In The Victorian Age in Literature, published in 1913, Chesterton leaps into a concise overview of the outstanding writers of this era—discussing such poets as Robert Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold as well as the great novelists Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Charles Reade.

He writes with his own unmistakable brand of witty bravado, meditating on how George Eliot would write a Dickens character, or remarking that George Meredith was really, at his best, a sort of daintily dressed Walt Whitman.