Although there is a tendency in twentieth–century writers, and literary critics, to approach tragedy as a high and daunting ideal, to attempt a tragedy in the nineteenth century was a frequent undertaking, and it is not surprising that, given Hardy's brooding and unflinching intellect, the genre has a powerful presence in his stories. If his success is finest and most subtle in tragedy, he had attempted and succeeded before, and his experiments continued after, Tess of the d'Urbervilles.

That the Victorians thought they could achieve the dignity of tragic art did not mean they devalued the genre. Far from that: they held it to be a reflector of essential qualities of their culture. Because Matthew Arnold was concerned that readers of Empedocles on Etna might allow the philosophy and suicide of Empedocles to affect their outlook on life, and because he felt that his age required energetic and pragmatic solutions to problems rather than meditative and self–absorbed analysis, he withdrew the poem from the second edition of his Poems and in the volume's famous Preface explained his motives. Idylls of the King is a steadily measured projection of the need in Tennyson's society for moral courage tempered by political need for action. While The Ring and the Book is only intermittently ‘tragic’, there is little question but that Browning drew upon tragic precepts in its portrayal of the Pope; Browning's knowledge of tragedy shaped several of his early dramas and poems in a more academic fashion, and the later Balaustion's Adventure both summarises and revises Euripides' Alcestis.