Advancement in Victorian Lit will examine the themes of progress, motion, and self-improvement in British literary work of the 19th century. Though we’ll focus on the novel as a form (and as a forum for the values of social mobility), we’ll also read short stories, correspondence, sermons, and occasional essays in order to recreate the national mood of an empire in which everything seemed possible: poverty eradicated, education for all, railroads creating an early information superhighway.

Amidst breakneck change, and blinding speed, Victorian fiction laid out a national character and an aesthetic charter that, in some sense, still holds; when most people today think of a novel, they’re thinking of the novel that the Victorians invented.