Victorian Literature, 1832-1900

INTRODUCTION

The following list was designed to guide your study of the Victorian period, its literature, history, and culture.  I suggest that you begin by reading one or two of the histories noted at the end of the list.  The recommended secondary sources will introduce you to the vast number of critical and theoretical studies of the Victorians; begin with these texts but then feel free to seek out the commentaries that you personally find most helpful.  Consult anthologies (e.g., Norton’s or Longman’s) for an overview.  It is essential, however, that you read the poetry in critical editions (so you are in a position to evaluate the anthologies from which you will likely one day be teaching) and find good, carefully edited editions of the novel because footnotes and introductory material will enrich your understanding, particularly of the novel’s historical, cultural, and philosophical contexts.

POETRY AND NON-FICTION PROSE

• Macaulay "Milton," "Southey's Colloquies," History of England, Vol. I, Ch. III: "England in 1685"
• Thomas Carlyle "Characteristics," Sartor Resartus, On Heroes and Hero Worship, Past and Present, "Shooting Niagara: And After?"
• John Henry Newman Apologia pro Vita Sua
• John Stuart Mill "Bentham," "Coleridge," On Liberty, Autobiography, The Subjection of Women
• Alfred Tennyson, major poems, including  "The Lady of Shalott," "Oenone," "The Palace of Art," "The Lotos Eaters," "Ulysses," "Tithonus," The Two Voices, "Break, Break, Break," "Locksley Hall," The Princess, In Memoriam, Maud, "Flower in the Crannied Wall," "The Higher Pantheism," Idylls of the King, "Merlin and the Gleam," "Crossing the Bar"
• Emily Bronte, major poems
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning, major poems, including Aurora Leigh
• Robert Browning, major poems, including "My Last Duchess," "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister," "Porphyria's Lover," "Pictor Ignotus," "The Lost Leader," "The Bishop Orders His Tomb," "Love Among the Ruins," "A Woman's Last Word," "Fra Lippo Lippi," "A Toccata of Galuppi's," "By the Fire-side," "An Epistle . . . Karshish," "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," "The Statue and the Bust," "How It Strikes a Contemporary," "Bishop Blougram's Apology," "Memorabilia," "Andrea del Sarto," "Saul," "Cleon," "Two in the Campagna," "Abt Vogler," "Rabbi Ben Ezra," "Caliban Upon Setebos," "Prospice," The Ring and the Book, "House," "Why I am a Liberal"
• John Ruskin, Modern Painters, Stones of Venice,  Praeterita
• Matthew Arnold, major poems and nonfiction prose, including "Mycerinus," "To a Friend," The Strayed Reveller, "In Harmony with Nature," "The Forsaken Merman," "Resignation," Empedocles on Etna, "Isolation. To Marguerite," "To Marguerite--Continued," "Memorial Verses," "A Summer Night," "The Scholar-Gipsy," "Thyrsis," "Dover Beach," Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse," "Preface to Poems (1853)," "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," "The Literary Influence of Academics," The Study of Poetry," "Wordsworth," "Byron," "Shelley," "Keats," "Literature and Science," Culture and Anarchy
• Dante G. Rossetti, major poems
• Christina Rossetti, major poems
• Augusta Webster, “A Castaway,” “By the Looking-Glass,” “Faded,” “Circe”
• William Morris, major poems,  News from Nowhere
• Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, The Descent of Man
• Edward Fitzgerald The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
• Algernon C. Swinburne, major poems, including "A Ballad of Life," "Laus Veneris," "Anactoria," "Hermaphroditus," "Faustine," "The Leper," "Dolores," "The Higher Pantheism in a Nutshell," "A Nympholept"
• Walter Pater The Renaissance, from Appreciations: "Style," "Wordsworth," "Coleridge," "Rossetti"
• Gerard M. Hopkins, major poems, including "God's Grandeur," "The Sea and the Skylark," "The Windhover," "Pied Beauty," "Hurrahing in Harvest," "The Caged Skylark," "Andromeda," "Felix Randal," "Spring and Fall," "As Kingfishers Catch Fire," "Not, I'll Not, Carrion Comfort," "No Worst, There is None," "Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord," "Author's Preface to MS. Poems (1876-1889)"
• Rudyard Kipling, major poems
• Amy Levy, “Xantippe,” “A Minor Poet,” “Magdalen”
• Oscar Wilde "The Decay of Lying," "The Critic as Artist” ;  poems
• Edmund Gosse, Father and Son

FICTION

• W. M. Thackeray Vanity Fair
• Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford or North and South
• Charles Dickens, Bleak House, Hard Times, and at least one additional novel (e.g., David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend)
• Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone or The Woman in White
• Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers
• Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre and Villette or Shirley
• Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
• George Eliot, Middlemarch and another novel: e.g., Mill on the Floss, Adam Bede, Daniel Deronda
• Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure, and another novel, e.g., The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Woodlanders
• George Gissing, New Grub Street or The Odd Women
• Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm
• Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

 SHORT FICTION

•  Victorian Short Stories, edited by Dennis Denisoff
• Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin-de-Siecle, edited by Elaine Showalter

HELPFUL SECONDARY SOURCES

• Jerome H. Buckley The Victorian Temper
• John Holloway The Victorian Sage
• Graham Hough The Last Romantics
• Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience
• J. Hillis Miller, The Disappearance of God
• Deirdre David, Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy
• Angela Leighton, Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart
• George Levine, Darwin and the Novelists
• George Levine, ed., Realism and Representation
• Linda Dowling, Language and Decadence in the Victorian fin de siecle
• Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness

CLASSIC HISTORIES OF THE PERIOD

• G. Kitson Clark, The Making of Victorian England
• Robert Langbaum, ed., The Victorian Age: Essays in History and In Social and Literary Criticism, 2nd ed. rev.
• G. M. Young, Victorian England: Portrait of an Age
• Richard D. Altick, Victorian People and Ideas
• E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class
• Martha Vicinus, ed., Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age