<P> Other significant novelists of this era were Elizabeth Gaskell (1810--1865), Anthony Trollope (1815--1882), George Meredith (1828--1909), and George Gissing (1857--1903). </P> <P> Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning conducted their love affair through verse and produced many tender and passionate poems . Both Matthew Arnold and Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote poems which sit somewhere in between the exultation of nature of the romantic Poetry and the Georgian Poetry of the early 20th century . However Hopkins's poetry was not published until 1918 . Arnold's works anticipate some of the themes of these later poets, while Hopkins drew inspiration from verse forms of Old English poetry such as Beowulf . </P> <P> The reclaiming of the past was a major part of Victorian literature with an interest in both classical literature but also the medieval literature of England . The Victorians loved the heroic, chivalrous stories of knights of old and they hoped to regain some of that noble, courtly behaviour and impress it upon the people both at home and in the wider empire . The best example of this is Alfred Tennyson's Idylls of the King, which blended the stories of King Arthur, particularly those by Thomas Malory, with contemporary concerns and ideas . The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood also drew on myth and folklore for their art, with Dante Gabriel Rossetti contemporaneously regarded as the chief poet amongst them, although his sister Christina is now held by scholars to be a stronger poet . </P> <P> In drama, farces, musical burlesques, extravaganzas and comic operas competed with Shakespeare productions and serious drama by the likes of James Planché and Thomas William Robertson . In 1855, the German Reed Entertainments began a process of elevating the level of (formerly risqué) musical theatre in Britain that culminated in the famous series of comic operas by Gilbert and Sullivan and were followed by the 1890s with the first Edwardian musical comedies . The first play to achieve 500 consecutive performances was the London comedy Our Boys by H.J. Byron, opening in 1875 . Its astonishing new record of 1,362 performances was bested in 1892 by Charley's Aunt by Brandon Thomas . After W.S. Gilbert, Oscar Wilde became the leading poet and dramatist of the late Victorian period . Wilde's plays, in particular, stand apart from the many now forgotten plays of Victorian times and have a closer relationship to those of the Edwardian dramatists such as George Bernard Shaw, whose career began in the 1890s . Wilde's 1895 comic masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest, was the greatest of the plays in which he held an ironic mirror to the aristocracy while displaying virtuosic mastery of wit and paradoxical wisdom . It has remained extremely popular . </P>

The victorian era was considered the age of the novel