirical view of his characters, he also tended to depict a more middle-class society than Dickens did.
Wuthering Heights (1847), Emily's only work, is an example of Gothic Romanticism from a woman's point of view, which examines class, myth, and gender.
[12] Elizabeth Gaskell produced notable works during this period, including Mary Barton (1848), Cranford (1851–1853), North and South (1854–1855), and Wives and Daughters (1864–1866).
George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) also produced major works during this period, most notably Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1871–1872), and Daniel Deronda (1876).
Later in this period, Thomas Hardy's best-known novels are Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895).
Renowned for his cynical yet idyllic portrayal of pastoral life in the English countryside, Hardy's work pushed back against widespread urbanization that came to symbolize the Victorian age.
It was not until the last decades of the 19th century that any significant theatrical works were produced, beginning with Gilbert and Sullivan's comic operas of the 1870s, George Bernard Shaw's (1856–1950) plays of the 1890s, and Oscar Wilde's (1854–1900) The Importance of Being Earnest.
Victorians loved chivalrous stories of knights of old; they hoped to regain some of that courtly behavior for readers at home and in the wider empire.
Wilde's 1895 comic masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest, was the greatest of the plays in which he held an ironic mirror to the aristocracy while displaying virtuosic mastery of wit and paradoxical wisdom.
Writers like Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland), Anna Sewell (Black Beauty), and R. M. Ballantyne (The Coral Island) wrote mainly for children, although they had an adult following.
Other authors such as Robert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island) and Anthony Hope (The Prisoner of Zenda) wrote mainly for adults, but their adventure novels are now generally classified as for children.
Rarely were these publications designed to capture a child’s pleasure; however, with the increase in the use of illustrations, children began to enjoy literature and were able to learn morals in a more entertaining way.
The writings of Thomas Babington Macaulay on English history helped codify the Whig narrative that dominated the historiography for many years.
In the United States, Henry David Thoreau's works and Susan Fenimore Cooper's Rural Hours (1850) were canonical influences on Victorian nature writing.
In the UK, Philip Gosse and Sarah Bowdich Lee were two of the most popular nature writers in the early part of the Victorian era.
