Essay On Victorian Literature

As mentioned before, Victorian literature is the literature produced during the so-called British Victorian era; an era that, although commonly used to refer to the period of Queen Victoria 's reign between 1837 and 1901, is in fact said to begin with the passage of the Reform Act and death of Sir Walter Scott in 1832 and go up to 1914, as far as English literature is concerned. The era was preceded by the Regency era and succeeded by the Edwardian period, roughly coinciding the latter half of the period with the first portion of the Belle Époque era of continental Europe and other non-English speaking countries. In literary terms, the period is considered a link between the romantic period and the very different literature of the 20th century.

But this kind of economic success was not to last long. In the early 1840s, a severe depression, with widespread unemployment, led to rioting. Even without the provocation of unemployment, conditions in the new industrial area were terrible enough to create fears of revolution. Workers and their families in the suburbs lived in horribly crowed, unsanitary housing, and the conditions under which especially children and women worked in factories were unimaginably brutal. But the factories ' owners regarded themselves as innocent for such conditions, since they were linked to a sort of economic theory of laisse-faire which assumed that unregulated working conditions would ultimately benefit everyone. Indeed, it has been stated that it was not until the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace in London, 1851, that the industrial revolution reached the highest point of worldwide success.

For this horrible conditions and despite the initial period of prosperity, this first period of the Victorian era came to be referred to as "the period of troubles" and led way to significant political and social changes along the rest of the age.

Thus and it has just been noted, the economic changes of the age were clearly reflected in social organisation. While pre-industrial society was basically constituted by closed groups predestined by birth, Victorian society was a kind of class-society formed by groups particularly determined by