Essays on Victorian Literature

     Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White shows the relationship between madness and gender in the female characters of Anne Catherick and Laura Fairlie. However, although there was a larger number of female patients in the asylum, Anne Catherick and Laura Fairlie are unconventional…

Victorian age, as the word itself is telling us, is the period of English and world history marked by the reign of Queen Victoria, the most long-lived from all English emperors. The adopted timing of this age coincides with the years of Queen Victoria’s reign,…

Dracula converts the society’s conventions into grotesque elements. Religion is deformed by Count Dracula and used to transform women into a demonic-being. This status of fear makes ordinary people to defeat the enemy that comes from the outside, giving the fact that the Count is…

King Solomon’s Mines is a novel by the English Victorian writer Henry Rider Haggard which was published in 1885. The novel, which became a best seller in a short period of time, tells the story of a group of adventurous men leaded by Allan Quatermain…

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens was published in 1860, and is widely regarded as examplary for the Victorian Era, as the novel seems to reflect upon the great social changes which occured during that time in Britain. The Victorian Era saw great transformations for the…

What may have been one of Britain’s greatest times took place during Queen Victoria’s reign lasting from 1837 to her death in 1901. This period, commonly known as The Victorian Era, was one of great change and national confidence for the people of Great Britain….

Haggard narrates in King Solomon’s Mines the adventure of three men that appear to be three perfect examples of white manliness. However, Allan Quatermain, who is the narrator of the novel, does not act like a hero . Additionally, Haggard also includes the fear of…

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) can be read from a feminist perspective, as Mina Murray-Harker, one of the most complex character in the novel, is a mixture between the Victorian woman ideals. That is why she deserves a profound analysis in order to discuss whether she…

“For men, love was important, but for women, it was absolutely necessary.” Great Expectations by Charles Dickens takes place in the Victorian Era, when relationships were formal, classy, and altogether proper. Victorian Era relationships were drastically different from relations in the twenty-first century. In Great…

H. Rider Haggard’s novel King Solomon’s Mines (1855) is a popular novel that sometimes has been read as an adventure story in which a white man, Quatermain, travels into unknown and dangerous territory and fight against dangerous natives. However, Zachary David Cady offers an alternative…

Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula was published in 1897 and it still stands as his greatest masterpiece. The novel could not find an immediate success but it has inspired several films and other literary pieces of work. Stoker’s intention was to explain the anxieties of his…

From the very beginning, H. Rider Haggard’s novel King Solomon’s Mines is presented as an essentially masculine novel. The story follows and depicts those aspects of the world that are of interest mostly and almost exclusively to men, according to Victorian beliefs. The representation of…

The majority of the readers of H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885) focus on the Imperialism and how white men overcome the difficulties and save Kukuanaland from the tyrant King Twala. I agree here that Haggard wants to present how men overcome difficulties in…

Nowadays the female characters have more important roles in novels than they used to, especially if the novel is all about the male figures. When thinking about a story of strong and determined adventurers, most of the times what comes to mind is the figure…

In the 19th century, Christianity suffered a decline of faith. Scientific discoveries and the publication of rational studies of the Bible as a historical book and not as God’s word, like The life of Jesus (1808-74) from David Strauss, contributed to the decrease of the…