Victorian Period

Showing 1–24 of 131 results

  • Agnes Grey

    Agnes Grey was one of a trio of novels that defined the “governess novel” in 1847 and 1848. Alongside Jane Eyre and Vanity Fair, Agnes…

  • Modern Love

    The Victorian writer George Meredith completed Modern Love, his most famous poem, in the months following his wife’s death in 1861. The series of 16-line…

  • The Dead Alive

    In this 1874 novella by Wilkie Collins, the celebrated British writer of sensation fiction tells the tale of two brothers sentenced to be executed for…

  • London Labour and the London Poor

    Produced between 1850 and 1862, London Labour and the London Poor is one of the most significant examples of nineteenth-century oral history. The collection teems…

  • When the Sleeper Wakes

    As George Orwell wrote in 1940, “Everyone who has ever read When the Sleeper Wakes remembers it.” Graham, the “sleeper” of the title, falls into…

  • The Broadview Anthology of British Literature: Concise Volume B – Third Edition

    The two-volume Broadview Anthology of British Literature: Concise Edition provides an attractive alternative to the full six-volume anthology. Though much more compact, the Concise Edition…

  • The Library Window

    In this Victorian tale, a young woman recuperating at her aunt’s house in a Scottish town is spending a good deal of time looking out…

  • Queen Eleanor and Fair Rosamond

    Queen Eleanor and Fair Rosamond—among the most compelling and thought-provoking of Margaret Oliphant’s works of short fiction—tells the story of Mr. and Mrs. Lycett-Landon, “two…

  • The Invisible Man

    The Invisible Man stands out as possessing one of the most complicated heroes, or perhaps anti-heroes, in literature. A thoroughly unlikeable character, the Invisible Man…

  • A City Girl

    In April 1888, Friedrich Engels wrote a letter to the English novelist and journalist Margaret Harkness, expressing his appreciation for her first novel, A City…

  • The Half-Caste

    Dinah Mulock Craik’s The Half-Caste concerns the coming-of-age of its title character, the mixed-race Zillah Le Poer, daughter of an English merchant and an Indian…

  • The Sorceress of the Strand and Other Stories

    In 1898, The Strand Magazine, one of the most influential publications of the Victorian fin de siècle, deemed best-selling author and editor L.T. Meade a…

  • Ann Veronica

    H.G. Wells’s 1909 novel centres on the coming of age of the spirited Ann Veronica, who runs away from her sheltered suburban home to live…

  • Black Beauty

    Continuously in print and translated into multiple languages since it was first published, Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty is a classic work of children’s literature and…

  • Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass

    First published in 1865, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland began as a story told to Alice Liddell and her two sisters on a boating trip in…

  • The Philanderer

    The second of Shaw’s “unpleasant” plays, written in 1893, published in 1898, but not performed until 1905, The Philanderer is subtitled “A Topical Comedy.” The…

  • Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – Third Edition

    First published in 1886 as a “shilling shocker,” Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde takes the basic struggle between good and evil and adds to the…

  • Salome

    Salome is Oscar Wilde’s most experimental—and controversial—play. In its own time, the play, written in French, was described by a reviewer as “an arrangement in…

  • Domestic Manners of the Americans

    Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans, complemented by Auguste Hervieu’s satiric illustrations, took the transatlantic world by storm in 1832. An unusual combination of…

  • The Princess and the Goblin and Other Fairy Tales

    George MacDonald’s Victorian fairy tales transformed the genre of fantasy. His work also shaped the next generation of both children’s literature and modernism: C.S. Lewis…

  • In Memoriam

    Published in 1850, In Memoriam won its author the Poet Laureateship of Britain and received widespread attention from critics and reviewers, as well as from…

  • The Octoroon

    Regarded by Bernard Shaw as a master of the theatre, Dion Boucicault was arguably the most important figure in drama in North America and in…

  • Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Selected Poetry

    A century ago Tennyson had begun to be dismissed as a poet whose work embodied everything the modern world was looking to leave behind. He…

  • A Child of the Jago

    “Learn to read and write, learn all you can, learn cunning, spare nobody and stop at nothing. … Do your devilmost … for the Jago’s…