The Victorian Age which extended from 1837 to 1901 was an era of great social change and intellectual advancement. "The steady advance of democratic ideals" and "the progress of scientific thought" (Compton-Rickett, page 405) were the chief factors influencing the life of the times. The age was marked by "conflicting explanations and theories, of scientific and economic confidence and of social and spiritual pessimism, of a sharpened awareness of the inevitability of progress and of deep disquiet as to the nature of the present" (Sanders, page 399). The literature of Victorian England is infused with the scientific as well as the humanitarian spirit, the romantic as well as the didactic note. It was essentially an Age of Prose- the direct influence of the growth in science and the questioning spirit -with great progress in critical prose writing. The inconsistent features of the early Victorian Britain were clearly reflected in the pamphlets, essays...