It can be daunting to pick up a Victorian novel. The Penguin edition of Middlemarch weighs in at 880 pages, and it's not an exception. But that's not always how you would have originally encountere...

Okay, so "industrialization" might sound more like economic development than literary history. But Victorians were seeing major changes—from manufacturing booms to the first railways to widesprea...

The Victorians were super status conscious. Between the working class and the upper crust, there was the catchall "middle class." And with the middle class growing in the nineteenth century, there...

The Victorians were the first to confront Darwin's theory of evolution. Yep, we're talking before the bumper stickers. When his Origin of Species came out in 1859, it sparked a lot of debate. Sure,...

Victorians loved them some progress, whether it was one person bootstrapping their way up into the middle class, or the entire nation growing bigger and stronger. And the British didn't stop at the...

The Victorians had a bad case of nostalgia. They could get wistful and sad about just about anything that was over. Victorian literature is riddled with nostalgia: from historical novels about Robi...

Utilitarianism is a big name, but it's got an easy definition. The whole thing boils down to asking one question to make decisions: "What will make the most people the most happy?"Seems simple, unt...