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What is Victorian Literature? | Definition, Examples, & Analysis

In his 1831 essay "The Spirit of the Age," the Victorian writer John Stuart Mill reflected that “[t]he first of the leading peculiarities of the present age is, that it is an age of transition. Mankind have outgrown old institutions and old doctrines, and have not yet acquired new ones” (in The Spirit of the Age, 2007). The dual notions of turbulent transit and uncertain change encapsulate many of the tensions and themes that run throughout the literature of the vast Victorian era. The Victorian period can be defined broadly by the reign of Queen Victoria (1837 to 1901) in Britain, although its temporal markers remain slippery and diffuse. The period was underscored by seismic shifts in society, which dramatically altered the way that culture was ordered. From industrialization, socioeconomic and political upheaval, urbanization, technological advancement, scientific rationalism, and a corresponding crisis of religious faith, the fabric of the Victorian age is constituted of many converging and sometimes conflicting threads. The literature from this period can be understood, then, as a response to these manifold transitions.

Many fictional figures from Victorian literature loom large in our contemporary cultural imagination: Van Helsing and the eponymous vampire clash in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897); Alice falls down the rabbit hole in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865); Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson make their first appearances in Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (1887); Dorian Gray’s portrait collects dust in the attic in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and Heathcliff and Catherine roam the moors in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). The texts introducing these iconic characters tell us much about the period by revealing the tensions around sex, class, morality, human nature, politics, religion, work, and technology that Victorian writers were grappling with. 

This study guide starts with some tentative definitions of the period and then provides a brief overview of some of the central themes that can be found in Victorian prose, poetry, and drama, to explore how Victorian writers were – to use Mill’s phrase – refashioning outgrown  “old institutions and old doctrines” and forging new ones (1831, [2007]).

Many critics warn against defining the Victorian era purely in terms of Queen Victoria’s reign. As Lawrence Poston notes: 

A New Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture

A literal reading of the term implies that the Victorian era begins with the accession of Victoria to the throne in 1837 and ends with her own demise in 1901. Yet the first generation of authors we now know as “Victorian” was born at the end of the eighteenth century and in the first two decades of the nineteenth. Carlyle, Mill, Macaulay, Newman were all publishing in the 1820s; Tennyson and Browning in the early 1830s. Strict adherence to the dates of reign ignores these larger continuities. (“1832”, A New Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture, 2014)

A more diffuse definition, therefore, allows for engagement with the period’s multifaceted ideas that stretch beyond a fixed temporal bracket. These ideas, as John Plunkett et al. set out in Victorian Literature (2011), came together and “created the distinct perception of a new ‘modern’ period” of Victorianism. 

Notions of the “modern” or “modernity” were formed through a number of different forces and factors. Whilst Victorian predecessors, the Romantics, heralded solipsistic expressions and emotive engagements with nature; the Victorians were interested in social issues and the question of how to live a life that was being profoundly shaped by the industrial revolution, capitalism, consumerism, science, and the ideologies of the British Empire. As Matthew Arnold wrote in 1865, “[t]he modern spirit is now awake almost everywhere” (Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, 2004). 

For more on this, see our guide “What is Modernity?”

It is impossible to encapsulate all the beliefs, approaches, and literary practices at play in Victorian writing. What follows is a brief overview of some of the main cultural themes — class, morality, empire, and gender –- born out of the “chaos and contradictions” of the Victorian period, and some examples of their literary expressions (Sean Purchase, Key Concepts in Victorian Literature, 2006). 

The emergence of class as a forceful presence within Victorian literature is complex, with various authors responding to the newly forming class divisions and corresponding notions of social mobility in a multitude of ways. As Alexandra Warwick notes in The Victorian Literature Handbook (2008), the period “saw the development of a language of class and an increasingly finely graded sense of its existence and significance.” These developments unfolded due to a number of factors, as John Plunkett et al. set out: 

Victorian Literature

Victorian society was dramatically marked by the twofold processes of industrialization and urbanization, [where] it is important to recognize the extent to which Britain was transformed by new living conditions, working environments, modes of social interaction and organization - and the possibilities and pressure associated with such changes. (Victorian Literature, 2011)

Alongside political reform, city living, and overarching ideas of social responsibility, Victorian class consciousness was also shaped by the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Their seminal work, The Communist Manifesto, was first published in 1848, where the turbulent nature of the period is encapsulated by the famous lines: “All that is solid melts into air” (2014). Marx and Engels critiqued capitalism’s exploitation of the lower classes’ labor, and this sense of injustice can also be felt in many social problem novels of the time, like Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1854-1855). 

Class tensions are felt in the literature of the period. For example, ideas of class anxiously propel the character Pip on his trajectory in Great Expectations (1861) by Charles Dickens. The text grapples with the question of what “a true gentleman” might be as Pip, who starts out as a blacksmith apprentice until he inherits a mysterious fortune, has to learn how to navigate London’s high society. Indeed, class divisions are cast into sharp relief for Pip, after he first visits wealthy “spinster” Miss Havisham’s house and remarks: 

Great Expectations

I thought how Joe [Pip’s brother-in-law] and my sister were then sitting in a kitchen, and how Miss Havisham and Estella never sat in a kitchen, but were far above the level of such common doings. (Dickens, 1861, [2017])

Upon realizing that in Miss Havisham’s upper-class house, the downstairs and kitchen areas were occupied by servants, ideas of space and “common doings” are imbued with newly forming class associations in Pip’s mind. 

Many Victorian authors offered class critiques and commentaries, too. In Bleak House (1852), Dickens admonishes London’s social inequality and poverty through a convoluted and slow-moving court case which drags through the text. The novel is famously cloaked in a heavy fog, which symbolizes institutional oppression: 

Bleak House

Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth. (Dickens, 1852, [1997])

Elsewhere, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem “The Cry of the Children” (1843) highlights the issue of child labor, writing: 

The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume 2

How long, O cruel nation, 
Will you stand to move the world, on a child’s heart,—

(The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, [2010])

Barrett Browning was responding to the campaign for children’s rights, especially in factories, to protect them from long hours and awful work conditions. Themes of class, child labor, and exploitation are present in the works of many Victorian writers, such as Gaskell and Francis Trollope; such themes are also palpable in a wider literary move to represent the child’s perspective, such as What Maisie Knew (1897) by Henry James.

Victorian morality surfaces in a number of different forms throughout the literature of the period. Middle-class Victorian values typically included chastity, thriftiness, self-reliance, self-control, and discipline. These individualistic values and the emphasis on moral improvement are clear in the emergence of self-help books like the bestselling Self-Help (1859) by Samuel Smiles. As Sally Mitchell writes the “climate of mental and moral improvement was a distinctive feature of their age” (Daily Life in Victorian England, 2008). Traits like humility, hard work, self-sufficiency, and respectability were integral to this line of thought, underscoring many “rags to riches” stories, such as Oliver Twist (1838) by Charles Dickens, and perpetuated the idea that the poor could improve their station if they only worked hard enough. Remaining in an impoverished state was, therefore, seen as a moral failing. This belief is foundational to liberalism. 

However, some texts, such as the poetry of Barrett Browning and social problem novels, did focus on society’s moral obligations to the poor and the immorality of child labor and workhouses. 

Morality also underpinned notions of respectability that structured many of the class anxieties and ideals of the time. The presumed morality of the middle classes was called into question in several texts of the period, including Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). Stevenson's text (which deals with notions of good and evil; morality and intellectualism; and rationality and irrationality) tells the story of gentleman Dr. Jekyll, who fractures himself in two, creating the dangerous counterpart, Mr. Hyde.

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the Weld of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both [...]. (Stevenson, 1886, [2015])

This dual awareness results in a “dreadful shipwreck” of the self for Jekyll, where the reality of human nature, desire and vice is revealed beneath the guise of respectability, encapsulating much of the tension between excited progress and troubled unrest that propelled the Victorian period (2015). 

Elsewhere, Oscar Wilde offered an existential exploration of desire, sin and human nature in The Picture of Dorian Gray, suggesting that “Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one’s age. I consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age is a form of the grossest immorality” (1890, [1998]). This spurred moralistic outcry over the text’s homosexual connotations. Wilde would later become at the center of a scandal when he faced legal charges for gross indecency, where he would be cross-examined on "the love that dares not speak its name.” Wilde was imprisoned in 1895 and died in 1900 aged 46. (To learn more about the stigma surrounding sexual identity, see our study guide "What is Queer Theory?")

Victorian literature engaged with many aspects of morality and human nature, which are not only legible within the texts of the period, but also the anxious scandals, indecency trials like Wilde’s, and attitudes to crime and punishment. For more on Wilde's trial, see Dale Barleben’s Staging the Trials of Modernism (2017).

Edward Said writes in Culture and Imperialism (1993) that imperialism and empire have a “shadowy presence” in Victorian literature (2007). Following Said’s work, many postcolonial theorists have investigated the long shadows that the Age of Empire has cast, looking at the legacy of colonial rule as narrated through the literature of the period. 

A key example of imperialist ideology in literature is Rudyard Kipling’s jingoistic poem, “The White Man’s Burden” (1899) which speaks to a nationalistic pride and racist imperialism that some Victorian writers upheld. The poem portrays British colonization as a moral duty of “responsibility” to “educate” and “civilize” colonial subjects. Post-colonial scholarship both within and beyond Victorian studies has unpacked and critiqued the justification of imperialism that Kipling’s poem encapsulates. For more information, see Patrick Brantlinger’s Victorian Literature and Postcolonial Studies (2009), and our guides “What is Imperialism?” and “What is Postcolonialism?”

Narratives of masculinity and adventure also contributed to imperial constructions of “Englishness”. In Empire Boys (2015), Joseph Bristow explores how children’s literature from the period enforced the nation’s colonial ideologies through adventure stories and imperial romances, as seen in Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), R. M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1857), and Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894). 

Sean Purchase highlights the lack of engagement with the reality of imperialism in many Victorian texts, writing “Victorian fiction is typically uncomfortable with its images of the empire, and popular writers such as Dickens rarely, if at all, acknowledge it in their novels” (2006). Despite the discomfort that Purchase identifies, whether reading through omission or overt engagement, Victorian literature was steeped in imperialism. In “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” (1985), Gayatri Spivak writes: 

Feminist Postcolonial Theory

It should not be possible to read nineteenth-century British literature without remembering that imperialism, understood as England’s social mission, was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English. The role of literature in the production of cultural representation should not be ignored. (in Feminist Postcolonial Theory, 2003)

We can see this in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), through the treatment of Mr. Rochester’s first wife Bertha Mason: a woman from the West Indies who is locked away and portrayed as a “lunatic.”

While ideas of masculinity were shaped by notions of the gentleman, imperial power, and adventure, women were conversely tied to the home. Early images of Victorian womanhood were confined to the domestic sphere, where the title of Coventry Patmore’s 1862 poem, “The Angel in the House,” came to represent a selfless and angelic ideal of femininity centered around the “worth as a Maid and Wife” (2003). 

Corresponding symbols of the fallen woman — who has fallen from the angelic ideal, usually through sexual acts — were often vilified and labeled as deviant or immoral. Moral commentaries on the fallen woman can be seen in George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859) and through allegory in Christina Rossetti’s poem “Goblin Market,” where Laura partakes of the goblin’s “forbidden fruit” (1862 [2012]). Elsewhere, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (1853) and Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838) present fallen women — the ostracized seamstress Ruth and the selfless Nancy, respectively — more compassionately. Their narratives highlight the hypocritical societal notions of illegitimacy that lead to their deaths: as the Minister Mr. Benson attempts to read Ruth’s sermon, he is overcome by the injustices of her plight:

Ruth

He looked, and, as he gazed, a mist came before him, and he could not see his sermon, nor his hearers, but only Ruth, as she had been—stricken low, and crouching from sight [...]—like a woeful, hunted creature. (Gaskell, 1853)

For more on the figure of the fallen woman, see Amanda Anderson’s Tainted Souls and Painted Faces, 2018.  

Victorian lives were stratified through hierarchies of gender and power, where aside from “the obvious exception of Queen Victoria, men dominated every available public or social sphere” (Purchase, 2006). In literature, this resulted in some women writing under male pen names, like Mary Ann Evans who wrote as George Eliot; and Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë, who published under Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. 

The image of the New Woman emerged throughout the Victorian era. Gillian Sutherland describes the term as 

In Search of the New Woman

growing out of and crystallising a steadily swelling debate over several decades about the position of women of the middle classes, their scope for independence, the implications of the access to secondary and higher education which they were beginning to secure, and the legal, financial, social and psychological constraints imposed upon them by marriage (In Search of the New Woman, 2015)

Finding shape in texts like Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem “Aurora Leigh” (1856), through Maggie’s sense of self in Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), the presence of the occult in Florence Farr’s The Dancing Faun (1894) and Sarah Grand’s politics, the language of the New Woman was being forged, written into a discourse of early feminism. 

The interest in the novel itself emerged within the Victorian era, spurred by a proliferation of production, the growth of a literary marketplace, increased readership, and even the formation of new genres (such as children’s literature) and new cultural modes of reading (like serialization). 

Michelle Allen-Emerson remarks that “novel-reading itself was a significant cultural phenomenon of the period” (“Contextualizing the Novel in the Classroom,” Teaching Victorian Literature in the Twenty-First Century, 2017). Purchase further suggests that the prominence of the novel was due to its ability to respond to the uncertainties of the period: 

Key Concepts in Victorian Literature

[T]he Victorian novel, with its neat expositions, complications and resolutions, and the manner in which the logic of its narrative so often engineers a happy ending, provided some sort of structure for Victorians. It established, in other words, a semblance of order and consolation against the chaos and contradictions of a changing world. (Key Concepts in Victorian Literature, 2006)

Serialization was also an increasingly popular mode of publication and consumption for more wealthy readers, where magazines would publish works by Eliot, Dickens, and William Thackeray in installments. Serialized texts in the form of affordable penny periodicals like George W. M. Reynolds’ The Mysteries of London (1844-46) became incredibly popular, too, which made reading more accessible to the working classes. For more on this topic, see Mary Shannon’s Dickens, Reynolds, and Mayhew on Wellington Street (2016) and Nicole C. Dittmer and Sophie Raine’s edited collection, Penny Dreadfuls and the Gothic (2023).

Different genres flourished: detective novels like Conan Doyle’s; fantasy tales like Carrol’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; gothic texts like Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights; and children’s literature like Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877) all emerged as lively and vibrant formal genres. Many novels were characterized by a realist style, which attempted to capture the verisimilitude of daily life, such as Dickens’s Great Expectations. 

Elsewhere, writers engaged in sensation fiction, which rendered social issues through scandal, shock, and taboos, like Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860), which H. L. Manse critiqued as “preaching to the nerves instead of the judgment” (Dictionary of Literary Biography, 1983). These various forms, genres, and styles speak to the diverse variety and strands of experimentation that constituted Victorian literature. 

Victorian poetry, like the novel, explored ideas using a multitude of approaches. In Reading Victorian Poetry, Richard Cronin notes that 

Reading Victorian Poetry

There is no style that Victorian poets share, one reason for which is that they had too many to choose from. They had available to them, as their predecessors did not, the full history of English poetry. (2011)

Inspiration was everywhere. Barrett Browning and Alfred Tennyson both refashion hero narratives in “Aurora Leigh” (1856) and “In Memoriam” (1850), respectively, drawing on religion, myth and the epic tradition to do so. 

New forms not only interpolated historical themes, but also drew on other mediums: dramatic monologues from Tennyson and Robert Browning formed through lyric, drama, and fiction, forming intricate narrative poems. Examples of this include Browning’s “Porphyria's Lover” (1836) and Tennyson’s “Ulysses” (1842). 

Other poets crafted poetry that centered sensory experiences; where Gerard Manley Hopkins harnesses poetic meter to play to the ear, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poems explode with visual imagery, and Christina Rossetti’s goblin market presents a feast of fruit that is “Sweet to tongue and sound to eye” (2012). 

Relying heavily on adaptation, much Victorian drama acted as a bridge between literature and theater. Julianne Smith argues for the appreciation of Victorian drama as a historical imprint of the relationships between “text and performance, text and history, text and reception, text and adaptation, text and modern media, [and] text and editorial practice” (“Teaching the ‘Forgotten’ Genre”, Teaching Victorian Literature in the Twenty-First Century, 2017). It also provides a useful record of popular culture and explicit engagement with social concerns, using what James Adams describes as an “amalgam of intrigue, sensation, idealism and domestic sentiment,” moving from the first English melodrama, Thomas Holcroft’s A Tale of Mystery (1802) to the music hall’s vaudeville and burlesque at the fin-de-siècle (A History of Victorian Literature, 2011). 

Playwrights like George Bernard Shaw and Wilde played with drama to interrogate societal issues through satire. For example, Shaw’s Arms and the Man (1894) critiques warfare and his later work Pygmalion (1913) satirizes the shallow superficiality of Britain’s class divides through Eliza Doolitte’s story; Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) uses wit, farce, and humor to mock the institution of marriage and classist Victorian ideals of “earnestness” through a confusion of names. 

Literature of the long nineteenth century was characterized, among other things, by tension. This tension was felt in the class divisions, as in Dickens’s Great Expectations; between good and evil that fragmented Jekyll’s sense of self; between temptation and shameful repression; within the depictions of the British Empire at its most powerful and violent; and between rigid gender roles. There is a tension between the past and the future, too. As Victorian writers responded to the new reform and changes, they were looking forward to an uncertain future and anticipated much of the themes that modernism would pick up and rework. This forward-looking search for meaning in the past and present moments is encapsulated in a sonnet from Christina Rossetti’s “Later Life: A Double Sonnet of Sonnets”: 

Poems

We lack, yet cannot fix upon the lack: 
Not this, nor that; yet somewhat, certainly. 

We see the things we do not yearn to see
Around us: and what see we glancing back? (Poems, 1881, [2006])

Further reading on Victorian literature & resources on Perlego 

Breton, R. (2021) The penny politics of Victorian popular fiction. Manchester University Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/2663429/the-penny-politics-of-victorian-popular-fiction-pdf 

Cox, K. (2021) Touch, Sexuality, and Hands in British Literature, 1740–1901. Taylor & Francis. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/2534657/touch-sexuality-and-hands-in-british-literature-17401901-pdf 

Ehnenn, J. (2017) Women’s Literary Collaboration, Queerness, and Late-Victorian Culture. Taylor & Francis. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1487239/womens-literary-collaboration-queerness-and-latevictorian-culture-pdf 

Hall, J. D. (2017) Nineteenth-Century Verse and Technology: Machines of Meter. Springer International Publishing. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/3496740/nineteenthcentury-verse-and-technology-machines-of-meter-pdf 

Marcus, S. (2017) The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth Century England. Taylor & Francis. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1577671/the-other-victorians-a-study-of-sexuality-and-pornography-in-midnineteenthcentury-england-pdf 

Showalter, E. (2020) A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. Princeton University Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1892060/a-literature-of-their-own-british-women-novelists-from-bronte-to-lessing-pdf 

Moers, E. (1976) Literary Women. Oxford University Press, 

John, J. (2016) The Oxford Handbook of VIctorian LIterary Culture. Oxford University Press. 
Gilbert, S, and Gubar, S. (1979) The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination. Yale University Press.

Adams, J. E. (2011) A History of Victorian Literature. 1st edn. Wiley. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1008213/a-history-of-victorian-literature-pdf 

Allen-Emerson, M. (2017) “Contextualizing the Novel in the Classroom,” in Jen Cadwallader, and Laurence W Mazzeno (eds.)Teaching Victorian Literature in the Twenty-First Century. Springer International. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/3497036/teaching-victorian-literature-in-the-twentyfirst-century-a-guide-to-pedagogy-pdf 

Anderson, A. (2018)  Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture. Cornell University Press. Available at: 

https://www.perlego.com/book/566001/tainted-souls-and-painted-faces-the-rhetoric-of-fallenness-in-victorian-culture 

Arnold, M. (2004) Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold. Perlego. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1819684/selections-from-the-prose-works-of-matthew-arnold-pdf 

Ballantyne, R. M. (2013) The Coral Island. Hesperus Press Ltd. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/3045793/the-coral-island-pdf 

Barleben, D. (2017) Staging the Trials of Modernism: Testimony and the British Modern Literary Consciousness. University of Toronto Press. Available at: 

https://www.perlego.com/book/886852/staging-the-trials-of-modernism-testimony-and-the-british-modern-literary-consciousness 

Brantlinger, P. (2009) Victorian Literature and Postcolonial Studies. Edinburgh University Press. 

Bristow, J. (2015) Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man’s World. Taylor and Francis. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1643478/empire-boys-adventures-in-a-mans-world-pdf 

Browning, E. B. (2010) The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume 2. Perlego. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1728790/the-poetical-works-of-elizabeth-barrett-browning-volume-2-pdf 

Browning, E. B. (2018) Aurora Leigh. Perlego. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1728009/aurora-leigh-pdf 

Brontë, C. (2010) Jane Eyre. HarperCollins. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/669630/jane-eyre-pdf 

Brontë, E. (2017) Wuthering Heights. Delphi Classics. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1654328/wuthering-heights-by-emily-bronte-illustrated-pdf 

Carroll, L. (2016) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Wisehouse. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1415540/alices-adventures-in-wonderland-wisehouse-classics-original-1865-edition-with-the-complete-illustrations-by-sir-john-tenniel-pdf 

Cronin, R. (2011) Reading Victorian Poetry. Wiley. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1011915/reading-victorian-poetry-pdf 

Darwin, C. (2018) On the Origin of Species; or: The Preservation of the Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Read Books Ltd. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/792517/on-the-origin-of-species-or-the-preservation-of-the-favoured-races-in-the-struggle-for-life-pdf 

Dickens, C. (2017) Great Expectations. Delphi Classics. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1653779/great-expectations-by-charles-dickens-illustrated-pdf 

Dickens, C. (1997) Bleak House. Perlego. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1713271/bleak-house-pdf 

Dickens, C. (2017) Oliver Twist. Delphi Classics. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1653775/delphis-oliver-twist-by-charles-dickens-illustrated-pdf 

Dittmer, N. and Raine, S. (eds.)(2023) Penny Dreadfuls and the Gothic: Investigations of Pernicious Tales of Terror. University of Wales Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/3783678/penny-dreadfuls-and-the-gothic-investigations-of-pernicious-tales-of-terror-pdf

Doyle, A. C. (2017) A Study in Scarlet. Delphi Classics. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1654200/a-study-in-scarlet-by-sir-arthur-conan-doyle-illustrated-pdf 

Eliot, G. (2012) The Mill on the Floss. Dover Publications. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/110057/the-mill-on-the-floss-pdf 

Eliot, G. (2017) Adam Bede. Delphi Classics. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1654360/adam-bede-by-george-eliot-delphi-classics-illustrated-pdf 

Farr, F. The Dancing Faun. Elkin Mathews and John Lane.

Gaskell, E. C. (2003) North and South. Perlego. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1716418/north-and-south-pdf 

Gaskell, E. C. (2000) Mary Barton. Perlego. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1714754/mary-barton-pdf 

Gaskell, E. C. (2003) Ruth. Perlego. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1716405/ruth-pdf 

James, H. (2004) What Maisie Knew. Perlego. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1718121/what-maisie-knew-pdf 

Kipling (2020) The Best of Rudyard Kipling: A Collection of Essential Poetry. Read Books Ltd. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1693946/the-best-of-rudyard-kipling-a-collection-of-essential-poetry-pdf 

Kipling, R. (2020) The Jungle Book. Vintage Books. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/2918516/the-jungle-book-pdf 

Manse, H. L. (1983) “Sensation Novels,” in Nadel, I. B. and Fredeman, W. E. (ed) Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 18: Victorian Novelists After 1885. Gale Research. 

Marx, K. and Engels, F. (2014) The Communist Manifesto. HarperCollins. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/602671/the-communist-manifesto-pdf
Mitchell, S. (2008) Daily Life in Victorian England. 2nd edn. Bloomsbury Publishing. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/4171389/daily-life-in-victorian-england-pdf 

Mill, J. S. (2007) "The Spirit of the Age" in Cavanagh, C (ed.) The Spirit of the Age: Victorian Essays. Yale University Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1089920/the-spirit-of-the-age-victorian-essays-pdf 

Patmore, C. (2003) The Angel in the House. Perlego. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1843937/the-angel-in-the-house-pdf 

Plunkett, J., et al. (2011) Victorian Literature: A Sourcebook. Bloomsbury. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/2997595/victorian-literature-a-sourcebook-pdf 

Poston, L. (2014) “1832,” in Tucker. H. F (ed.) A New Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture. Wiley. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1000660/a-new-companion-to-victorian-literature-and-culture-pdf 

Purchase, S. (2006) Key Concepts in Victorian Literature. Bloomsbury. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/3031860/key-concepts-in-victorian-literature-pdf 

Reynolds, G.W.M. (2014) The Mysteries of London. Vol. 1. Perlego. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1848503/the-mysteries-of-london-v-14-pdf 

Rossetti, C. (2012) Goblin Market. Dover Publications. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/110944/goblin-market-pdf 

Rossetti, C. G. (2006) Poems. Perlego. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1714656/poems-pdf 

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Sewell, A. (2019) Black Beauty. Studium Legis. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1377915/black-beauty-pdf 

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What is the Gothic? | Key Elements of Gothic Literature & Film

As Nick Groom notes in The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction, “Type ‘Gothic’ into Google and you get over 250 million hits: images of ecclesiastical architecture, websites devoted to ‘bone-chilling’ literature, and opportunities to purchase alternative footwear….Trying to identify the original ‘Goths’, meanwhile, can lead either to an ancient barbarian race or to a rock music subculture of the 1980s” (2012). All these things are, in fact, gothic, a term with a varied yet related collection of meanings.

“Gothic” originally referenced tribes (Visigoths in the west, Ostrogoths in the east) most famous for invading Rome. The rise of the Goths is often considered the beginning of the “Dark Ages,” a misleading term for the period between the “fall” of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance. Stereotyped as a time of intellectual decline, the reality of the early Middle Ages was more complex. In fact, the Visigoths developed a code of law with comparatively progressive attitudes toward the rights of women and the practice of religion.

As Christianity spread across medieval Europe, cathedrals appeared across the continent in a style that sought to capture the magnificence of God for an illiterate public. This ornate, dramatic, and asymmetrical style of art and architecture, seen in the famous Notre Dame de Paris, was distinct from the symmetrical, ordered classical style exemplified by the Roman Pantheon. As the Renaissance aimed to revive classical ideals, Gothic acquired a new meaning: Giorgio Vasari deemed medieval architecture “Gothic,” meaning to debase the style as un-Roman and un-Enlightened. The name stuck, without its necessarily pejorative connotation. 

In The Gothic Cathedral, Otto Georg Von Simson writes that the defining features of Gothic architecture are not its feats of engineering — vaulted ceilings, pointed arches, flying buttresses — or its soaring height, but its “two aspects…without precedent and parallel: the use of light and the unique relationship between structure and appearance” (2020, [1989]). Through light and space, architects aimed, Von Simpson argues, to reflect God in stone:

The Gothic Cathedral

The cathedral was the house of God, this term understood not as a pale commonplace but as fearful reality. The Middle Ages lived in the presence of the supernatural, which impressed itself upon every aspect of human life. The sanctuary was the threshold to heaven. (1989, [2020])

Yet, there was a dark side to Gothic architecture in its shadowy corridors, depictions of hellish torment, and monstrous gargoyles leering overhead. The violence of the Reformation added another layer of less-than-heavenly associations with Gothic architecture: iconoclasts left Europe’s religious structures in ruins and the remains of Gothic architecture haunted.

In the 17th- and early 18th-centuries Gothicism was again transformed: the Goths were reimagined as forerunners to modern society, early Christians who stood against the excesses of paganism and provided an example for curtailing absolutist monarchies. Gothic ruins became popular sites to visit for poetic inspiration or historical reflection. Cultural fascination with medieval customs and architecture helped spark the Gothic literary tradition that emerged in the 1760s.

A naïve young woman finds herself in a vast and mysterious house, filled with unsavory secrets. A guilt-ridden monk is tormented by visions of past wrongs — are they dreams or spectres? A scientist labors in a candlelit laboratory as rain pounds against the window. These are recognizably gothic scenes. But what makes them so?

The Gothic is, in many ways, a formula, a collection of plot devices, character types, and other tropes that can be rearranged and subverted to tell a story — and incorporated into works of any genre.

Let's take a look at some key gothic elements and tropes.

Since Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), authors have loved setting gothic stories in scary structures — castles, monasteries, cathedrals, and houses. Gothic spaces are often labyrinthine or difficult to navigate, containing secret passageways, shadowy corners, crumbling walls, forbidden rooms, and dramatic architectural features (staircases, towers, dungeons, crypts). Glance through the horror movies released in any given year, and you’ll soon notice that many stage their terrors in a single prominent location — whether that structure is haunted by undead presences (The Amityville Horror), terrorized by man-made horrors (Psycho, Get Out), or home to both (The Shining). 

The Gothic also frequents settings which are sublime. Edmund Burke uses sublime to describe intense feelings of pain and danger which can be pleasurable to us “at certain distances, and with certain modifications.” Sublime landscapes often force us to confront our smallness in the face of nature — high mountains, frozen tundras, deep oceans.

“It was a dark and stormy night….” Or, as Mary Shelley writes in Frankenstein (1818), “It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils.” The mood of the Gothic translates into its literal gloomy atmosphere, rife with rain, lightning, mist, wind, and fog. The cold, damp, and dark obscure the sun during the day, while pale moonlight lights the gothic night. 

Take this passage from Jane Eyre (1847), when Jane is wandering alone after leaving Mr. Rochester,

Jane Eyre

I lay still a while: the night-wind swept over the hill and over me, and died moaning in the distance; the rain fell fast, wetting me afresh to the skin. Could I but have stiffened to the still frost — the friendly numbness of death — it might have pelted on: I should not have felt it; but my yet living flesh shuddered to its chilling influence.

Here, the weather both reflects and creates the genre’s characteristic melancholy.

Gothic literature has spawned all sorts of nightmarish beings — vampires, werewolves, zombies, demons. These monsters come from nature (Godzilla), from the past (Dracula), from our own creation (Frankenstein’s creature), or from within (Dr. Jekyll’s evil counterpart, Mr. Hyde). Monsters are transgressors, refusing to play by the rules as they prey upon our fears and our desires. (See our study guide on monster theory for more.) 

Some works of Gothic literature feature a literal monster, while others depict humans who behave monstrously, including sadists, serial killers, and sexual predators. Gothic monsters help us interrogate the boundaries between human and nonhuman, acceptability and depravity, goodness, and evil.

Things just don’t seem to stay dead in the Gothic. Ghosts haunt the genre, terrifying characters, possessing them, or warning them of danger. The genre explores the boundary between life and death through beings that transcend them, and ghosts also allow the Gothic to emphasize that particular feeling that won’t let the past rest: guilt. 

The past always seems to return in the Gothic; wrongs demand to be righted, unsated figures seek revenge, and traumatic events resurface. These ghosts may not be literal, but they are felt: for example, in Daphne Du Maurier’s Gothic romance, Rebecca (1938), the protagonist is tormented by comparisons between her and her husband’s late wife, Rebecca. The narrator feels Rebecca’s presence throughout the house and must deal with the consequences of her (and her husband’s) past actions. Even objects in the Gothic seem to have lives of their own; doors mysteriously slam shut and portraits watch from the walls.

Strange families are common in Gothic literature. Characters are haunted by the loss of significant family members or by wrongdoings which continue to curse the family line. Complex family trees allow for reveals of unknown relatives and inheritances. The Gothic wonders how much your family dictates who you are and how difficult it is to break from familial expectations. 

Incest is also a common gothic trope. In Gothic Incest: Gender, Sexuality and Trangression, Jenny DiPlacidi argues that,

Gothic incest: Gender, Sexuality and Transgression

representations of incest are revealed as synonymous with the Gothic as a whole: complex, multifaceted and consciously resistant to the dominant social and sexual hegemonies in their models of alternative agencies, sexualities, forms of desire and family structures. (2018)

The Gothic loves damsels in distress: women in danger, pursued or held captive by monsters and monstrous men who threaten them with physical violence and sexual transgression. These gothic heroines — beautiful, waifish, fragile — swoon and shriek in terror. 

Henry Fusili’s painting The Nightmare captures the dramatic distress of the gothic heroine. A beautiful woman lies with a demon crouched on her torso. Her white dress hugs her body, and her long neck invites a kiss or a monster’s bite. The painting’s combination of horrific and seductive elements exemplifies the impulse to see beauty alongside and within pain, fear, and death.

While gothic heroines may seem helpless and naïve, they often need to be clever and resourceful in order to save themselves. In Dracula (1897), Mina Harker is not just the vampire’s victim; she plays an integral role in defeating him, drawing upon her knowledge of the train tables and battling Dracula alongside the men.

Male gothic protagonists are conflicted, solitary, tortured, brooding, and secretive. The “Byronic hero” — modeled after famous poet and infamous womanizer Lord Byron — rides the line between hero and villain, sometimes a darkly seductive charmer, sometimes a cold and sullen loner. The mercurial Mr. Rochester manipulates Jane even as he is tormented by his secret past; the melancholy Victor Frankenstein alternates between self-aggrandizing and self-loathing, racked with guilt from his actions and inaction.

Another version of this tortured type is the sympathetic monster — Frankenstein’s creature, the Phantom of the Opera, Edward Scissorhands. Rather than clinging to power while brooding on their bad actions, these figures are usually disempowered and tortured by their own existence more than anything they’ve done.

The heroine slowly walks down the hallway. Tense string music plays in the background, and she tightens her grip on the weapon in her hand as she moves in and out of shadow. The music swells, and you hold your breath as you wait for something to happen.  

This feeling of tension and suspense is core to the gothic aesthetic. The genre plays with psychological intensity and anticipation as much as it releases into outbursts of violence.

The Gothic also embraces melodrama. Dramatic events occur and characters respond in kind — women swoon, men rage and lash out. Inner torment is expressed in displays of “madness,” and characters become physically ill as a result of moral failure, psychological distress, or bad weather. 

Doubling is another common trope in the Gothic. Some stories, like Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson” (1839), feature doppelgangers, people who look exactly alike. But gothic doubles can take other forms too — twins, reflections, separate characters who begin to merge into one. In Carmilla (1847), Laura and Carmilla grow more alike and codependent: “you and I are one for ever,” Carmilla declares.

In The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Dorian’s double is his decaying portrait which allows him to remain forever young. This doubling, as with Jekyll and Hyde, allows for an examination of the duplicity of man and the difference between appearances and true nature. 

In her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley writes about her inspiration for the novel,

Frankenstein

When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision,—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. (1831)

The book came to Shelley in a dream, fitting for a story which features powerful dreams of its own. Sleep is often disrupted in Gothic texts by visions and nightmares which reveal desires, fears, or dangers.

The Gothic is more than the sum of its parts: it is invested in particular themes which can be adapted to different times, locations, and political agendas. Broadly, the Gothic depicts transgressions, both of behavioral norms (sexual deviance, gender subversion, moral wrongdoings) and of seemingly fixed boundaries (self and other, life and death, past and present, man and monster). Dwelling often in the spaces between these categories, the Gothic often aims to evoke an ambivalent feeling of pleasure and pain, attraction and repulsion. Fear, the popularity of the Gothic seems to say, can feel pretty good. 

Theoretical concepts often helpful for analyzing Gothic texts include the unheimlich/uncanny (Freud), the abject (Kristeva), the grotesque, the liminal, the monstrous, the sublime (Burke), the fantastic (Todorov; Rabkin), the weird (Fisher), and the eerie (Fisher).

The Gothic novel pushes back against the Enlightenment’s view of the world as rational, disenchanted, and comprehensible through human experimentation and exploration. As William Hughes, David Punter, and Andrew Smith write in The Encyclopedia of the Gothic,

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