• The Victorian Novel: a popular genre that reflected the social changes and values of the Victorian age, often with a moral and social responsibility1.
• Early Victorian Novelists: writers who described the urban and rural life, the different social classes and professions, and the evils and injustices of society, such as Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, and the Bronte sisters.
• Late Victorian Novelists: writers who were more critical and realistic, influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution and Positivism, and experimented with new narrative techniques, such as Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and Lewis Carroll.
• The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood: a group of poets and painters who reacted against the artificiality of the art of the period and wanted to return to the purity and simplicity of the medieval art and legends2.
• Aestheticism: an anti-Victorian trend that considered art as an end in itself, detached from any morals, and led by Oscar Wilde.
• Edgar Allan Poe: an American writer who mixed psychological insight with extreme ratiocination, and explored the themes of madness, death, and the grotesque.
  • Victorian literature: The literature produced during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901), which reflects the social, economic, and moral changes of the era1.
  • Four general characteristics: Literature of this age tends to be closer to daily life, moralistic, idealistic, and influenced by science and evolution2.
  • The style of the Victorian novel: Victorian novels tend to be idealized portraits of difficult lives with a central moral lesson, but also become more complex and realistic as the century progresses3.
  • Significant Victorian novelists and poets: A long list of influential and diverse writers, such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, and H. G. Wells.