The Victorian Age in Literature

Dishing out his signature brand of harsh wit, G. K. Chesterton casts a critical eye on the poets and novelists that defined the Victorian age in English literature. “Her imagination was sometimes superhuman—always inhuman,” he writes of Emily Brontë. “Wuthering Heights might have been written by an eagle.” Ranging from sharp denunciation to genuine admiration, Chesterton critiques the works of Tennyson, Ruskin, Eliot, Byron, and Shelley, among many others. He explores the influence of religion on the world of art and expounds upon the gridlock he believes to be permeating England in the early twentieth century.