The Victorian Era produced some of the greatest literature the world has ever had the pleasure to read. Any list of the greatest books ever written always contains, or should, Dickens, Bronte, Eliot, and Conrad, who was Polish but wrote in English from England, with an occasional inclusion of Wilde, Hardy, Wells, Trollop, and Stevenson. Bibliophiles would not forget to include Stroker, Barrie, Thackeray, Butler (everyone should read the poorly titled ‘The Way of All Flesh’), and Carroll. Stretching the definition of Victorian, one could bring in the Russians Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Americans Twain, Poe, Cooper, and Melville along with the French authors Hugo, Flaubert, and Dumas.

Victorian literature is loosely defined as being written during the reign of Queen Victoria who ruled over the United Kingdom and Ireland for 63 years from 1837 to 1901, parenthetically, a reign exceeded in longevity only by Queen Elizabeth’s 70 years on the throne. The Victorian Era was bookended by the Industrial Revolution which ended around the 1840s and the beginning of the Technological Revolution that began in the 1870s and continued to the start of WWI. The era witnessed the beginning of the end of the labor intensive agricultural and mining sectors, with a subsequent weakening of the guild and manor systems. The hermetic British class system also sustained a permanent leak with the advent of a true middle class brought about by an unconstrained rise in economic fortunes and personal incomes.

All this brought about a renegotiation and a realignment of the social structures in place since the time of the pharaohs. Serfs and slavery gave way to agricultural innovations and the introduction of a managerial class in business. The existing economic and social fabrics were torn asunder with the way forward less than clear, but the status quo would not endure for long. The ensuing social upheaval provided a bonaza of topics and plots for the Victorian Era authors. Dickens wrote about poverty and children, Hardy plotted about morality and money, Trollop’s novels took on class and money, Emily Bronte took on immorality, class, and money, and Thackeray discussed hypocrisy. None of the subjects the authors approached were exclusive to their times, but in the Victorian age contrasts had sharp edges. Victorian times were either-or with little in between. Grey was tea, which incidentally dates to the Victorian Era.

Apologies for the preamble to this post which was meant to be just a listing of Victorian authors but somehow, I digressed into a brief discussion of 19th century all things British. The following table is a composite of other lists and sources dealing with Victorian authors, whether prose, poetry, or plays, fiction or non-fiction. The table below initially had additional information about the authors, but WordPress does not give the space needed to display them so squeeze the sides of table I did. Also, I initially was listing all authors, regardless of nationality, within the Victorian Era but that grew too large for web page. Finally, the “Best Sellers” column is subjective in that it may be the critics’ choice, or it may be based on current sales, and sometimes it’s just what I liked the most. As an example, the critics always list ‘Great Expectations’ or ‘The Tale of Two Cities’ as his best but I’ve always preferred ‘Oliver Twist’ and ‘A Christmas Carole’ which led me to list ‘Great Expectations’ and ‘A Christmas Carole’.