I haven’t read a lot of Victorian literature thus far so there is still much for me to learn about this period in literature, but I do know of a few things involving it which I hope to expand on throughout the semester in addition to what I have not yet discovered.

One piece of Victorian literature I have read is Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. It has been a few years since I last read it, but I remember being captivated by Dickens’ vivid descriptions of scenes throughout the novel that made me feel as though I were there. I realize that Dickens was born after the French Revolution, but the way he describes things throughout the novel is quite interesting to the reader as it seems telling of the time he is writing about and I hope to see this throughout the literature we read. From our Victorian writers, I would like to learn more about the world surrounding them and see how they connected their life and events that have happened around them to their writing.

I’m also interested in learning about the movement evolution from Romanticism to Victorian literature. How do we as readers distinguish a work from being classified as Romantic or Victorian? What sets Victorian literature apart from other movements other than the fact that it was written during Queen Victoria’s reign? In class we have already seen this difficulty in classification with the example of Jane Austen. 

Lastly, I’d like to learn more about the works themselves and discover what connections and disconnections can we, as readers, make between them all in this period of literature?