Program Overview

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The Victorian Period (ENGL0017)

Key Information

The Victorian Period (ENGL0017) is a module offered by the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, specifically the English Language and Literature department. It carries a credit value of 30.

• Faculty: Faculty of Arts and Humanities
• Teaching department: English Language and Literature
• Credit value: 30

Restrictions

This module is available only to students on the BA English programme, full-year affiliates enrolled in the English Department, students on the Arts and Sciences BASc degree programme who have successfully completed the ENGL0005 Introduction to English Literature module, and to students in other departments who have successfully completed the ENGL0047 Narrative Texts module.

Alternative Credit Options

There are no alternative credit options available for this module.

Description

This course explores the literature of the period ranging from 1830 (when Tennyson's first volume of poems was published) to 1900 (the last months of Queen Victoria's reign before her death in January 1901). Often described as 'the Age of the Novel', the course naturally devotes considerable space to nineteenth-century fiction, but also pays close attention to the directions taken by poetry and non-fiction.

Autumn term lectures include overviews of the period followed by a lecture on each of the six set texts. Seminar groups study at least four of the set texts. The set texts have included the poems of Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, and Hopkins, as well as three novels: Dickens's Great Expectations, Eliot's Middlemarch, and Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles. (Set texts are subject to change.)

Spring term lectures are structured around the major literary genres of the period, such as sage writing, condition of England writing, nonsense poetry, sensation fiction, decadent writing, and the gothic. Writers explored through these lectures include Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Henry James, Algernon Charles Swinburne, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Wilkie Collins, Mary Braddon, H. G. Wells, and many others.

Spring term seminars are sign-up options; options in the past have included:

• 'Romance in Poetry'
• 'Great Victorian Novels'
• 'The Victorians and Art'
• 'Gothic'
• 'How to Do Things with Books'
• 'Colonial writing and fictions of Empire'
• 'People Behaving Badly'
• 'Exoticism and the Supernatural'

Examination is by means of an exam paper or by Course Essay, if preferred and if no other Course Essay is being submitted by the candidate in that year.

Module Deliveries for 2026/27 Academic Year

• Intended teaching term: Terms 1 and 2
• Undergraduate (FHEQ Level 6)

Teaching and Assessment

• Mode of study: In person
• Methods of assessment:
  • 100% Exam
  • 0% Coursework (3 assessments)
• Mark scheme: Numeric Marks

The methods of assessment for affiliate students may be different to those indicated above.

Other Information

• Number of students on module in previous year: 33
• Module leader: Professor Juliette Atkinson

Last Updated

This module description was last updated on 10th March 2026.