We generalize confident about the people we call the Victorians, though conscious thoughts should make us a moment such as partial and such generalizations are likely to be unsatisfactory. This period is, first and foremost, very long: Queen Victoria reigned from 1837 to 1901; a statement about the early Victorian period (1830-1850) is expected to change for the mid Victorians (about 1850 - c. 1870) need and may not be at all for the later Victorian (approx. 1870 - c. 1890).
Some key features of Victorian literature
• Literary arts and entertainment: there was an exponential increase in the availability of novels. They were often in serial form in magazines, so that reached a wider audience than ever published.
• Literature was used as a means for the study of individual identity in the framework of social conventions.
• Literature was used to divisions (between rich and poor, men and women, within the itself) to explore.
• Were popular and sometimes existed the forms of romanticism and realism side by side.
• There were a number of women writers: the Brontës, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, George Elliot and Elizabeth Gaskell. There were also other authors from non-privileged backgrounds such as Charles Dickens and H. G. Wells.
Key stages in the Victorian era of 1837 to 1849:
• Dickens is a famous and highly paid writer.
• Chartism: Rights (for men) and better conditions for the poor working class movement call for reform of the Parliament vote increases.
• 1848: Revolutions throughout Europe (not in the UK).
• 1840Er years: ' hungry forties': Irish famine.
• Development of the rail system.
Key stages in the Victorian era, 1850-1870:
• The world exhibition in 1851 in Hyde Park. Increasing wealth of the United Kingdom and the British. This was the time of the expansion of the British Empire.
• Dickens founded throughout the year popular, cheap, weekly magazines, household words then. Novels were continued history and was affordable.
• The increased interest in natural sciences and ideas of evolution characterized by publication of Darwin's the origin of species (1859).
• Reforms further improved conditions for working people and advanced franchise (1867 Reform Act)
Key stages in the Victorian era 1870-1901:
• Fin de siècle - "Decadence". The style of literature promotes the importance of Oscar Wilde.
• Phones, cars, cinema, bicycles and 'rational' clothes for women.
• Find authors such as Thomas Hardy taboo areas represent.
• The new woman - increased political activism made by women, the better choice and education and employment opportunities.
