sure, in its imaginative and spiritual enthusiasm, is the expression of a
period more profoundly great than the Victorian; but the Victorian
literature speaks for an age which witnessed incomparably greater changes
than any that had gone before in all the conditions of life--material
comforts, scientific knowledge, and, absolutely speaking, in intellectual
and spiritual enlightenment. Moreover, to twentieth century students the
Victorian literature makes a specially strong appeal because it is in part
the literature of our own time and its ideas and point of view are in large
measure ours. We must begin by glancing briefly at some of the general
determining changes and conditions to which reference has just been made,
and we may naturally begin with the merely material ones.

Before the accession of Queen Victoria the 'industrial revolution,' the
vast development of manufacturing made possible in the latter part of the
eighteenth century by the introduction of coal and the steam engine, had
rendered England the richest nation in the world, and the movement
continued with steadily accelerating momentum throughout the period. Hand
in hand with it went the increase of population from less than thirteen
millions in England in 1825 to nearly three times as many at the end of the
period. The introduction of the steam railway and the steamship, at the
beginning of the period, in place of the lumbering stagecoach and the
sailing vessel, broke up the old stagnant and stationary habits of life and
increased the amount of travel at least a thousand times. The discovery of
the electric telegraph in 1844 brought almost every important part of
Europe, and eventually of the world, nearer to every town dweller than the
nearest county had been in the eighteenth century; and the development of
the modern newspaper out of the few feeble sheets of 1825 (dailies and
weeklies in London, only weeklies elsewhere), carried full accounts of the
doings of the whole world, in place of long-delayed fragmentary rumors, to
every door within a few hours. No less striking was the progress in public