Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians

Discover 1,200 Romantic and Victorian literary treasures, new insights by 60 experts, 25 documentary films, 30 inspirational teachers’ notes and more. Discovering Literature has been supported since its inception by Dr Naim Dangoor CBE, The Exilarch's Foundation.

Featured articles

The Gothic

Professor John Bowen discusses key motifs in Gothic novels , including the uncanny, the sublime and the supernatural. Filmed at Strawberry Hill House, Twickenham.
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Dracula: vampires, perversity and Victorian anxieties

The vampire is a complicated creature: caught between life and death, at once alluring and horrifying. Greg Buzwell considers the way the novel reflects the fears that haunted late 19th-century society – fears of immigration, sexual promiscuity and moral degeneration.
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‘Man is not truly one, but truly two’: duality in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Curator Greg Buzwell considers duality in Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, exploring how the novel engages with contemporary debates about consciousness, homosexuality and criminal psychology.
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Mary Shelley, Frankenstein and the Villa Diodati

Greg Buzwell describes the bizarre circumstances that gave rise to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and the other works that emerged from the ‘ghost story challenge’ at the Villa Diodati in the summer of 1816.
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The Gothic in Great Expectations

Professor John Bowen considers how Dickens uses the characters of Magwitch and Miss Havisham to incorporate elements of the Gothic in Great Expectations.
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Walking the landscape of Wuthering Heights

Situating Emily Brontë in her hometown of Haworth – a small Yorkshire mill town surrounded by moors – Professor John Bowen reflects on the representation of landscape in Wuthering Heights.
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Oliver Twist: a patchwork of genres

Dr Claire Wood examines how Dickens blends multiple genres in Oliver Twist, including melodrama, the Gothic, satire and social commentary.
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Jack the Ripper

The unidentified killer known as Jack the Ripper murdered a series of women in the Whitechapel area of London during 1888. Judith Flanders explores how the excitement and fear surrounding the mysterious murderer made its way into late-Victorian literature.
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Aestheticism and decadence

‘Art for art’s sake’? Aestheticism and decadence shocked the Victorian establishment by challenging traditional values, foregrounding sensuality and promoting artistic, sexual and political experimentation. Dr Carolyn Burdett explores the key features of this unconventional artistic period.
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Deathbed scenes in fiction

The deathbed is an iconic scene in Victorian fiction. Professor John Mullan considers its potential for sentimentality and satire.
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Looking at the manuscript of William Blake’s ‘London’

Alterations to the draft of William Blake’s ‘London’ show the poet exploring poverty, revolution, reason and the power of the imagination. Dr Linda Freedman examines the manuscript, to discover the meanings behind this iconic poem.
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Daughters of decadence: the New Woman in the Victorian fin de siècle

Free-spirited and independent, educated and uninterested in marriage and children, the figure of the New Woman threatened conventional ideas about ideal Victorian womanhood. Greg Buzwell explores the place of the New Woman - by turns comical, dangerous and inspirational - in journalism and in fiction by writers such as Thomas Hardy, George Gissing and Sarah Grand.
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Themes

From Romantic poetry to Gothic horror, from depictions of poverty and industrialisation to portrayals of the middle classes, and from crime fiction to fin de siècle decadence: the literary works of the Romantic and Victorian periods, and the contexts in which they were written, offer a wealth of topics to explore.