Why ‘Victorian’? A Period and Its Problems

Why do literary historians still employ the term ‘Victorian’ to describe a sprawling period of some sixty or so years? This paper concentrates attention on how modern criticism has largely failed to analyze the introduction of the term ‘Victorian’ into British and American culture during the 1870s. By looking closely at the late nineteenth-century essays of Edmund Clarence Stedman, John Addington Symonds, Edward Dowden, and H. D. Traill, the discussion examines the appeal of the ‘Victorian’ label at a time when Her Majesty enjoyed greater popularity than before. The analysis shows that even in recent discussions of how the ‘Victorians’ and their epoch have been subject to much myth-making there remains scarcely any exploration of how ‘Victorian’ is a late nineteenth-century term. Contending that most of the writers whom scholars readily class as ‘Victorian’ were not, strictly speaking, ‘Victorian,’ the article concludes by suggesting that the term ‘nineteenth century’ serves as a more suitable label to identify the ways in which writers from the so-called ‘Victorian’ age conceptualized the period to which they belonged.