By the second half of the 19th century, the Romantic movement had exhausted itself, and with the reign of Queen Victorian there began a new golden age in the literary history of England. The sixty years covered by Tennyson’s working life were rich in literature of almost every kind. They were years of rapid change, stimulating thought and provoking criticism.

The growth of wealth gave increased leisure for the pursuit of letters, and widened the audience to whom a man of letters could appeal. In a single year, 1895, there were published Tennyson’s Maud, Browning’s Men and women, Arnold’s Balder Dead, Patmore’s Angle in the House, and Macdonald’s first work: in fiction, Dickens’s little Dorr it and Thackeray’s Newcomers, Mrs. Gaskell’s North and South, Kingsley Westward Ho; and Trollope’s Warden; in history, the third and fourth volumes of Macaulay’s History. At the same time, there were writing such eminent writers as Rosette and Fitzgerald, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and George Meredith, and in the world of criticism, Ruskin, Carlyle, Mill and Newman. It was the golden age of literature.