Victorian period

Cultural  

1. The period of British history when Queen Victoria ruled; it includes the entire second half of the nineteenth century, a time when Britain was the most powerful nation in the world. The Victorian period was known for a rather stern morality. It was also marked by a general earnestness about life and by a confidence that Britain's domestic prosperity (see Industrial Revolution) and vast holdings overseas (see British Empire) were signs of the country's overall righteousness (see white man's burden). As the Victorian period continued, however, such easy beliefs were increasingly challenged.

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The Victorian period produced a great number of diverse writers and thinkers. (See Robert Browning; Charles Darwin; Charles Dickens; Rudyard Kipling; John Stuart Mill; Robert Louis Stevenson; and Alfred, Lord Tennyson.)

Example Sentences

The property where the baby was found dates to the Victorian period and at one stage housed a church-run mother and baby unit.

From BBC • Aug. 9, 2024

And in the Victorian period, some publishers used binding cloth dyed with colors like Scheele’s green, an industrially produced hue also containing arsenic.

From New York Times • Mar. 9, 2023

“The piece itself lived very well in its original Victorian period setting, partly because of the issues of light and technology in the play that really are the crux of the action,” she said.

From Seattle Times • Apr. 22, 2022

During the Victorian period, however, many of these lectures and demonstrations at other institutions were more spectacle than scholarship.

From Salon • Dec. 18, 2021

Still, they produce an illusion of bustling progress; and the reading class infers from them that the abuses of the early Victorian period no longer exist except as amusing pages in the novels of Dickens.

From Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion by Shaw, Bernard