The Victorian Age2 Marks Questions with Answers · 15 MCQs · Chronology Drill

The novel displaced poetry as the dominant literary form: serialised publication in monthly parts and magazines created a mass readership, and the age produced Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës, George Eliot, Trollope and Hardy. The Victorian novel became the great instrument for examining society itself — industrialism, class, marriage, money and faith.

In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850) is Tennyson's elegy for his Cambridge friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died suddenly in 1833 — written in 131 sections over seventeen years. It uses the 'In Memoriam stanza' (iambic tetrameter rhyming ABBA) and contains the famous phrase 'Nature, red in tooth and claw'. In the same year, 1850, Tennyson succeeded Wordsworth as Poet Laureate.

A dramatic monologue is a poem spoken by a single imagined character to a silent listener at a critical moment, so that the speaker unintentionally reveals his own nature. Robert Browning perfected the form in My Last Duchess, Andrea del Sarto and Fra Lippo Lippi; Tennyson's Ulysses is the other canonical example.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) was founded in 1848 by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais (seven members in all), seeking the sincerity and detail of art before Raphael. In poetry the circle includes Christina Rossetti, William Morris and Swinburne. Robert Buchanan attacked them in 'The Fleshly School of Poetry' (1871), aimed chiefly at D. G. Rossetti.

The Oxford Movement (1833–1845) was a High Church revival within the Church of England, launched by John Keble's sermon 'National Apostasy' (1833) and carried by the Tracts for the Times — hence its members were called Tractarians: Keble, Pusey and John Henry Newman. Newman's conversion to Rome (1845) and his spiritual autobiography Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864) are its literary landmarks.

In 'The Study of Poetry' (1880), Matthew Arnold proposed judging new poetry by holding it against short 'touchstone' passages from the indisputably great masters — Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton. The method follows from his definition of poetry as 'a criticism of life'. His social criticism, Culture and Anarchy (1869), gave English the phrase 'sweetness and light' and the term 'Philistines'.

'Art for art's sake' is the creed of Aestheticism: art needs no moral or social justification beyond its own beauty. Its English manifesto is the Conclusion to Walter Pater's Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) — 'to burn always with this hard, gem-like flame' — and its flamboyant exemplar is Oscar Wilde. It is the direct rejection of Arnold's moral view of literature.

Mary Ann Evans adopted the male pseudonym George Eliot so her fiction would be judged seriously, free of the prejudice against 'lady novelists' and of scandal touching her private life. Her masterpiece Middlemarch (1871–72) was famously called by Virginia Woolf 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people'.

The Condition of England (social-problem or industrial) novel of the 1840s–50s dramatised the misery of the new industrial cities — the phrase is Thomas Carlyle's. Key examples: Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855), Disraeli's Sybil, or The Two Nations (1845), Kingsley's Alton Locke, and Dickens's Hard Times (1854), which is dedicated to Carlyle.

Wessex is the half-real, half-imagined region of south-west England (the name revived from the old Anglo-Saxon kingdom) in which Thomas Hardy set his major fiction, which he grouped as 'Novels of Character and Environment' — Far from the Madding Crowd, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d'Urbervilles. After the hostile reception of Jude the Obscure (1895), Hardy abandoned the novel and wrote only poetry.

Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë published as Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell — androgynous pseudonyms preserving their initials. After their joint Poems (1846) sold two copies, 1847 brought Jane Eyre (Charlotte), Wuthering Heights (Emily) and Agnes Grey (Anne) — the most famous single year in the history of the English novel.

The Angel in the House (1854–62) is Coventry Patmore's poem idealising his wife as the perfectly devoted, self-sacrificing Victorian woman; the phrase became shorthand for the era's domestic ideal of womanhood. Virginia Woolf later declared that the woman writer's first task was 'killing the Angel in the House'.

Darwin's theory of natural selection shattered confidence in a divinely ordered nature, deepening the Victorian crisis of faith already visible in Tennyson and Arnold ('Dover Beach', with its retreating 'Sea of Faith'). Exam trap: 'Nature, red in tooth and claw' is from In Memoriam (1850) and therefore predates Darwin by nine years — it anticipates, not answers, him.

In the single year 1859 appeared Darwin's On the Origin of Species, J. S. Mill's On Liberty, FitzGerald's Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, George Eliot's first novel Adam Bede, Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, and the first four of Tennyson's Idylls of the King — science, philosophy, poetry and fiction transformed in one year.

Carlyle, 'the Sage of Chelsea', was the age's prophet: Sartor Resartus (1833–34), the strange 'philosophy of clothes'; The French Revolution (1837), whose first manuscript was accidentally burned by J. S. Mill's maid and rewritten from scratch; and On Heroes and Hero-Worship (1841). He coined 'the Condition of England question', naming the social-problem novel's whole concern.

Ruskin began as the defender of Turner in Modern Painters (1843–60) and of Gothic architecture in The Stones of Venice (1851–53), then turned social prophet in Unto This Last (1860), attacking political economy — 'There is no wealth but Life.' Gandhi translated its ideas as Sarvodaya and called it the book that transformed his life: a guaranteed India-connection question.

The Idylls of the King (1859–1885) is Tennyson's twelve-book Arthurian epic in blank verse, tracing the rise and ruin of Camelot through Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot, and dedicated to the memory of Prince Albert. Read as allegory of Victorian society's moral decay, it was the laureate's grand public project across a quarter-century.

The Ring and the Book (1868–69) is Browning's 21,000-line masterpiece: a Roman murder trial of 1698 narrated twelve times by different speakers — the dramatic monologue multiplied into a whole epic of viewpoints, anticipating the modern relativity of narrative. The 'ring' is Browning's figure for shaping raw fact (the 'old yellow Book' of trial documents) into art.

Arnold's 'Dover Beach' (published 1867) hears in the retreating tide the 'melancholy, long, withdrawing roar' of the 'Sea of Faith' — the Victorian crisis of belief in a single lyric. Its closing plea ('Ah, love, let us be true / To one another!') and the 'darkling plain... where ignorant armies clash by night' are among the most quoted lines in the syllabus.

Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1847–48), subtitled 'A Novel without a Hero', follows the amoral, brilliant Becky Sharp through Regency society — the title taken from the fair at the town of Vanity in The Pilgrim's Progress. Serialised against Dombey and Son, it made Thackeray Dickens's one acknowledged rival.

Trollope, a Post Office official (credited with the pillar box), wrote 47 novels in two great sequences: the Barsetshire novels of clerical life (The Warden, 1855, to The Last Chronicle of Barset, 1867) and the political Palliser novels. His Autobiography's confession of writing by the clock — 3,000 words before breakfast — damaged his reputation for a generation.

Sprung rhythm is Gerard Manley Hopkins's metre counting only stressed syllables, any number of unstressed ones — closer to speech and Old English verse than to syllabic metre. With 'inscape' (a thing's unique inner form) and 'instress' (the force that sustains it), it powers The Wreck of the Deutschland and 'The Windhover'. The Jesuit Hopkins died in 1889 but was first published by Robert Bridges in 1918 — a Victorian poet who became a modern one.

Goblin Market (1862) is Christina Rossetti's masterpiece: sisters Laura and Lizzie, the goblin fruit-sellers' 'Come buy, come buy', and Lizzie's self-sacrificial redemption of her sister. Read variously as Christian allegory, proto-feminist fable and Pre-Raphaelite fantasia, it is the most analysed Victorian poem by a woman.

Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) — 'How do I love thee? Let me count the ways' — records her courtship by Robert Browning, and Aurora Leigh (1856) is the age's great verse-novel: nine books of blank verse on the making of a woman poet. In 1850 she was seriously proposed for the Laureateship that went to Tennyson.

Wilde turned Pater's aestheticism into spectacle: The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890–91), whose preface declares 'There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book', and the perfect comedy The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Weeks after its triumph came his trials and two years' hard labour, from which issued De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898).

In Culture and Anarchy (1869), Arnold names the two forces of civilisation: Hebraism — strictness of conscience, energy in doing — and Hellenism — spontaneity of consciousness, seeing things as they are. England, he argued, was over-Hebraised and needed Hellenising through culture, 'the best which has been thought and said'. The chapter titles are quoted verbatim in exams.

The Yellow Book (1894–97) was the quarterly of the Decadence — Aubrey Beardsley's art editorship gave it its scandalous black-and-white style, with contributions from Henry James and Max Beerbohm. Though Wilde never wrote for it, he was reported arrested 'with a yellow book under his arm', and Beardsley was dismissed in the panic — the emblematic fin-de-siècle episode.

Mrs Gaskell wrote the Condition-of-England novels Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855) from her Manchester parsonage, the gentle comedy of Cranford (1853), and The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) — the first great Brontë biography, written at Patrick Brontë's request and still the foundation of the Brontë myth.