The Victorian age was one whose principal tenets were progress and individualism, and one characterized by Tennyson as an awful moment of transition. In this volume introductory essays on aspects of Victorian thought, faith and doubt lead into chapters on the major novelists and poets of the period, as well as pieces on women prose-writers, fantasy and nonsense, the Victorian theatre and the fin de siecle. The Penguin History of Literature is a critical survey of English and American literature in ten volumes. Each volume is a collection of original essays specially commissioned for the series, which, taken together, cover 14 centuries of literature from the Anglo-Saxons to the present.