The Victorian age in literature is roughly taken to be between 1830 and 1890, approximately coinciding with the long reign of Queen Victoria.

This was the age of industrialization, empire and reform. Mass movement of people from the country to London changed its demographics drastically. Poverty and exploitation increased. Family life was significantly altered. Slums sprang up in and around London and pollution made its appearance. The Chartist uprisings (see the box Chartism) and increasing social unrest raised fears of a revolution similar to the recent one in France. The middle class tried to retain an old-world morality in times when moral codes were too lax (as they believed). Part of the moral debate surrounded sexual codes, marriage, religious beliefs and family life. Debates about faith were invariably driven by developments in science that questioned and broke down established ideas. The Church of England faced a crisis as people were divided along the ‘high’ and ‘low’ lines – a crisis driven in part by the conversion of Cardinal John Henry Newman to Catholicism. Darwinism altered the prevailing views of life, divinity, humanity and creation in the latter decades of the century.

Many writers of the mid-Victorian age were involved in what eventually came to be known as the ‘condition of England’ debates. These debates over morality, poverty, education, industrialization and reform are clearly the contexts of the ‘social problem’ novel in Victorian literature.