Learn about five English authors who are representative of Victorian literature
J.E. Luebering, director of Encyclopædia Britannica's Core Editorial Group, discussing five writers he considers representative of English literature during the 19th century.
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
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Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.Clifton Fadiman examines the inspiration Charles Dickens's work took from the milieu of Victorian England, with its startling contrasts of morality and hypocrisy, splendor and squalor, prosperity and poverty. This video is a 1962 production of Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation.
Transcript
There are five writers that I think best illustrate the Victorian era. Most important is Charles Dickens. A central figure, a journalist, an editor, and most importantly a novelist, who's also a public speaker. Almost as important is Mary Ann Evans, who also wrote under the name George Eliot. She was as crucially important as a novelist and wrote perhaps the greatest of Victorian novels, called "Middlemarch." A third writer is William Makepeace Thackeray. His "Vanity Fair" is perhaps one of the richest and most complex views of the Victorian period written. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, she was a poet who worked in an era that was pointedly devoid of poetry. And finally, Wilkie Collins, who is the inventor, I would say, of the modern thriller. They give us great insight into the Victorian era because of the richness of their descriptions, the vibrancy of their narratives, and the--just the skill with which they were working as novelists.