While in the preceding
Romantic period poetry had been the dominant genre, it was the novel that was most important in the
Victorian period.
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) dominated the first part of Victoria's reign: his
first novel,
Pickwick Papers, was published in 1836, and his last
Our Mutual Friend between 1864–5.
William Thackeray's (1811–1863) most famous work
Vanity Fair appeared in 1848, and the three
Brontë sisters, Charlotte (1816–55), Emily (1818–48) and Anne (1820–49), also published significant works in the 1840s. A major later novel was
George Eliot's (1819–80)
Middlemarch (1872), while the major novelist of the later part of Queen Victoria's reign was
Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), whose first novel,
Under the Greenwood Tree, appeared in 1872 and his last,
Jude the Obscure, in 1895.