Victorian Literature Resources

Victorian Literature Resources

Best of the Web

Websites

Victorian Web

Tons of information about the Victorian era and its art—it's a maze over there.

Greenwood's Map of London

Ever been lost with a character in the mean streets of Victorian London? Problem solved.

Punch cartoons

Victorians loved their punch—and their Punch. This site has images and analyses of the popular cartoons.

PBS's Charles Dickens

A concise overview of Dickens's life and works, with visual accompaniment.

David Perdue's Dickens Page

Lots of things to explore here, but we recommend starting with the illustrations of Dickens's novels—as Alice says, what's the use of a book without pictures?

Movies

Wuthering Heights (1939)

An all-time classic movie. Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff? Yes, please.

Jane Eyre (1943)

A dark adaptation featuring some big names—Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine—from way back when.

Great Expectations (1946)

One of the great classic movies. If you're not turned off by black-and-white, you should watch the Dickens out of this.

Great Expectations (1998)

An updated version of Dickens's classic set in modern-day New York City and starring Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow.

David Copperfield (1999)

Dame Maggie Smith plays Betsey Trotwood. Need we say more?

North and South (2004)

Okay, so the BBC has made enough adaptations of Victorian novels to clog up our Netflix queue for years to come. But this one has some great actors and incredible scenes—it's possibly even better than the novel at getting inside industrial life. (Now that we've seen those factory shots with cotton floating in the air, we get why so many people had problems with their lungs.)

Vanity Fair (2004)

With Reese Witherspoon as Becky Sharp, the adventuress never looked so good.

Alice in Wonderland (2010)

As if Lewis Carroll weren't crazy enough to begin with, this movie adds Tim Burton, Johnny Depp, and Helena Bonham Carter.

Great Expectations (2011)

Great Expectations meets our version of serialization—the television series. It's atmospheric and spooky. We think Dickens would approve.

Jane Eyre (2011)

The newest in a long series of attempts to capture the novel on film. This one stands out for how it uses flashbacks to tell the story. And the scene setting is amazingly vivid: if you ever wanted to know what it would be like to live in Jane Eyre's England, here you go.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011)

Big Hollywood meets big Victorian mystery.

Books

The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Fowles (1969)

John Fowles's tale of romance and detection reads like a Victorian novel, even though it was written decades after Queen Victoria died.

Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages, Phyllis Rose (1984)

If you've read some Victorian novels and wondered what Victorian marriages were really like, Rose's book will be food for thought. She traces the marriages of prominent writers—from Thomas Carlyle to George Eliot—and tells us what was really going on behind closed doors.

Affinity, Sarah Waters (1999)

A neo-Victorian novel full of forbidden romance, mystery, and séances—oh, and Victorian prison life.

Possession, A.S. Byatt (1999)

A neo-Victorian novel gets romantic: studying Victorian poetry never looked so sexy.

We Two: Victoria and Albert, Gillian Gill (2009)

A close look at the woman and the man—and the marriage—at the head of the British Empire.