Victorian Era Synthesis - Asher P3 Team 7

The Victorian Period was a reaction to the intuition and feeling of the Romanticism Era. During the Victorian Era, the rapidly growing middle and lower classes moved to the city and thus influenced many writers. The authors of the Victorian Era, for the most part, wrote thickly plotted and lengthy works that included lots of characters to entertain their readers. This is clear in Anthony Trollepe’s famed Barsetshire novels, where he describes the lives of the people of the country town of Barsetshirte. Trollepe’s detailed account of each town member, goes on and on about the interesting and fascinating life of these people. His work is described as “complete appreciation of the usual,” the very essence of Victorian literature. Trollepe make the life of normal people interesting by sharing with the reader detailed accounts of action in the countryside town. As people grew tired of the emotional literature of the Romanticism Era, they inspired work that was creative and took their mind off the hardships of reality. This comes across in the fantasy worlds that mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) created. In his complex books such as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Dodgson sweeps the reader off their feet and brings them to another dimension. Dodgson uses incredible amounts of fantasy and humor to take the mind of the common man off of his hardships. However, literature of the time also held a sense of moral righteousness. An example of this is Oscar Wilde’s novel Picture of Dorian Gray. This horror story follows the life of Dorian Gray as he slowly degrades into believing that he has turned ugly. This story, like many of the time, focuses around a moral; in this case it is the unimportance of good looks. Fueled and inspired by the pervious era, writers looked into the life around them for inspiration and ideas. The literature that came out of the Victorian era was that of detailed plots and moralistic lessons which gave the reader a sense of rectitude.