page_title: Victorian literature
section_title: Science, philosophy and discovery
hierarchical_section_title: Victorian literature / Science, philosophy and discovery
caption_attribution_description: "Charles Darwin, aged 51." According to the son of Charles Darwin, Francis Darwin, this portrait is by Messrs. Maull and Fox&#91;1&#93;; he writes that "the date of the photograph is probably 1854; it is, however, impossible to be certain on this point, the books of Messrs. Henry Maull and John Fox having been destroyed by fire." A photo like this one has been used in http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CharlesDarwinHuntingSnark.jpg
context_page_description: Victorian literature is literature, mainly written in English, during the reign of Queen Victoria. It was preceded by Romanticism and followed by the Edwardian era.
  While in the preceding Romantic period, poetry had tended to dominate, the novel became the defining literary art form of the Victorian period. Charles Dickens dominated the first part of Victoria's reign and most rightly can be called "The King of Victorian Literature". His first novel, The Pickwick Papers, was published in 1836, and his last Our Mutual Friend between 1864–65. William Thackeray's most famous work Vanity Fair appeared in 1848, and the three Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne, also published significant works in the 1840s. A major later novel was George Eliot's Middlemarch, while the major novelist of the later part of Queen Victoria's reign was Thomas Hardy, whose first published novel, Desperate Remedies, appeared in 1871 and his last, Jude the Obscure, in 1895.
context_section_description: The Victorian era was an important time for the development of science and the Victorians had a mission to describe and classify the entire natural world.  Much of this writing does not rise to the level of being regarded as literature but one book in particular, Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, remains famous.  The theory of evolution contained within the work challenged many of the ideas the Victorians had about themselves and their place in the world. Although it took a long time to be widely accepted, it would dramatically change subsequent thought and literature. Much of the work of popularizing Darwin's theories was done by his younger contemporary Thomas Henry Huxley, who wrote widely on the subject.
  A number of other non-fiction works of the era made their mark on the literature of the period.  The philosophical writings of John Stuart Mill covered logic, economics, liberty and utilitarianism. The large and influential histories of Thomas Carlyle: The French Revolution, A History and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History permeated political thought at the time. The writings of Thomas Babington Macaulay on English history helped codify the Whig narrative that dominated the historiography for many years. John Ruskin wrote a number of highly influential works on art and the history of art and championed such contemporary figures as J. M. W. Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites. The religious writer John Henry Newman's Oxford Movement aroused intense debate within the Church of England, exacerbated by Newman's own conversion to Catholicism, which he wrote about in his autobiography Apologia Pro Vita Sua.
  A number of monumental reference works were published in this era, most notably the Oxford English Dictionary which would eventually become the most important historical dictionary of the English language. Also published during the later Victorian era were the Dictionary of National Biography and the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.
caption: Charles Darwin's work On the Origin of Species affected society, throughout the Victoria era, and still does today.
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