Victorian Literature/Timelines

The intention is to list each author at least twice, once in the year they produced their first significant work, and once in the year of their death. They may also be listed in the year of their greatest or best-known work, and, if they wrote in both poetry and prose, in the first year of their alternative medium, or their best production in that medium.

If the publication was originally in a magazine, it will be listed in that year, not the year of the book.

1835

Felicia Hemans d.

William Cobbett d.

1836

Dickens, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club

Marryat, Mr Midshipman Easy

Caroline Norton, A Voice from the Factories

1837

Queen Victoria came to the throne

Carlyle, The French Revolution

Thackeray, The Yellowplush Papers

Lockhart, Life of Scott

1838

Elizabeth Barrett, The Seraphim, and other poems

Lady Charlotte Guest's translation of The Mabinogion

Surtees, Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities

L.E.L. (Letitia Elizabeth Landon) died

1839

Ainsworth, Jack Sheppard

L.E.L. (posthumously) The Zenana and minor poems

1840

Barham, The Ingoldsby Legends, 1st series

1841

Browning, Bells and Pomegranates no. 1 (Pippa Passes)

1842

Macaulay, Lays of Ancient Rome

Tennyson, Poems

1843

Richard Horne, Orion

Macaulay, Essays contributed to the Edinburgh Review

Ruskin, Modern Painters i

George Borrow, The Bible in Spain

Southey d.

1844

William Barnes, Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect

Kinglake, Eothen

1845

Thomas Hood d.

Barham d.

1846

Bronte sisters, Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell

Edward Lear, A Book of Nonsense

1847

Anne Bronte, Agnes Grey

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

Thackeray, Vanity Fair

1848

Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton

Charles Kingsley, Yeast

Thackeray, Vanity Fair

Emily Bronte d.

1849

Arnold, The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems

Anne Bronte d.

Maria Edgeworth d.

Thomas Lovell Beddoes d.

1850

Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Death's Jest Book (expanded version) published posthumously

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese

Tennyson, In Memoriam

Wordsworth d.

Wordworth, The Prelude published posthumously

1851

Meredith, Poems

1854

Dickens, Hard Times

Patmore, The Betrothal (part 1 of The Angel in the House)

1855

Trollope, The Warden

Charlotte Bronte d.

1857

Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown's Schooldays

1858

Arthur Hugh Clough, Amours de Voyage

Dean Farrar, Eric, or Little by Little

George MacDonald, Phantastes

Adelaide Anne Procter, Legends and Lyrics

1859

George Eliot, Adam Bede

Edward Fitzgerald, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel

Leigh Hunt d.

Macaulay d.

1861

Charles Reade, The Cloister and the Hearth

Palgrave, The Golden Treasury

E.B. Browning d.

A.H. Clough d.

1862

Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market and other poems

1863

Jean Ingelow, Poems

Kingsley, The Water Babies

Sheridan LeFanu, The House by the Churchyard

Margaret Oliphant, Salem Chapel

Thackeray d.

1864

John Clare d.

Walter Savage Landor d.

Adelaide Procter d.

Surtees d.

1865

Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Swinburne, Atalanta in Calydon

1866

Swinburne, Poems and Ballads

Augusta Webster, Dramatic Studies

Keble d.

Thomas Love Peacock d.

1868

R. Browning, The Ring and the Book

1869

Arnold, Culture and Anarchy

Blackmore, Lorna Doone

W.S. Gilbert, Bab Ballads

1870

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Poems

Dickens d.

1871

George Eliot, Middlemarch

Hardy, Desperate Remedies

1872

Samuel Butler, Erewhon

1873

Walter Pater, Studies in the Renaissance

Amelia Edwards, Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys

Sheridan LeFanu d.

Bulwer Lytton d.

1874

James Thomson, The City of Dreadful Night

Trollope, The Way We Live Now

1875

Kingsley d.

1876

Morris, The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs

Henry James, Roderick Random

1877

Anna Sewell, Black Beauty

1878

Richard Jefferies, The Gamekeeper at Home

Anna Sewell d.

1879

R.L. Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes

1880

George Gissing, Workers in the Dawn

Joseph Shorthouse, John Inglesant

George Eliot d.

1881

Amy Levy, Xantippe and other Verse

R.L. Stevenson, Treasure Island

Borrow d.

Carlyle d.

Disraeli d.

1882

F. Anstey, Vice Versa

Ainsworth d.

D.G. Rossetti d.

Trollope d.

1883

Jefferies, The Story of my Heart

1884

Michael Field, Calirrhoë and Fair Rosamund

Charles Reade d.

1885

Rider Haggard, King Solomon's Mines

Pinero, The Magistrate

Stevenson, A Child's Garden of Verses

1886

William Barnes d.

1887

Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet

Richard Jefferies d.

1888

Kipling, Plain Tales from the Hills

Arnold d.

1889

Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat

Yeats, The Wanderings of Oisin

Robert Browning d.

Wilkie Collins d.

Gerard Manley Hopkins d.

Amy Levy d.

1891

Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Kinglake d.

1892

Kipling, Barrack Room Ballads

Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan (performance)

Yeats, The Countess Cathleen

Tennyson d.

Amelia Edwards d.

1893

E.F. Benson, Dodo

Pinero, The Second Mrs Tanqueray

Yeats, The Celtic Twilight

1894

du Maurier, Trilby

George and Weedon Grossmith, The Diary of a Nobody

Anthony Hope, The Prisoner of Zenda

George Moore, Esther Waters

Pater d.

Christina Rossetti d.

R.L. Stevenson d.

Augusta Webster d.

1895

Conrad, Almayer's Folly

H.G. Wells, The Time Machine

1896

A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad

William Morris d.

Coventry Patmore d.

1897

Jean Ingelow d.

1898

Hardy, Wessex Poems

Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol

Aubrey Beardsley d.

Lewis Carroll d.

1899

Somerville and Ross, Some Experiences of an Irish RM

1900

John Ruskin d.

Oscar Wilde d.

1901

Arnold Bennett, Anna of the Five Towns

Kipling, Kim

Queen Victoria d.

1902

J.M. Barrie, The Admirable Crichton

De La Mare, Songs of Childhood

Beatrix Potter, Peter Rabbit

Samuel Butler d.