The Victorian Period and the 19th Century (1832-1901 CE)

VI. The Victorian Period and the 19th Century (1832-1901 CE)

Writings from the period of Queen Victoria's reign include sentimental novels. British writers include Elizabeth Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, and the Brontë sisters. Pre-Raphaelites, like the Rossetti siblings and William Morris, idealize and long for the morality of the medieval world.

The end of the Victorian Period is marked by the intellectual movements of Aestheticism and "the Decadence" in the writings of Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. In America, Naturalist writers like Stephen Crane flourished, as did early free verse poets like Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.