Victorian Entertainment

The Society Novel
The society novel existed for new middle classes who might have mingled with the aristocracy. It went into exhaustive detail on dress, food, furniture, stately homes, conversation and behaviour in every situation. It created innocent heroines where evil must be punished and virtue rewarded. The circulating library provided a wide variety of books for the Victorians who could afford the fee they charged.

During the Victorian period many great writers were producing works we are still studying today. Here is a partial list:

Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)
Jane Austen (1775-1817)
William Blake (1757-1827
Anne Bronte (1820-1849)
Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855)
Emily Bronte (1818-1818)
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (
Robert Browning (1812-1889)
George Gordon Byron (1788-1824)
Lewis Carroll (1832-1898)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (117-1834)
William Wilkie Collins (1824-1889)
Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
George Eliot (1819-1880)
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
Henry James (1843-1864)
John Keats (1795-1821)
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
Herman Melville (1819-1891)
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-1894)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882)
John Ruskin (1819-1900)
Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851)
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)
Abraham "Bram" Stoker (1847-1912)
Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)