Victorian Reading List

*Required Reading

*Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy

*Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. Lady Audley’s Secret

*Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre

*Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights

*Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. Aurora Leigh

*Browning, Robert. “Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola on God,” “My Last Duchess,” “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister,” “Pictor Ignotus,” “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed’s Church,” “Love among the Ruins,” “Fra Lippo Lippi,” “Andrea del Sarto,” “Bishop Blougram’s Apology,” “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” “An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician,” “Cleon,” “Caliban upon Setebos,” “A Death in the Desert”

*Carlyle, Thomas. Sartor Resartus, Past and Present

*Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone

*Dickens, Charles. Bleak House, Great Expectations

*Eliot, George. Middlemarch

*Gaskell, Elizabeth. North and South

*Hardy, Thomas. Tess of d’Urbervilles

*Hopkins, Gerard Manley. “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” “Binsey Poplars,” “Carrion Comfort,” “The Windhover,” “Tom’s Garland,” “I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, Not Day,” “No Worst, There Is None,” “Pitched Past Pitch of Grief,” “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” “Dragonflies Draw Flame,” “That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection,” “God’s Grandeur,” “Felix Randal,” “Pied Beauty,” “Spring and Fall,” “Harry Ploughman”

*Meredith, George. The Egoist

*Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty, The Subjection of Women

*Morris, William. “The Defence of Guenevere”

*Pater, Walter. The Renaissance

*Pinero, Arthur Wing. The Second Mrs. Tanqueray

*Rossetti, Christina. “Goblin Market,” “The Prince’s Progress,” “Song [‘When I am dead, my dearest’],” “In an Artist’s Studio,” “Up-Hill,” “The Convent Threshold,” “Remember,” “Winter Rain,” “My Dream,” “Winter: My Secret,” “A Better Resurrection,” “Christian and Jew: A Dialogue,” “The Iniquity of the Fathers upon the Children [Under the Rose],” “The Lowest Room,” “A Christmas Carol [In the bleak mid-winter],” “A Birthday”

*Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. “Jenny,” “The Blessed Damozel,” “Troy Town,” “Sister Helen,” “My Sister’s Sleep,” “Dante at Verona,” “The Burden of Nineveh,” “Eden Bower”

*Ruskin, John. “Of Queens’ Gardens,” “Of King’s Treasuries” (in Sesame and Lilies), “Of Ideas of Beauty,” (in Part III in Volume II of Modern Painters), “Of Pathetic Fallacy” (in chapter XII of Part IV in Volume III of Modern Painters)

*Schreiner, Olive. The Story of an African Farm.

*Stoker, Bram. Dracula.

*Swinburne, Algernon Charles. “Faustine,” “Dolores,” “Hymn to Prosperpine,” “Laus Veneris,” “The Triumph of Time,” “Hermaphroditus,” “Anactoria,” “Fragoletta,” “Sapphics,” “Sestina,” “Hertha,” “Tiresias,” “To Walt Whitman in America,” “The Higher Pantheism in a Nutshell,” “John Jones’s Wife,” “Ave Atque Vale”

*Tennyson, Alfred. “The Lady of Shalott,” “Tithonus,” “The Palace of Art,” “The Lotus-Eaters,” “Ulysses,” “Godiva,” “Aylmer’s Field,” In Memoriam, Maud: A Monodrama, “Lucretius,” “The Ancient Sage,” “The Coming of Arthur” (in Idylls of the King)

*Thackeray, William Makepeace. Vanity Fair

*Trollope, Anthony. The Way We Live Now.

*Wilde, Oscar. The Importance of Being Earnest, The Picture of Dorian Gray.

For Further Reading

Arnold, Matthew. “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-Gypsy,” “Thyrsis,” “To Marguerite,” Empedocles on Etna, “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse,” “Rugby Chapel,” “The Buried Life”

Boucicault, Dion. The Colleen Bawn

Brontë, Charlotte. Villette

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. "Sonnets from the Portuguese"

Browning, Robert. The Ring and the Book.

Butler, Samuel. The Way of All Flesh.

Carlyle, Thomas. “Signs of the Times,” “On History,” “Shooting Niagara,” “Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question,” Characteristics

Carroll, Lewis. Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass

Clough, Arthur Hugh. “The Latest Decalogue,” “Is it True,Ye Gods, Who Treat Us,” “Epi-Strauss-Ism,” “Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth,” The Bothie of Tober-Na-Nuolich

Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone or The Woman in White

Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield, Hard Times, Little Dorrit

Eliot, George. Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss

Gaskell, Elizabeth. The Life of Charlotte Brontë

Gilbert, W. S. Patience, Iolanthe

Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure

Huxley, Thomas Henry. “Culture and Education,” “Science and Morals,” “Ethics and Evolution”

Macaulay, Thomas Babington. “’Minute’ on Indian Education”

Meredith, George. The Ordeal of Richard Feverel

Mill, John Stuart. Autobiography

Morris, William. “The Haystack in the Floods,” “Golden Wings,” dedicatory stanzas to The Earthly Paradise, News from Nowhere

Newman, John Henry. Apologia pro vita sua, The Idea of a University

Nightingale, Florence. Casssandra

Oliphant, Margaret. Salem Chapel, Autobiography

Pater, Walter. Imaginary Portraits, Marius the Epicurean

Thackeray, William Makepeace. Henry Esmond

Trollope, Anthony. Barchester Towers, The Warden, The Last Chronicle of Barset

Wilde, Oscar. Salome, The Critic as Artist, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”

General Criticism

Altick, Richard D. The English Common Reader (1957)

Armstrong, Isobel. Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Politics, Poetics (1993)

Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987)

Von Arx, Jeffrey Paul. Progress and Pessimism: Religion, Politics, and History in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain (1985)

Beckson, Karl. London in the 1890s: A Cultural History (1992)

Booth, Michael. Theatre in the Victorian Age (1991)

Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism (1988)

Chapple, J.A.V. Science and Literature in the Nineteenth Century (1986)

Christ, Carol. The Finer Optic: The Aesthetic of Particularity in Victorian Poetry (1975)

Culler, Dwight. The Victorian Mirror of History (1986)

Edmond, Rod. Affairs of the Hearth: Victorian Narrative Poetry and the Ideology of the Domestic (1988)

Flint, Kate. The Woman Reader, 1837-1914 (1993)

Gallagher, Catherine. The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction (1985)

Gilmour, Robin. The Victorian Period: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English, Literatures, 1830-1890 (1993)

Hadfield, John. Victorian Delights: Reflections of Taste in the Nineteenth Century (1987)

Helsinger, Elizabeth, Robin Lauterbach Sheets, and William Veeder. The Woman Question: Society and Literature in Britain and America, 1837-1883, 3 vols. (1983)

Himmelfarb, Gertrude. Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians: Essays (1986)

Hobsbawm, E. J. The Age of Capital, 1848-1875 (1975)

Houghton, Walter. The Victorian Frame of Mind (1957)

Jay, Elisabeth. Faith and Doubt in Victorian Britain (1986)

Jenkyns, Richard. The Victorians and Ancient Greece (1980)

Levine, George and William Madden, eds. The Art of Victorian Prose (1968)

Levine, Phillipa. Victorian Feminism, 1850-1900 (1987)

Marcus, Steven. The Other Victorians (1966)

Mitchell, Sally, ed. Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia (1988)

Newsome, David. The Victorian World Picture (1997)

Poovey, Mary. Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (1988)

Rowell, George. The Victorian Theatre: A Survey (1967)

Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism (1993)

Tucker, Herbert F., ed. The Blackwell Companion to Victorian Writing (1998)

Wheeler, Michael. Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology (1990)

Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society: 1780-1950 (1958)

January 1998