Thackeray, Gaskell, and others
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated
background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published as serials in
Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of
publication in monthly parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad
narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an
ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the
Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair
was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more
sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains.
Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the
1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the
economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels
about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis
(1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of
provincial life.
Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48, indeed, represent a
pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and
Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by
Kingsley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the first
time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression in prose fiction, rather
than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh Clough would concede that “the modern
novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than
simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë
sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented
the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many
of the poems in their first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell (1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that began to be
published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her
novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life
of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine’s
marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have
been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example,
the heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of
moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous marriage with her employer and
the death by fire of his mad first wife derive from the rather different tradition of the Gothic
novel. In Shirley (1849) Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as
Monday morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend this study of
the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and drama.
Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel,
Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an
extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of elemental passions and
the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that the age of the novel must also be an age
of realism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact
also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as
the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined
in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The
collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter.
The result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the
1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him
vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was
insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of
1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a
form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers
since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both
Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by
which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is the
form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined brilliant vignettes of
contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by
his new ambitions with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual lyrics. Eloquent,
vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute pathological study of individual grief and the
central Victorian statement of the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855)
assembles 27 lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on
patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it offers a somber vision
of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about
contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note
was the last thing aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The differences
between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of the period.
