What is the main aspect of Victorian literature?

To select one aspect of Victorian literature
and explain why it is the most significant is obviously a huge undertaking, and an answer which
is only a couple of hundred words long must be very general and summary.

Nonetheless, I think that the aspect of Victorian literature which strikes the modern
reader most forcibly is what I shall call its "largeness". This applies in the most
elementary way: Victorian writers such as Trollope, Dickens, Hardy, Carlyle and Ruskin produced
immense oeuvres, filling many feet of shelf-space with uniform calf-bound
volumes. Tennyson, Browning and Arnold wrote similarly long poems.

On a
somewhat deeper level, though, Victorian writers tackled large themes. The length of their books
paralleled the grandeur of their concerns: liberty, justice, the death of God, the
responsibilities of empire, the meaning of virtue. Writers with no training in philosophy were
happy to try their hand at the big philosophical questions. Writers like George Eliot (who
was very widely read in philosophy and theology) constructed whole new
philosophies of religion.

Many of the Victorians were tremendously confident,
certain that they were at the apex of the greatest empire in history. Their confidence was vast
confidence. Many were racked with doubts because religion seemed to be collapsing. Their doubts
were enormous doubts. Whatever else the Victorians were, they were always larger than
life.