Alone of all the volumes in the New Cambridge History of English Literature, this one is named after the reign of a monarch. To identify a literary period in this way is necessarily problematic, and the utility of the label ‘Victorian’ has long been contested. On the other hand, it has endured – albeit with shifting sets of connotations. Not least among the reasons for this endurance is the apparent precision offered by the bounding dates of the Queen’s reign (1837–1901), with the latter of these years more or less coinciding, conveniently, with the end of a century. Yet even before Queen Victoria’s demise, her long tenure of the throne had encouraged many commentators to look backwards, thus accentuating the notion of her reign as marking a distinctly defined era. Both her Golden and Diamond Jubilees stimulated evaluative retrospectives – such as Alfred Russel Wallace’s The Wonderful Century. Its Successes and Failures (1898) – of all that had been achieved (the emphasis was almost invariably teleologically framed) over the preceding decades, whether in politics or industrial invention, the physical sciences or the field of culture.

The sense that Victoria’s accession marked a very useful, clearly defined starting point was, of course, in many ways constructed in hindsight, a product of the lengthy reign of a monarch who had attracted a good deal of attention right from her accession, due to the combination of her youth and the fact of her being a woman. This was accentuated as a result of an expanding popular press that exploited these circumstances, then her marriage to Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in 1840, and then her rapidly growing family.