The Victorian Era: Background information when reading The House on Fortune Street

The Victorian Era

This article relates to The House on Fortune Street

Each of Margot Livesey's four key characters relates to a specific author: John Keats, Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens and Virginia Woolf.

Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson) and Charles Dickens were both prominent Victorians, the term used to describe people, things and events during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901). A great source of information on the Victorian period can be found at victorianweb.org. Created and managed by George Landow, Professor of English and Art History at Brown University, the website has more than 60,000 documents covering the literature, history and culture of the age of Victoria. It describes the social aspects of the period, the people, science and technology, and religion. It was a period of great change with the beginnings of modern movements such as feminism and the rise of unions. The Victorian era was also the age of Darwin, Marx and Freud.

Authors writing during the Victorian era include the Brontes, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning, Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Eliot, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Oscar Wilde. Victorianweb.org provides comprehensive coverage of each of these figures including a biography, a section on their works, literary relations and related resources.

Filed under People, Eras & Events

This "beyond the book article" relates to The House on Fortune Street. It originally ran in May 2008 and has been updated for the May 2009 paperback edition. Go to magazine.