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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 

Said, E. (2007) Culture and Imperialism. Penguin.

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

Shannon, M. (2016) Dickens, Reynolds, and Mayhew on Wellington Street: The Print Culture of a Victorian Street. Taylor & Francis. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1630976/dickens-reynolds-and-mayhew-on-wellington-street-the-print-culture-of-a-victorian-street-pdf

Shaw, B. (2003) Arms and the Man. Perlego. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1715983/arms-and-the-man-pdf  

Shaw, B. (2003) Pygmalion. Perlego. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1716151/pygmalion-pdf 

Smiles, S. (2011) Self-Help. Barnes & Noble. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/3714186/selfhelp-barnes-noble-digital-library-with-illustrations-of-conduct-and-perseverance-pdf 

Spivak, G. C. (2003) “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” in Reina Lewis and Sara Mills (eds.) Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. Routledge. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1601455/feminist-postcolonial-theory-a-reader 

Stevenson, R. L. (2015) Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. 3rd edn. Broadview Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/2030514/strange-case-of-dr-jekyll-and-mr-hyde-third-edition-pdf 

Stevenson, R. L. (2017) Treasure Island. Delphi Classics. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1653890/treasure-island-by-robert-louis-stevenson-illustrated-pdf 

Stoker, B. (2017) Dracula. Delphi Classics. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1654607/dracula-by-bram-stoker-delphi-classics-illustrated-pdf 

Sutherland, G. (2015) In Search of the New Woman: Middle-Class Women and Work in Britain 1870-1914. Cambridge University Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/4226122/in-search-of-the-new-woman-middleclass-women-and-work-in-britain-18701914-pdf 

Warwick, A. (2008) “Class,” in Warwick, A. and Wills, M. (ed.) The Victorian Literature Handbook. Bloomsbury. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/393263/the-victorian-literature-handbook-pdf 

Wilde, O. (1998) The Picture of Dorian Gray. Broadview Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/2030356/the-picture-of-dorian-gray-pdf 
Wilde, O. (1997) The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People. Perlego. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1718385/the-importance-of-being-earnest-a-trivial-comedy-for-serious-people-pdf

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

Rolling hills, gentle streams, noble shepherds, and maybe a gamboling nymph or two: These are the classic hallmarks of pastoral literature. Pastoral literature had its beginnings with the poetic and idealized descriptions of shepherds’ lives in harmony with nature. It has since gathered a wider range of meanings and associations, usually founded on the key dynamic between the corruption of urban life and the innocence of rural life. The pastoral is a mode of literature that can appear in a wide array of other genres (such as fantasy and historical fiction). In its earlier appearances, pastoral literature exhibited such a common set of characteristics that it was, arguably, a genre in its own right. As Terry Gifford explains in Pastoral,

Pastoral

pastoral up to about 1610 was to refer to poems or dramas of a specific formal type in which supposed shepherds spoke to each other, usually in pentameter verse, about their work or their loves, with apparently idealised descriptions of their countryside. This form of writing was so recognisably pastoral that it might almost be called a genre. (2019)

there is a broader use of pastoral to refer to an area of content. In this sense pastoral refers to any literature that describes the country as providing an implicit or explicit contrast to the urban. (2019)

In pastoral literature, the countryside is rendered in an idealized form — commonly infused with nostalgia for a bucolic life of simple innocence that may or may not have actually existed. This vision is often contrasted, whether explicitly or implicitly, with an urban life of chaos and corruption which the writer yearns to escape from. As Gifford argues, pastoral literature often exhibits   

some form of retreat and return, either within the text, or in the sense that the pastoral retreat returned some insights relevant to the urban or court readership. (2019)

This rural/urban dynamic is key, as it underlines much pastoral literature. To loosely identify some of pastoral literature’s most common characteristics then:

The countryside is often idealized as a space of innocence, purity, simplicity, and beauty. 

There is an awareness of the shortcomings of urban life — commonly characterized as dirty, corrupt, soulless, and unfulfilling. 

Rural life is often represented as the last staging post of humanity’s lost innocence — harking back to a lost golden age, associated with the mythical utopia of “Arcadia”. This sense of loss can be pervasive, as Arcadia is often not presented as a realistic prospect that can be regained.

In the following sections, we will discuss some of the debates around pastoral literature, review its historical outline, and explore some specific examples.


A significant criticism of pastoral literature is that it is not genuinely pastoral at all — that it is written by, and for, urban audiences. Sukanta Chaudhuri argues, 

A Companion to Pastoral Poetry of the English Renaissance

Pastoral is the most disingenuous of literary modes. It is neither folk literature nor popular literature, though it can incorporate elements of one or the other. It does not usually emanate from a rustic source. It is essentially a fiction of rural life created by people who do not live it. (A Companion to Pastoral Poetry of the English Renaissance, 2018)

If pastoral literature is an idealized vision of country life, then, what does this mean for country life in reality? Is the truth distorted and neglected by pastoral visions which fail to represent and challenge the real issues that affect real people? As Jonathan Bate outlines in Romantic Ecology,

Romantic Ecology

For modern criticism […] pastoral poetry is historically and socially specific. […] [I]t is not really written by shepherds, it is a comforting aristocratic fantasy that covers up the real conditions of oppression and exploitation in feudal and neo-feudal agrarian economies. Raymond Williams writes with honest indignation: ‘It is not easy to forget that Sidney’s Arcadia, which gives a continuing title to English neo-pastoral, was written in a park which had been made by enclosing a whole village and evicting the tenants.’ (2013)

Is pastoral literature hopelessly naive, then, and not sufficiently reflective of the problems of reality? Does it still serve a valuable purpose? In Art as Therapy, Alain de Botton and John Armstrong argue that 

It's a loss if we condemn all art that is gracious and sweet as sentimental and in denial. In fact, such work can only affect us because we know what reality is usually like. (2016)

Expanding on this, de Botton and Armstrong explain:

Far from taking too rosy and sentimental a view, most of the time we suffer from excessive gloom. We are only too aware of the problems and injustices of the world – it's just that we feel debilitatingly small and weak in the face of them. Cheerfulness is an achievement, and hope is something to celebrate. (2016)

Despite the concerns raised about pastoral literature’s elision of real-world problems, its very naivety might actually serve a redemptive purpose — providing us with a cheering glimpse of a better world.

In Arcadia Updated, Marius Fiskevold and Anne Katrine Geelmuyden put forward another argument in defense of pastoral literature: 

Arcadia Updated

One fundamental source of landscape meaning is the tradition of cultural pastorals in Western art. As pastoral heritage, any landscape is imbued with humans’ dreams and aspirations concerning the relationship between humanity and nature. […] Imaging a landscape is a way of seeing the land, which creatively plays out humanity’s existential liminality in relation to nature as the distinctly Other. It is a world where humans can develop their passion for belonging. (2018)

For Fiskevold and Geelmuyden, then, pastoral literature plays an important role in our construction of a meaningful relationship with the landscape around us. 

Some of the earliest literary appearances of pastoral themes can be found in Hesiod’s Works and Days (c. 700 BCE), particularly with its depiction of a mythical “Golden Age” in which humanity lived in perfect unity with nature. Theocritus is another ancient Greek poet often identified with the beginnings of pastoral literature. As Gifford argues, 

The literary form originates in the Idylls of Theocritus (c.316–260) […]. For the sophisticated and decadent court at Alexandria, Theocritus wrote a series of poems, based upon the shepherds’ song competitions in his native Sicily, that he titled the Idylls. For the writer this was a poetry of nostalgia to set against his present life which was actually that of an Alexandrian scholar. What is offered to his patron is a vision of simplicity of life in contact with nature that is vividly evoked with the artifice of poetry […]. (2019)

Gifford highlights, however, that Theocritus actually “retains a strong and often amusing strain of realism throughout the Idylls” — the shepherds are acutely aware of the tasks that they must fulfill, as well as the dangers of going barefoot in the thorny landscape. The Idylls, then, may not be as “idyllic” as we might assume:

the strong presence of labour in the Idylls is rather ironic since this title has given us the term ‘idyllic’ which has come to be associated with the pastoral. The word ‘idyll’ derives from the Greek eidyllion, meaning a small picture, and characterises a short poem of idealised description. (Gifford, 2019)

Theocritus set his pastoral visions in Arcadia, which, as well as being a real region of Greece, was regarded in Greek mythology as the home of the god Pan and other supernatural entities such as nymphs. 

Alongside Theocritus, Virgil is regarded as the most significant figure in the pastoral literature of antiquity. In keeping with his status as the most famous ancient Roman poet, Virgil had a seismic influence on the history of Western literature (particularly with the Renaissance). Inspired by Theocritus, Virgil’s Eclogues (c. 44–38 BCE) established many of pastoral literature’s defining characteristics: the vision of an unspoiled Arcadia, the shepherds’ life of innocence and simplicity, and the uneasy dynamic between rural and urban life. Virgil’s pastoral poetry is also infused with political and social concerns, which encroach on the rural idyll. 

Although pastoral themes were far from absent in the literature of the Middle Ages, pastoral literature really bloomed with the Renaissance in Europe and the many imitations of Virgil’s Eclogues which then appeared. The work of the Italian poet Mantuan was particularly influential on the proliferation of English pastoral literature in the sixteenth century, with contributing writers including Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare, among others. Many of Shakespeare’s plays are infused with pastoral elements, with As You Like It (c. 1599) chief among them. Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender (1579) is one of the most influential pastoral works from this period, and Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” (1599) is one of the most famous pastoral poems of all. Its opening lines, in which a shepherd paints a picture of pastoral bliss for his beloved, are often cited:

Complete Poems

With its description of simple love and contentment amidst nature, Marlowe’s poem conveys the pastoral spirit in a distilled form. 

Moving into the seventeenth century, John Milton’s pastoral elegy “Lycidas” (1638) represents a significant pastoral moment, alongside his monumental epic Paradise Lost (1667) with its focus on the lost Garden of Eden. Although pastoral literature was declining in popularity by the eighteenth century, Alexander Pope’s Pastorals (1709) are worth mentioning here. Romantic literature, which arose from the end of the eighteenth century, then engaged with pastoralism through its intense idealization of the natural world.

The Romantic poet William Wordsworth, in particular, is noted for his development of pastoralism in poems which meditate on his beloved Lake District in Cumbria, England. Gifford argues that, in works such as The Prelude (1850), Wordworth’s portrayal of the shepherd subverts “the patronising simplification of a common pastoral convention of the rural worker as bucolic clown” — instead, Wordsworth’s shepherds possess “a maturity, integrity and dignity that is both produced by his work and extends beyond it” (2019). Wordsworth’s shepherds belong to a very different landscape than that of their classical counterparts, and the nature of the pastoral here is not so much beautiful as sublime:

[Wordsworth] is constantly aware that his contemporaries more usually move under skies less generous and serene than those of the ancient Mediterranean, in landscapes of wintry snows, hard labour, terrifying winds and an overawing solitude. In the poet’s idealizing imagination, the actual Shepherd assumes a giant shape: he becomes, beheld single against the sky, ‘A solitary object and sublime’. (Peter V. Marinelli, Pastoral, 2017) 

We have only sketched a brief outline of pastoral literature’s far-reaching influence throughout history here. For more detail, the further reading section at the end of this guide is a good place to start exploring Perlego’s extensive coverage of the topic. 

Pastoralism still holds a place in our collective imagination. In The Environmental Imagination, Lawrence Buell argues that

The Environmental Imagination

Insofar as some form of pastoralism is part of the conceptual apparatus of all persons with western educations interested in leading more nature-sensitive lives, it is to be expected that pastoralism will be part of the unavoidable ground-condition of most of those who read this book. (1996)

In Buell’s view, pastoralism has become an intrinsic part of us, and it represents “a species of cultural equipment that western thought has for more than two millennia been unable to do without” (1996).

Marinelli agrees that pastoralism does still exert an influence today, but he stresses that “pastoral” has now become a “very broad and very general term”:

For us it has come to mean any literature which deals with the complexities of human life against a background of simplicity. All that is necessary is that memory and imagination should conspire to render a not too distant past of comparative innocence as more pleasurable than a harsh present, overwhelmed either by the growth of technology or the shadows of advancing age. (2017) 

In Marinelli’s view, this broader sense of pastoralism gains increasing currency as civilization continues to erode natural landscapes, which become “as a consequence daily more precious as a projection of our desires for simplicity” (2017). As the environmental crisis accelerates with each passing year, critics such as Gifford argue that “there is [...] a strong sense that the environmental movement is producing a revival of interest in the writing of new pastoral literature” (2019). On contemporary British writing in particular, for example, Deborah Lilley argues that

the latest iteration of pastoral to emerge [...] is sparked by and shaped – re-formed – around environmental crisis. Pastoral’s conceptions of the human and the natural, the country and the city, the past and the present, and the relationships between them are challenged by the uncertainties that environmental changes bring. (The New Pastoral in Contemporary British Writing, 2019)

The pastoralism of today is closely related to ecocriticism and climate fiction. In Octavia E. Butler’s climate fiction novel The Parable of the Sower (1993), for example, there is a profound focus on the importance of community and harmony with nature amidst environmental breakdown and urban decay. While the desire for a simple life in nature is still present in contemporary literature, this is now overshadowed by the unavoidable realization that climate change represents an existential threat to our collective rural idyll.  

The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment (2013) edited by Louise Westling

What Else Is Pastoral? (2011) by Ken Hiltner

Pastoral poetry of the English Renaissance : An anthology (2016) edited by Sukanta Chaudhuri

The Future of Environmental Criticism (2009) by Lawrence Buell 

Arcadian Visions (2015) by Allan R. Ruff  

Alpers, P. (2011) What Is Pastoral? The University of Chicago Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1842518/what-is-pastoral-pdf 

Bate, J. (2013) Romantic Ecology. Taylor & Francis. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1678482/romantic-ecology-routledge-revivals-wordsworth-and-the-environmental-tradition-pdf 

Poetry Articles

What is Victorian Literature?

What is Pastoral Literature?

What is Imagism?

What is Free Verse?

What is New Criticism?

What is Modernist Literature?