Some Late Victorian Writers

Rudyard Kipling, English short-story writer, poet, and novelist chiefly

remembered for his celebration of British imperialism, his tales and poems of
British soldiers in India, and his tales for children. He received the Nobel Prize
for Literature in 1907.
Kipling’s poems and stories were extraordinarily popular in the late 19th and
early 20th century because he seemed to transcend the uncertainty, presenting a
coherent and positive vision. But after World War I (Kipling wrote pamphlets and
poems enthusiastically supporting the UK war) his reputation as a serious writer
suffered through his being widely viewed as a jingoistic (comes from the word
jingo, the nickname for a group of British people who always wanted to go to war
to prove the superiority of Britain) imperialist. (His rehabilitation was attempted,
however, by T.S. Eliot.) His verse is indeed vigorous, and in dealing with the lives
and colloquial speech of common soldiers and sailors it broke new ground.
George Bernard Shaw, Irish comic dramatist, literary critic, and socialist
propagandist, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925.
Despite his failure as a novelist in the 1880s, Shaw found himself during this
decade. He became a vegetarian, a socialist, a spellbinding orator, a polemicist (a
person who engages in controversial debate), and tentatively a playwright. He
became the force behind the newly founded (1884) Fabian Society, a middle-class
socialist group that aimed at the transformation of English society not through
revolution but through evolution in the country’s intellectual and political life
(Example: The Apple Cart (performed 1929), a futuristic high comedy that
emphasizes Shaw’s inner conflicts between his lifetime of radical politics and his
essentially conservative mistrust of the common man’s ability to govern himself).
Shaw involved himself in every aspect of its activities, most visibly as editor of
one of the classics of British socialism, Fabian Essays in Socialism (1889), to
which he also contributed.
Oscar Wilde, Irish wit, poet, and dramatist whose reputation rests on his only
novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and on his comic masterpieces Lady
Windermere’s Fan (1892) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). He was
a spokesman for the late 19th-century Aesthetic movement in England, which
advocated art for art’s sake, and he was the object of celebrated civil and criminal
suits involving homosexuality and ending in his imprisonment (1895–97).