Chapter 1 - The 1870s and the Invention of Victorian Literature

Summary

Literary historians have long envisioned the 1870s as a turning point in the invention of a specifically Victorian literary age only because they have taken American Edmund Clarence Stedman at his word. Treating his Victorian Poets (1875) as an unprecedented critical project responsible for popularizing, even introducing, the very adjective Victorian, such historians have — by extension — interpreted the latter as a primarily literary term always already suggesting inadequacy and obsolescence. Considering the evolution of Stedman’s work over time and for different audiences, and in relation to earlier and later critical efforts including George L. Craik’s Compendious History of English Literature (1861) and Alfred Austin’s The Poetry of the Period (1870), this chapter offers a fuller, more nuanced account of the role of the 1870s in consolidating a Victorian age and a Victorian literature, partly by demonstrating how Stedman’s account worked to assert America’s primacy in a contested transatlantic field.