1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die

by Boxall, Peter

  As befits this apparently paradoxical transition, the thematic structure of Julie is both rigorous and odd. In the first half, Julie alternately resists and is consumed by Saint-Preux’s passion, which leads to his banishment from her father’s house. By the second half, he has returned to the new estate formed by Julie and her husband, Wolmar, where all three happily co-exist in the cultivation of both mind and landscape. In this static Elysium, the dangerous desires of the novel’s first part are ethically recapitulated. For readers, this allegorical mirroring of virtue and desire makes Julie’s triumph somewhat suspect. However, the irreducibility of the problem makes the difficulty of Rousseau’s novel a persistently contemporary one. DT

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  PRE-1800

  Émile; or, On Education

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  Lifespan | b. 1712 (Switzerland), d. 1778 (France)

  First Published | 1762

  First Published by | Duchesne (Paris)

  Original Title | Émile; ou, De l’Éducation

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s philosophical novel charts the ideal education of an imaginary pupil, Émile, from birth to adulthood. Émile is not taught to read until he himself thirsts for the knowledge, and his experience of literature is deliberately limited. According to Rousseau, Robinson Crusoe supplies the best treatise on an education according to nature, and it is the first book Émile will read.

  Rousseau’s educational philosophy regarding religion was also radical. He advocates delaying a child’s religious education to prevent indoctrination or ill-conceived notions about divinity. Émile is thus not taught according to one doctrine but is equipped with the knowledge and reason to choose for himself. Early adolescence is a time which demands learning by experience rather than academic study. Émile is seen to pose and answer his own questions based on his observations of nature. During the transition between adolescence and adulthood Rousseau begins to focus on Émile’s socialization and his sexuality.

  In the final book, “Sophie: or Woman,” Rousseau turns his attention toward the education of girls and young women. In this book, he disapproves of serious learning for girls on the basis that men and women have different virtues. Men should study truth; women should aim for flattery and tact. Rousseau’s novel concludes with the marriage of Émile and Sophie, who intend to live a secluded but fruitful life together in the country. LMar

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  PRE-1800

  The Castle of Otranto

  Horace Walpole

  Lifespan | b. 1717 (England), d. 1797

  First Published | 1765

  First Published by | W. Bathoe & T. Lowndes (London)

  Pseudonym | Onuphrio Muralto

  The Castle of Otranto, Horace Walpole’s only novel, enjoys pride of place as the founding text of the gothic genre. The central narrative revolves around the prince of Otranto (the tyrannous Manfred) and his family, and develops from a mysterious incident at the inception of the story: the death of Conrad, Manfred’s son and heir, crushed under the weight of a gigantic plumed helmet. This supernatural occurrence unleashes a train of events that leads to the restoration of the rightful heir to the title of Otranto. These events take place principally in the family castle, well appointed with vaults and secret passageways, which becomes the scene, as well as the embodiment, of mysterious deaths and hauntings. Largely a fantasy set in the chivalric Middle Ages, the novel nevertheless deals in violent emotions, and places its characters in psychological extremis. Cruelty, tyranny, eroticism, usurpation—all have become, along with the setting, the common currency of gothic narratives.

  Walpole claimed that the basic story first came to him in a dream, and that he had been “choked by visions and passions” during its composition. Concerned for the reception his work might receive, he not only first published it under a pseudonym, but went so far as to pretend that it was the translation of a sixteenth-century Italian manuscript. The whimsy of Walpole’s literary experiment is mirrored in the construction of his own gothic revival mansion, Strawberry Hill, which can still be visited today. ST

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  PRE-1800

  The Vicar of Wakefield

  Oliver Goldsmith

  Lifespan | b. 1730 (Ireland), d. 1774 (England)

  First Published | 1766

  First Printed by | B. Collins for F. Newbury (London)

  Written | 1761–1762

  Among the book illustrators of the time, Thomas Rowlandson made twenty-four illustrations for Goldsmith’s masterpiece.

  The Vicar of Wakefield, as the title suggests, tells the story of Dr. Primrose and his large family, who on the surface live an idyllic life in a rural parish. This tranquillity is disrupted by sudden impoverishment, which sets the plot in motion. The plot, though thin, includes thwarted marriages, unscrupulous behavior, lost children, fire, imprisonment, various disguises, and mistaken identity. Vulnerability attenuates the situation of all the characters who, like the vicar himself, are generally virtuous, but also susceptible to foolish and naive behavior. The vicar is the novel’s main narrator, which in itself produces a number of comic ironies; to fill in gaps, however, there are numerous stories within stories. The novel contains sentimental set pieces, but its overall register is richly comic. Both the disasters that befall the characters and the equally dramatic reversals of fortune are amusing.

  One of the most striking aspects of Goldsmith’s minor classic, clearly, is its heterogeneity. Not only is the plot untidy and digressive, but the text itself includes non-fictional elements, such as poems, sermons, and various disquisitions on politics, legal punishment, and poetics. All this reflects the diversity of Goldsmith’s output as a writer: he was a poet, a playwright, and a novelist, but also took on a great deal of hack work to make a living. ST

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  PRE-1800

  Tristram Shandy

  Laurence Sterne

  Lifespan | b. 1713 (Ireland), d. 1768 (England)

  First Published | 1759–1767

  First Published by | J. Dodsley (London)

  Serialized | Nine volumes

  William Hogarth produced prints of scenes from Tristram Shandy in the 1760s that have defined visualization of the book ever since.

  The book’s full title, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, suggests a loosely biographical work, but the eponymous author-narrator scarcely gets so far as his third year of life, and remains studiously circumspect about his own opinions. While little of Tristram’s life is divulged, the book generates an intimate relationship between the processes of reading and writing. Through digressions and interruptions, narrative expectations are dismantled with a freedom and vivacity that eliminates the very notion of plot. With its inventive conversation between spoken idiom and written circumspection, it is mischievously friendly, and as lewdly suggestive as anything that had ever been written. This book is the archetypal “experimental” novel, prefiguring modern and postmodern fiction. From Rabelais, Laurence Sterne develops comic fantasy, bawdy grotesque, and learned wit. From Cervantes, Sterne takes the picaresque combustion of narrative form, modulating into a more quixotic, but nevertheless realistic, dissection of human folly. Portraits of Tristram’s father, his mother, Uncle Toby, and others build up an oblique but intimate representation of family life. The comic brilliance of the literary surface obscures Sterne’s deeper psychological realism, his almost Proustian analysis of sentimentality, notably the well-meant but ridiculous erudition of Tristram’s father. The modulation of Toby’s interest in warfare into his love affair offers a fine comic characterization of the links between speech, personality, and the groin.

  For all its garrulous intimacy, Sterne leaves much to the imagination. The book’s diplomatic irony provides a subtle critique of the English gentleman, from class and sexuality to all the unacknowledged delicacies of property and propriety. DM

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om the pre 1800s

  PRE-1800

  A Sentimental Journey

  Laurence Sterne

  Lifespan | b. 1713 (Ireland), d. 1768 (England)

  First Published | 1768, by G. Faulkner (Dublin)

  Full Title | A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy by Mr. Yorick

  Overshadowed by Tristram Shandy, Sterne’s shorter novel is nevertheless a comic gem. Combining autobiographical anecdote, incidental fiction, and pastiche of travel writing, the book chronicles the journey of Yorick and his servant La Fleur through France. The Grand Tour, that education in continental manners and art so important to the English gentleman, figures as an implied object of satire. However, there is not much grand about this journey; rather, we are confronted with a belittling and microscopic investigation of sensibility.

  More than a mere story, the principal pleasure of this novel is its playful manipulation of conversational intimacy. The manner of the telling takes priority, while the author-narrator leaves different incidents suspended between sentimental interpretations and a more knowing realism. One notable example is a man lamenting his dead ass, related as an allegory from nature of how feeling toward an animal might provide an edifying example of humane fellow-feeling. The mourner has nevertheless overworked and starved the ass he mourns. Swiftly juxtaposing this with the unfeeling lash given to the animals on which the author’s transport depends, the allegory is shot through with double entendres. Such gulfs between sentiment, material conditions, and narrative point of view are always close to the surface, even if financial considerations, earthly passions, and a continuously implied eroticism are politely deflected. DM

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  PRE-1800

  The Man of Feeling

  Henry Mackenzie

  Lifespan | b. 1745 (Scotland), d. 1831

  First Published | 1771

  First Published by | T. Cadell (London)

  First Published | Anonymously

  The first anonymously published edition of The Man of Feeling sold out in little more than six weeks, likening its cataclysmic effects to the stir caused by the publication of Rousseau’s The New Eloise a decade earlier. Marking a crucial cultural moment in the history of literature, the “editor” of The Man of Feeling purports to offer his readers an historical account of the experiences of young Harley, the eponymous man of feeling himself. Each fictional episode that follows is designed with the express intention of exploring a particular emotive reaction, be it an emphatically non-erotic identification of a London prostitute, or the circulation of affection between a father and his estranged offspring. The represented emotions range broadly from pity, sympathy, and empathy to charity and benevolence.

  The turns of plot in The Man of Feeling seem secondary to the careful cultivation of emotional response. Each tableau is linked to the next without much discernible concern for the generation of narrative suspense, while other sections, the editor informs his reader, are either missing or incomplete. Even so, the emphasis that this fiction brought to bear on the emotional responses of both character and reader alike would prove crucial to a range of eighteenth-century writers, but would also provide much of the aesthetic foundation that later novelists could safely take for granted. As Dickens so well understood, the reader of fiction was there primarily to be moved. DT

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  PRE-1800

  Humphry Clinker

  Tobias George Smollett

  Lifespan | b. 1721 (Scotland), d. 1771

  First Published | 1771

  First Published by | W. Johnston & B. Collins (London)

  Full Title | The Expedition of Humphry Clinker

  A suitably caricatural representation of the hypochondriac Matt Bramble engaged in a close encounter with a young widow.

  “The capital is become an overgrown monster; which like a dropsical head, will in time leave the body and extremities without nourishment and support.”

  Smollett’s last novel is an epistolary narrative detailing the travels through Britain of Matt Bramble and his company, including the servant hero, the impoverished Humphry Clinker. The letters reveal the characters of their very different authors. Matt Bramble is a hypochondriac misanthrope, his sister Tabitha, an aging husband-hunter, Jery Melford their nephew, an exuberant Oxford student, his sister Lydia a naive sentimental romantic, and Tabitha’s maid, Wyn Jenkins, a virtually illiterate social climber. These varied points of view provide a lively and wide-ranging narrative that engages the reader directly in deciphering not only the progress and adventures of the party but also the targets of Smollett’s satire. The narrative allows for multiple interpretations of the events that unfold, and there is no one authoritative version. However, Clinker’s moral integrity and religious zeal are constant throughout the accounts.

  The party continually encounters mishap, with Clinker invariably at the center. Such mishaps include duels, romantic intrigues, jealous encounters, a false imprisonment, and innumerable disputes both large and small. Finally the love matches are made, and the plot tied up. Unlike Smollett’s other titular heroes, Clinker reaps a reward that is unquestionably deserved. His naivety regarding the ways of the world and his morality are admirable traits, against which the flaws of his companions and his society are clearly exposed. LMar

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  PRE-1800

  The Sorrows of Young Werther

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Lifespan | b. 1749 (Germany), d. 1832

  First Published | 1774

  First Published by | Weygandsche Buchhandlung

  Original Title | Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers

  “I shall perish under the splendor of these visions!”

  The Sorrows of Young Werther, the novel that first made Goethe internationally famous, tells a story of a young man afflicted by a rather extreme dose of eighteenth-century sensibility: Werther is a case study of over-reliance on emotion, imagination, and close introspection. Our hero is sent to the fictional village of Walheim on family business, where he meets and promptly falls in love with Lotte. This attractive young woman, meanwhile, is engaged to another, the rational and rather dull local official Albert. Once established, this triangle places Werther at a complete impasse, and the impossibility of a happy resolution drives him to take his own life. Part of the novel’s intrigue has always been its loose relation to actual events: Goethe’s relationship with Charlotte Buff, who was engaged to his close friend, Kestner, and the love-related suicide of another friend, Karl Jerusalem (who borrowed pistols from an unsuspecting Kestner for the deed). Another element of the novel’s success was its effective use of the epistolary form. The narrative unfolds initially through Werther’s letters to a single correspondent. When Werther’s psychological state deteriorates, a fictive editor steps in, and the last part of the novel is his arrangement of Werther’s final scraps and notes.

  The novel struck a powerful chord in its own time, and its appearance was followed by what can only be called Werther mania: would-be Werthers wore his trademark blue jacket and yellow waistcoat; there was even Werther eau de cologne, and china depicting scenes from the novel. Legend also has it that there were copycat suicides, which alarmed Goethe, because his depiction of Werther was more critical than laudatory. The novel was extensively revised in 1787 for a second version, which has become the basis for most modern editions. ST

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  PRE-1800

  Evelina

  Fanny Burney

  Lifespan | b. 1752 (England), d. 1840

  First Published | 1778, anonymously

  Full Title | Evelina; or, The History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World

  Samuel Johnson remarked of the twenty-six-year-old Fanny Burney’s debut novel, Evelina, that it “seems a work that should result from long experience and deep and intimate knowledge of the world.” Her sense for character psychology and awkward social comedy a
re amply on show in Evelina. Adapting the form of the epistolary novel from predecessors such as Samuel Richardson, Burney traces the fortunes of her young heroine as she travels up from the country to negotiate the social world of London for the first time. Here she encounters a stream of suitors and some long-lost relatives, whose grotesque lack of breeding drives her to the brink of physical collapse. She is eventually acknowledged as her absent father’s true daughter. One of the novel’s great strengths is the way in which Burney filters the bustle of London society through the shy consciousness of Evelina. In addition, the growth of her feelings toward the righteous Lord Orville is subtly and ironically rendered. Love-struck teenagers often enjoy writing down the names of their crushes, and there is a charming naturalism in the way Burney has Evelina mention Lord Orville slightly more often than necessary.

  Evelina’s comedy of manners may itself feel a little “mannered” at times, especially when set next to the novels of the writer she influenced most directly, Jane Austen. Burney is vulnerable to the same accusations about the limits of her social scene as are sometimes leveled at Austen—there is no urban squalor here. But for its depiction of psychological interactions in a solidly imagined social setting, Evelina marks a high point in late eighteenth-century fiction—one that proves that this kind of wit did not suddenly begin in 1811 with Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. BT