information:extraction
The Victorian period: 1837–1901

In the 19th century the relationship between authors, publishers, and readers, changed. Authors originally had only received payment for their manuscript, however, changes in copyright laws, which began in 18th and continued into the 19th century promised royalties on all future editions. Another change in the 19th century was that novelists began to read their works in theaters, halls, and bookshops. Also during the nineteenth century the market for popular fiction grew, and competed with works of literature. New institutions like the circulating library created a new market with a mass reading public.

Another difference was that novels began to deal with more difficult subjects, including current political and social issues, that were being discussed in newspapers and magazines. Under the influence of social critics like Thomas Carlyle, the idea of social responsibility became a key subject, whether of the citizen, or of the artist, with the theoretical debate concentrating on questions around the moral soundness of the modern novel. Questions about artistic integrity, as well as aesthetics, including the idea of " art for art's sake ", proposed by writers like Oscar Wilde and Algernon Charles Swinburne, were also important.

Major British writers such as Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy were influenced by the romance genre tradition of the novel, which had been revitalized during the Romantic period. The Brontë sisters were notable mid-19th-century authors in this tradition, with Anne Brontë 's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Charlotte Brontë 's Jane Eyre and Emily Brontë 's Wuthering Heights. Publishing at the very end of the 19th century, Joseph Conrad has been called "a supreme 'romancer. ' " In America "the romance... proved to be a serious, flexible, and successful medium for the exploration of philosophical ideas and attitudes." Notable examples include Nathaniel Hawthorne 's The Scarlet Letter, and Herman Melville 's Moby-Dick.

A number of European novelists were similarly influenced during this period by the earlier romance tradition, along with the Romanticism, including Victor Hugo, with novels like The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831) and Les Misérables (1862), and Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov with A Hero of Our Time (1840).

Many 19th-century authors dealt with significant social matters. Émile Zola 's novels depicted the world of the working classes, which Marx and Engels 's non-fiction explores. In the United States slavery and racism became topics of far broader public debate thanks to Harriet Beecher Stowe 's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), which dramatizes topics that had previously been discussed mainly in the abstract. Charles Dickens ' novels led his readers into contemporary workhouses, and provided first-hand accounts of child labor. The treatment of the subject of war changed with Leo Tolstoy 's War and Peace (1868/69), where he questions the facts provided by historians. Similarly the treatment of crime is very different in Fyodor Dostoyevsky 's Crime and Punishment (1866), where the point of view is that of a criminal. Women authors had dominated fiction from the 1640s into the early 18th century, but few before George Eliot so openly questioned the role, education, and status of women in society, as she did.

As the novel became a platform of modern debate, national literatures were developed that link the present with the past in the form of the historical novel. Alessandro Manzoni 's I Promessi Sposi (1827) did this for Italy, while novelists in Russia and the surrounding Slavonic countries, as well as Scandinavia, did likewise.

Along with this new appreciation of history, the future also became a topic for fiction. This had been done earlier in works like Samuel Madden 's Memoirs of the Twentieth Century (1733) and Mary Shelley 's The Last Man (1826), a work whose plot culminated in the catastrophic last days of a mankind extinguished by the plague. Edward Bellamy 's Looking Backward (1887) and H. G. Wells 's The Time Machine (1895) were concerned with technological and biological developments. Industrialization, Darwin 's theory of evolution and Marx's theory of class divisions shaped these works and turned historical processes into a subject of wide debate. Bellamy's Looking Backward became the second best-selling book of the 19th century after Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Such works led to the development of a whole genre of popular science fiction as the 20th century approached.