In the previous period, the Romantic era, there was a huge turn towards imagination as the people “revolted” against reason and sense. But in the Victorian Era, people rebelled against such thoughts and were much more realistic, as evidenced by any typical Victorian novel such Hard Times (circa 1854) by Charles Dickens. While the novel does have a dramatized plot line and humor incorporated in it, but Dickens bluntly and truthfully portrays what urban life was like for those living during that time period. Not only that, Dickens uses the novel to demonstrate and highlight the economic and social pressures of the era.
The Romantic Era was also known for its heavy emphasis on the idea that nature is transformative and has the power to change people. But, the Victorian Era reacted to such ideas with realism and focused on the notion that a person, not nature, can create solutions to better a problem, and improve the individual lives of the people via those solutions. Mary Ann Evans, better known by her pen name George Eliot, wrote novels well-known for their realism and insight into how to solve the social problems of the era. Similarly, another famous writer, Anthony Trollope wrote a series of novels that analyzed the social and political life of England during that era. Later, at the close of the Victorian Era, it was commonly understood that a primary method of analyzing problems and proposing solutions was through the novel.
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