With Christmas season upon us, book lovers the world over must think yet again of that familiar holiday story by Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol. To skip the overview and go directly to the Restoration and 18th Century Timeline, or to any specific section of it, use the links just above “Continue Reading.” For an overview of the culture, authors, themes, and major works of this prolific and seminal era, click the “Continue Reading” link under the London river view painting. Join us for a look at some background information on the literature of this era that can help readers understand and enjoy it. Much literature focused on moral questions: what values are right, true, good, and everlasting? Who on the public scene, especially writers and politicians, are following them and who is breaking them, and what are the consequences? Based on these values that are good for people and good for society as a whole, how do we judge our politicians, writers, and dramatists in light of these truths? What made people tick, and especially, how can we formulate those truisms? In much of the literature of the era, writers did not just document their own times, but sought for general truths that applied to people at all times, everywhere. This “long 18th century” has been given many names: The Age of Reason, The Age of Enlightenment, The Age of Individualism, and The Age of Empiricism. Historians and students of culture find a common quest over these years to apply human reason to ultimate questions. Lasting from 1660 to the late 1700s, the era often referred to as “The Long Century” is an incredibly rich period, not only for innovations in literature, but also for developments in philosophy, science, mathematics, and political thought. Our newest Timeline and Reading List features literature from the English Enlightenment. Literature of the English Enlightenment: Courage to Use Your Own Reason John Dryden, major English author of the Restoration and early 18th century, and family.
The end of the era brought great dramatists and playwrights, especially Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, who used side-splitting humor and irony to challenge over-earnest Victorian values they thought to be hypocritical. Other poets focused on raising readers’ awareness of social problems, or pushed back against an over-mechanized and coarsening age, singing the glories of hand craftsmanship and “art for art’s sake.”
Many poets continued the Romantic era focus on Nature and the Middle Ages, while adding a new fascination with the Italian Renaissance. Victorian poetry is no less famous, with works like Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” and Browning’s “My Last Duchess” still anthology staples. The last third of the century brought a flowering of new fictional genres: “sensation” fiction, science fiction, supernatural fiction, detective fiction, and adventure “lost world” fiction-genres that writers and readers still enjoy today. Victorian novels such as Middlemarch, Bleak House, and Tess of the D’Urbervilles still appear on critics’ lists of all-time best English novels. In literature, the harvest of this period is rich. The development of the Steam Railway system and the telegraph and, later, the telephone, connected people formerly divided by great distances, enabling the spread of modern culture. The Industrial Revolution kicked into high gear, bringing rural workers from small villages to gather in big cities, shifting an economy formerly based on agriculture and handicraft industries into one based on high-volume manufacturing. Now we think of the Victorian Age as quaint and old-fashioned, but in reality it was the era in which our own modern age began. The English Victorian era, dating from about 1832 to 1901, gave birth to many of the works we now call “classic,” some of the best literature ever written in English. “The Fair Toxophilites” (lovers of archery) by William Frith. Archery was popular with Victorian women, one of the few sports considered proper for women.
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