Many of the greatest writers in English literature lived in the nineteenth century: Wordsworth, Tennyson, Carlyle, Dickens, the Brontes, Thackeray, Shaw and Kipling are just a few. This volume provides a comprehensive chronological outline of the period with biographical information of each writer, an assessment of their works, and a discussion of literary genres or movements to which they belonged. The author shows how the great aesthetic achievements of the Romantic poem and the Victorian novel were overtaken by the complexities of a new social and industrial order, which left their status secure, but their reproduction in succeeding years impossible.