Victorian prose
If Victorian poets and novelists write extensively of love and personal relationships, there is also a large body of writings in which these subjects are relatively subordinate, writings categorized as nonfictional prose. The seven writers featured in our selections are Carlyle, Newman, Mill, Ruskin, Arnold, Huxley, and Pater.
Victorian drama and theater
If the Victorian age can lay claim to greatness for its poetry, its prose, and its novels, it would be difficult to make such a high claim for its plays, at least until the final decade of the century. As might be expected, the soaring popularity of Victorian stage performances lured some of the major writers of the age, such as Tennyson and Browning and Henry James, to try their hands at writing plays, but the results were disappointing. Successful plays on stage were written by lesser lights of literature.
THE VICTORIAN NOVEL
It will be obvious that any estimate of Victorian literature has to take into account the outstanding achievements of the Victorian novelists. From the time of Charles Dickens (1812-1870), early in the period (his first novel, Pickwick Papers, was published in the same year as Victoria became queen), to the final decade when the late novels of Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) such as Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) appeared, a long line of novelists continued to turn out monumental masterpieces that delighted their contemporaries and that continue to delight readers today.
After Dickens's epoch-making early novels had appeared on the scene in the 1830s, each subsequent decade featured the emergence of new novelists of stature such as Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855) and Emily Bronte (1818-1848) in the 1840s, and William Makepeace Thackeray (181 1-1863), whose prominence in the 1850s was a challenge to Dickens's continued preeminence and popularity. In the 1860s, Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) established himself as a portraitist of mid-Victorian society, and in the 1870s, George Eliot (1819-1880) published what is generally regarded as her finest novel, Middlemarch (1872), although she had already established her reputation earlier with Adam Bede (1859) and The Mill on the Floss (1860). In the 1880s, George Meredith (1828-1909)—a less well known novelist today—finally began to receive adequate attention from the critics and public for novels he had published earlier such as The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859). In addition to these major novelists from Dickens to Hardy, several noteworthy names may be cited of writers who contributed to the rich variety of the Victorian novel, such as Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865), Wilkie Collins (1824-1889), and George Gissing (1857-1903).
Alfred, lord tennyson
Alfred Tennyson was the greatest of the Victorian poets. On the bookshelves of almost every family of readers in England and the United States, from 1 850 onward, were the works of a man who had incontestably gained the title that Walt Whitman longed for: "The Poet of the People".
Alfred was the fourth son in a family of twelve children. He had even published a volume in 1 827, in collaboration with his brother Charles, Poems by Two Brothers. This feat drew him to the attention of a group of gifted undergraduates at Cambridge, the "Apostles," who encouraged him to devote his life to poetry. He was painfully shy, and the friendships he found at Cambridge as well as the intellectual and political discussions in which he participated served to give him confidence and to widen his horizons as a poet. The most important of these friendships was with Arthur Hallam, a leader of the Apostles, who later became engaged to Tennyson's sister. Hal lam's sudden death, in 1833, seemed an overwhelming calamity to his friend. Not only the long elegy In Memoriam but many of Tennyson's other poems are tributes to this early friendship.
Alfred's career at Cambridge was interrupted and finally broken off in 1831 by family dissensions and financial need, and he returned home to study and practice the craft of poetry. His early volumes (1830 and 1832) were attacked as "obscure" or "affected" by some of the reviewers. Tennyson suffered acutely under hostile criticism, but he also profited from it. His volume of 1842 demonstrated a remarkable advance in taste and technical excellence, and in 1850 he at last attained fame and full critical recognition with In Memoriam. In the same year, he became poet laureate in succession to Wordsworth. The struggle during the previous twenty years had been made especially painful by the long postponement of his marriage to Emily Sell wood, with whom he had fallen in love in 1836 but could not marry, because of poverty, until 1850.
His life thereafter was a comfortable one. He was popular. The earnings from his poetry (sometimes exceeding £10,000 a year) enabled him to purchase a house in the country and to enjoy the kind of seclusion he liked. His notoriety was enhanced. In 1884 he accepted a peerage. In 1892 he died and was buried in Westminster Abbey.