Introduction

Abstract

High Victorian Culture is a study of the first four decades of Victorian Britain, from Victoria’s accession to the throne in 1837 to her proclamation as Empress of India in 1877 — or, to transpose the chronology into a more literary key, it covers an era that runs from Dickens’s first novel, The Pickwick Papers (1836–7), to George Eliot’s last novel, Daniel Deronda (1876). There has never really been much argument that from the 1870s onwards the landscape of Victorian England is so significantly altered as to make ‘late Victorian’ an indispensable modification but this has had the unfortunate effect of developing an binary opposition between early and late Victorian, as a result of which several decades between 1850 and 1890 have a way of dropping out of the picture. This problem has been addressed by the simple and useful expedient of introducing the term ‘mid-Victorian’ to refer to the 1850s and 1860s, but the danger here, I feel, is of over-periodising, of developing a chronological framework that is at once too specific and too unwieldy.