The English Victorian novel

The Victorian novel appeared first in serial form, chapter by chapter in monthly magazines, which explains its cliffhangers, its countless secondary characters and its length. Dickens installed the orphan of the London slums, George Eliot examined a provincial town where everyone fails at ambition, Thackeray made an unscrupulous social climber his heroine, Emily Brontë wrote a passion that outlives death. Beneath the displayed respectability, these books argue about money, marriage and the place of women.

works 8

• NovelOliver TwistCharles Dickens · 1838London, its workhouses and its gangs of child thieves, through the fate of an orphan.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelWuthering HeightsEmily Brontë · 1847A servant tells a passing tenant the story of the house next door, and of those who have lived in it.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelJane EyreCharlotte Brontë · 1847A poor orphan without beauty tells her own life, from childhood to her position as a governess.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelVanity FairWilliam Makepeace Thackeray · 1848Two friends enter the world together, one with a dowry, the other with nothing but her intelligence.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelThe WardenAnthony Trollope · 1855A man learns from the newspaper that the income he lives on is regarded as theft.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelWives and DaughtersElizabeth Gaskell · 1866A doctor's daughter sees a stepmother and a stepsister she did not choose come into the house.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelMiddlemarchGeorge Eliot · 1871A town in the Midlands on the eve of a reform, and a few ambitions rubbing against one another.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelTess of the d'UrbervillesThomas Hardy · 1891A pedlar's daughter sent to claim kinship with rich relatives who are not her kin.LiteraturePublic domain