The first decades (1830s to 1860s) of Queen Victoria's reign produced a vigorous and varied body of literature that attempted to come to terms with the current transformations of English society, but writers in the latter decades (1870s to 1900) withdrew into AESTHETICISM, a preoccupation with sensation as an end in itself. Confronted by the shift from an agricultural to an industrial urban society and troubled by the erosion of traditional religious beliefs, the early Victorian writers held to a moral aesthetic, a belief that literature should provide both an understanding of and fresh…
