Victorian Literature

The first decades (1830s to 1860s) of Queen Victoria's reign produced a vigorous and varied body of literature that attempted to come to terms with the current transformations of English society, but writers in the latter decades (1870s to 1900) withdrew into AESTHETICISM, a preoccupation with sensation as an end in itself. Confronted by the shift from an agricultural to an industrial urban society and troubled by the erosion of traditional religious beliefs, the early Victorian …

…SWINBURNE expressed their private erotic concerns in terms shocking to the general public. Such preoccupation with sensation led to the literary decadence of the 1890s, epitomized by Oscar WILDE's play Salome (1893), with illustrations by Aubrey BEARDSLEY. Along with a revitalization of prose fantasy (see William MORRIS, Robert Louis STEVENSON), the later Victorian period also saw a more searching realism, notably in such novels of Thomas HARDY's as JUDE THE OBSCURE and TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES.