The Victorian temper,: A study in literary culture

by Jerome H. Buckley

This classic study provides an authoritative portrait of the literary and aesthetic tastes - the 'temper' - of Victorian England. It considers in detail the diverse contexts of thought and feeling in which the great poets and 'prophets' of the age wrote. Though drawing also on the visual and plastic arts, it is primarily a study in literary culture and pays particular attention to the schools, movements, and coteries that lent such tension and vitality to the development of Victorian letters.

As a comprehensive examination of the literary sensibility of the age, and of the social, moral, and intellectual forces that helped condition its values and shape its creative expression, this book is essential reading for all serious students of Victorian literature and culture.

Genres: Literary Criticism

282 pages, Hardcover

First published February 5, 1951

Reviews

[Candy Wood]

It has probably been about forty years since I first read this book, my paperback copy of which cost $1.65 new and has no ISBN. In twelve chapters, Buckley considers what he calls the "literary culture" of England in the nineteenth century, beginning with the "anti-romantics" of the 1830s and continuing through the decadents of the 1890s. This means the familiar Victorians like Tennyson and Browning, Mill and Ruskin, Dickens and George Eliot, are seen in the context of forgotten contemporaries, and the analysis spends as much time on the context as on the major figures. For readers beginning the study of Victorian literature, the middle chapters focusing on Tennyson, then religion and science, would be helpful, as are the ones on "Victorian Taste" and Ruskin's reaction to it. Mostly, though, Buckley assumes familiarity with names and events, not worrying about beginners. Writing in the 1950s, he shows that the Victorians were more complex than either popular stereotypes or the modernists' dismissals portray them. Now that fifty more years have passed, the conflicts he explores are still worth considering.