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The Victorian Era: The Reconciliation of Romanticism and Modern Life

The Victorian era — the long reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1901 — was the great period in which the Romantic inheritance was reconciled with the new industrial, scientific, and political realities of the modern world. The major Victorian writers, artists, composers, and thinkers — Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, the Pre-Raphaelites, Ruskin, Carlyle, Mill, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, and many others — were all, in different ways, working in conscious relation to the Romantic tradition, even as they tried to come to terms with the very different conditions of their own age. The Victorian era also produced some of the great continuations of the Romantic project: the Gothic Revival in architecture; the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in painting and poetry; the early conservation movement, treated in our page on Romanticism and environmentalism; and the great Victorian novel, which was in many ways the most successful literary form of the nineteenth century.

This page offers a structured introduction to the Victorian era — its main intellectual currents, its major figures, and its relation to the Romantic inheritance.

The Victorian Inheritance

The Victorians inherited a complex legacy from the Romantic period. On the one hand, they inherited the great Romantic works — the poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats; the novels of Scott, Austen, and Mary Shelley; the philosophy of Coleridge, Carlyle, and Mill; the paintings of Turner, Constable, and the early Pre-Raphaelites; the music of Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, and the early Verdi and Wagner. On the other hand, they inherited the Romantic tradition of social criticism, religious questioning, political radicalism, and the new emphasis on individual conscience.

The great Victorian achievement was to take this inheritance and adapt it to the new conditions of the industrial and scientific age. The result was one of the great periods of Western literature, art, and thought.

The Major Victorian Writers

The major Victorian writers include:

Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) — the great Victorian poet, author of In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850), The Idylls of the King (1859–88), Maud (1855), the early poems of the 1830s, and the late plays. Tennyson’s poetry combines Romantic intensity with Victorian decorum, and his work became a model for a whole generation of later poets.
Robert Browning (1812–1889) — the great Victorian poet of the dramatic monologue, author of Men and Women (1855), The Ring and the Book (1868–69), and a vast body of shorter poems.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861) — the great Victorian poet of love and political engagement, author of Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and Aurora Leigh (1856).
Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) — the great Victorian poet and critic, author of The Scholar-Gipsy (1853), Dover Beach (1867), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and the influential Essays in Criticism (1865, 1888).
The Pre-Raphaelite poets — Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, William Morris, and Algernon Charles Swinburne — treated in detail in our page on The Pre-Raphaelites.
Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) — the great Victorian prose writer, essayist, and historian, author of Sartor Resartus (1833–34), The French Revolution (1837), and the great lecture series On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1840). Carlyle’s insistence on the role of the great individual in history, and his attack on the materialism of the age, were deeply Romantic.
John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) — the great Victorian philosopher and political thinker, author of On Liberty (1859), The Subjection of Women (1869), and Utilitarianism (1863). Mill was a leading figure of the liberal tradition, but his thought had important Romantic elements.
John Ruskin (1819–1900) — the great Victorian art critic, social critic, and theorist of architecture, author of The Stones of Venice (1851–53), Modern Painters (1843–60), and Unto This Last (1860). Ruskin’s social criticism and his attack on industrial civilization were deeply Romantic.
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) — the great Victorian novelist, author of Oliver Twist (1837–39), David Copperfield (1849–50), Bleak House (1852–53), Great Expectations (1860–61), and a vast body of other works. Dickens’s novels are deeply engaged with the great social questions of the age.
George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) (1819–1880) — the great Victorian novelist, author of Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Middlemarch (1871–72), and other major works.
William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863) — author of Vanity Fair (1847–48) and the great comic novel of the early Victorian period.
Anthony Trollope (1815–1882) — author of the great Barsetshire and Palliser novels of mid-Victorian English life.
The Brontës — Charlotte (1816–1855), Emily (1818–1848), and Anne (1820–1849) — authors of the great mid-century novels of intense Romantic feeling, including Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
Wilkie Collins (1824–1889) — the great Victorian sensation novelist, author of The Woman in White (1859–60) and The Moonstone (1868).
Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) — the great late-Victorian novelist and poet, author of Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895).
George Meredith (1828–1909), Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894), Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) — and many other important Victorian writers.

The Victorian Visual Arts

The Victorian visual arts were, in many ways, a continuation of the Romantic project. The major Victorian artists include:

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood — treated in detail in our page on The Pre-Raphaelites.
John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Ford Madox Brown, Arthur Hughes — the major Pre-Raphaelite painters.
The later Victorian painters — Frederic Leighton, G.F. Watts, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, John William Waterhouse, and the great tradition of Victorian academic painting.
The American Victorian painters — Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, and the great tradition of late nineteenth-century American painting.

The Victorian Architecture

The Victorian era was the great period of the Gothic Revival in architecture, with the rebuilding of the Houses of Parliament in London by Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin, the construction of countless churches, universities, and country houses in the medieval style, and the influential writings of Pugin, Ruskin, and William Morris. The Gothic Revival was a major expression of the Romantic conviction that the medieval past was a richer and more humane world than the industrial present.

The Victorian Music

The Victorian era saw the great continuation of the Romantic musical tradition. The major Victorian composers include:

Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900) — of Gilbert and Sullivan fame, the great composer of the English comic opera.
Edward Elgar (1857–1934) — the great late-Victorian and Edwardian composer, author of the Enigma Variations (1899), the Pomp and Circumstance Marches (1901–30), and the great oratorios.
Hubert Parry (1848–1918), Charles Villiers Stanford (1852–1924), Frederick Delius (1862–1934) — and the other major English and European late-Romantic composers of the period.
The American tradition — Edward MacDowell, Amy Beach, and the other late-Romantic American composers.

The Long Influence of the Victorian Era

The Victorian reconciliation of the Romantic inheritance with the conditions of the modern age is one of the great cultural achievements of the nineteenth century. The Victorian novel, the Pre-Raphaelite painting, the Gothic Revival architecture, the early conservation movement, the great Victorian philosophy and social criticism — all of these are major contributions to modern culture. The Victorian legacy, like the Romantic legacy, remains a powerful and pervasive part of our cultural inheritance.