A History of English Literature

theme. (Her novels offered ‘an admirable copy of life’, but lacked imagination,

according to Wordsworth, who lacked the kind of imagination she relied on in a

reader.) She also seems to be the first English prose writer since Julian of Norwich

who is clearly superior to male contemporaries in the same field. A finer novelist

than Scott,she confirmed the novel as a genre belonging significantly to women

writers as well as women readers.

Towards Victoria

The literary lull that followed the early deaths of Keats, Shelley and Byron is a true

age of transition, the period of the Great Reform Bill of 1832. Features of the

Victorian age began to appear: liberal legislation, a triumphant middle class, indus-

trial advance, proletarian unrest, religious renewal. When Victoria came to the

254 7 · THE ROMANTICS: 1790–1837

Chief events and publications of 1823–37

Events Notable publications

1823 Peel begins penal reforms.

1825 Stockton–Darlington Railway is opened.

1826 University College, London, is founded.

1828 Duke of Wellington becomes Prime Minister. The Test and
Corporation Acts, which had kept Catholics and
Nonconformists from high office, are repealed.
1829 Catholic Emancipation Act; Daniel O’Connell elected to
Parliament. Peel establishes the Metropolitan Police.
Stephenson’s Rocket runs on Liverpool–Manchester
railway.
1830 George IV dies. William IV reigns to 1837.

1832 Reform Bill is passed: the end of ‘rotten boroughs’; the
franchise is extended.
1833 Parliament abolishes slavery in the Empire. Education
and Factory Acts are passed. John Keble’s sermon
‘National Apostasy’ begins Oxford Movement.
1834 New Poor Law Act is passed. The ‘Tolpuddle Martyrs’.
The Houses of Parliament burn down.

1836 Barry and Pugin design new Houses of Parliament.

1837 William IV dies. Victoria reigns (to 1901).

1824 James Hogg, Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified

Sinner; Walter Savage Landor, Imaginary Conversations;

Mary Russell Mitford, Our Village; Walter Scott,

Redgauntlet; Lord Byron (d.1824), Don Juan xv–xvi;

Percy Bysshe Shelley (ed. Mary Shelley), Posthumous

Poems.

1825 S. T. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection; William Hazlitt, The

Spirit of the Age.

1826 Benjamin Disraeli, Vivian Grey; Mary Shelley, The Last

Man.

1827 John Clare, The Shepherd’s Calendar; John Keble, The

Christian Year; Alfred and Charles Tennyson, Poems by

Two Brothers.

1830 William Cobbett, Rural Rides; Coleridge, On the

Constitution of Church and State; Alfred Tennyson,

Poems, Chiefly Lyrical.

1832 Alfred Tennyson, Poems.

1833 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus; Keble, Newman, et al.

Tracts for the Times(–1841); Robert Browning, Pauline.

1834 George Crabbe (d.1832), Poetical Works.

1835 Coleridge (d.1834), Table Talk; Charles Dickens,

Sketches by Boz; Capt. Marryat, Mr Midshipman Easy;

R. H. Froude, Keble, John Henry Newman and others,

Lyra Apostolica.

1837 Carlyle, The French Revolution; Dickens, The Pickwick

Papers; William Makepeace Thackeray, The Professor;

John Gibson Lockhart, The Life of Sir Walter Scott.