Massive social and political changes occurred during the 19th century. It was an era of nationalism and imperialism. In the wake of the Industrial Revolution, many people moved
to urban areas. These areas were becoming centers of manufacturing and commerce. According to Hegel, bourgeois thought is a predominant but one-sided component of a larger scheme that includes Romanticism and religion. This period consists of the following movements:
Scientists during the Victorian era were dedicated to the description and classification of the entire natural world, which was a significant period in the development of science. Although most of this writing does not rise to the level of literary status, one book, Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, remains well known today. Throughout the work, the theory of evolution challenged Victorians' beliefs about themselves and their place in the world. The theories of Darwin took some time to become widely accepted. Still, his younger contemporaries, Thomas Henry Huxley, who wrote extensively on the subject, played a significant role in popularizing them.
Several non-fiction works of the era contributed to the period's literature, including John Stuart Mill's philosophical writings, which dealt with logic, economics, liberty, and utilitarianism. Political thought at the time was shaped by the large and influential histories of Thomas Carlyle: The French Revolution: A History (1837) and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History (1841). Historiography for many years was dominated by the Whig narrative codified by the writings of Thomas Babington Macaulay on English history. His works on art and the history of art have been highly influential, and he championed such contemporary artists as J. M. W. Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites. The Oxford Movement, led by the religious writer John Henry Newman, sparked intense debate within the Church of England, exacerbated by Newman's own conversion to Catholicism, as documented in his autobiography Apologia Pro Vita Sua.
Victorian literary theory has great diversity and productivity, sometimes regarded as a hinterland. In Theory of the Arts (1982), Francis Sparshott identified four lines of theorizing in art theory: classical, expressive, oracular, and purist. Victorian theory contributes original ideas to all but one of these lines. Art, for art's sake, as well as its theological and Hegelian alignments, anticipates the hallmarks of twentieth-century hermeneutics and formalism.
Complete List of Victorian Critics
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)
Walter Pater (1839-1894)
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)
Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893)
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)
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