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xi  The Victorian world was composed of a plethora of contradictions. Nine- teenth-century Britain during the years of Queen Victoria’s reign (1837– 1901) was characterized by paradoxical extremes: global domination and domestic unrest, capitalistic consumption and glaring poverty, scientific advances and spiritual crises, and a female ruler and a limited sphere for women. An examination of these paradoxes reveals a complex, multifari- ous era of imperialism and social reform, prosperity and penury, faith and skepticism, and feminism and domesticity. The literature of this era reflects these competing cultural currents for an increasingly literate public and an emerging literary marketplace. Several eighteenth-century political and social developments influ- enced these nineteenth-century contradictions. First, the era of British imperialism and colonization culminated in increased consumption of for- eign goods and rising waves of foreign immigration, a phenomenon known as reverse colonization. Second, the Industrial Revolution and the birth of a manufacturing economy engendered not only great wealth for the rising mercantile class but also a great migration of working-class citizens from Introduction and Background