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1800s
Frankenstein
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Lifespan | b. 1797 (England), d. 1851
First Published | 1818
First Published by | Lackington et al. (London)
Full Title | Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
“The fallen angel becomes a malignant devil.”
Frankenstein has far more in common with Dracula than with any of the novels of generic late-gothicism. Both are commonly cited as early examples of the horror genre, and both have introduced a character to popular culture that has become distorted beyond all recognition, mainly through their representations in the Hammer, and earlier Universal, movie franchises. Frankenstein, and Dracula also, seems now more akin to the ultra-modern strain of science-fiction technohorror than any classical version of the genre. At the center of the story is the idea that our understanding of science can be developed and controlled, to the point that the tendency of Nature toward dissolution can be arrested; the impossibility of this desire is at the center of its “horror.”
The subtitle of the novel, The Modern Prometheus, makes clear the connection with Greek mythology, but it is evident that Frankenstein is a novel that looks forward as well as back. The Swiss scientist and philosopher Frankenstein is inspired by occult philosophy to create a human-like figure, and give it life. The idea of reanimation is at the heart of much modern horror—the attempted violation of chaotic natural order in favor of linear certainty is something that modern society takes for granted, from the construction of unnatural environments to the continual attempts to postpone death and decline. Frankenstein is a novel that addresses such concerns from a point in history where the developments could only be imagined. Yet it remains, in all sorts of ways, an inescapable part of the culture it examines and foresees, and for these reasons alone it must continue to be read and reassessed. Effortless prose, grotesque imagery, and surreal imagination will ensure that it continues to be enjoyed. SF
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1800s
Ivanhoe
Sir Walter Scott
Lifespan | b. 1771 (Scotland), d. 1832
First Published | 1820
First Published by | A. Constable & Co. (Edinburgh)
Full Title | Ivanhoe; or, The Jew and his Daughter
Walter Scott’s historical romance details the political and cultural enmity between the subjugated Saxons and their Norman-French overlords during the reign of Richard the Lionheart in the twelfth century. Wilfred of Ivanhoe, a brave Saxon knight, returns from the Crusades to assist King Richard in recovering his throne from his usurping brother Prince John. To this endeavor, the assistance of a range of other personages, both historical and imaginary, is central—even the famed mythological outlaw Robin Hood makes an appearance. The narrative is urged forward by three confrontations of epic proportions: the tournament at Ashby-dela-Zouche, the siege of Torquilstone Castle, and the rescuing of the heroine Rebecca from Templestowe, the seat of the Knights Templar. In each instance, conflict and bloody warfare ensue; at other moments, elements gleaned from gothic romance take precedence. Yet for all the delight that he takes in the adventure and the sheer vitality of chivalry, Scott also subtly critiques warfare.
With its focus on medieval England, Ivanhoe signalled a change from the Scottish subject-matter of Scott’s earlier Waverley novels. As a sustained examination of the political, chivalric, and romantic practices of old, this fiction not only galvanized for a number of later writers and readers their impression of the medieval past, but also pioneered the genre of the historical novel, the literary form most often used to express it. DaleT
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1800s
Melmoth the Wanderer
Charles Robert Maturin
Lifespan | b. 1782 (Ireland), d. 1824
First Published | 1820
First Published by | A. Constable & Co. (London)
Original Language | English
Melmoth occupies a curiously transitional position in literary history. As the final, belated representative of the gothic tradition in literature, it contains many of the key features of the genre: wild and remote, or otherwise exotic locations, a succession of strange stories, labyrinthine entrapments, and the dangerous lure, for the Protestant, of Catholic Europe. The question of identity is in the foreground from the outset, as we are introduced to John Melmoth, a young student who inherits his uncle’s legacy. The estate includes a manuscript that relates the story of an ancestor, also called John Melmoth, who becomes the guiding thread for the novel. We discover that he has attained satanic immortality in exchange for his soul, yet he now uses this duration in order to seek his release from eternity by trying to drive another to take on his burden.
Melmoth’s appeal to modernity resides not so much in the surprise and tension of the action that keeps us engaged, but in its reflection on the nature of temptation and torment. The satanic Melmoth is always fated to fail; his victims doomed to endure the hardships of their lives. The human mind is portrayed as both vanquisher and vanquished, and it is for this reason that, though quickly forgotten by his own generation, Maturin became a model for the twilight explorations of Poe, Wilde, and Baudelaire, among others. It is only in realizing this that we have begun to acknowledge Maturin’s fundamental contribution to literary history. DT
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1800s
The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr
E. T. A. Hoffmann
Lifespan | b. 1776 (Germany), d. 1822
First Published | 1820–22
Full Name | Ernest Theodor Amadeus Hoffman
Original Title | Lebensansichten des Katers Murr
A composer as well as an author, Hoffmann cast Kriesler, the human hero of Tomcat Murr, in his own Romantic image.
“Bashfully—with trembling breast—I lay before the world some leaves from my life: its sorrows, its hopes, its yearnings—effusions which flowed from my inmost heart in sweet hours of leisure and poetic rapture.”
In E. T. A. Hoffmann’s bizarre novel, comprising an autodidactic feline’s “life and opinions” accidentally interspersed with “a fragmentary biography of Kappellmeister Johannes Kriesler on random sheets of waste paper,” the reader is taken on a fantastical journey through the mundanities of everyday life in early nineteenth-century Germany. Murr, the tomcat, cuts a gregarious figure that contrasts markedly with the anxious composer Kriesler. The confident and eclectic talents of Murr, a creature modeled on Hoffmann’s own adored tabby cat, render him a true Renaissance feline, whereas Kriesler, Hoffman’s alter ego, is a character saturated in the Romantic sensibility, ravaged, as he regularly is, by the extremes of emotional experience.
Hoffmann’s mesmerizing tale invokes everything from the supernatural, to the operatic, the musical, and the psychiatric in a narrative populated by characters who traverse the borders between madness and sanity, in a style that mirrors this uncertainty. It has even been suggested that Hoffmann’s work laid the foundations of magic realism. Following in the traditions of Rabelais, Cervantes, and Sterne, Hoffmann’s work went on to impact upon such a varied group as Gogol, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Kierkegaard, and Jung, and in many ways his writing prefigured Freud’s thinking about the uncanny. This is an immensely inventive and unusual read that both stimulates and confounds in turn. JW
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1800s
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
James Hogg
Lifespan | b. 1770 (Scotland), d. 1835
First Published | 1824
First Published by | Longman et al. (London)
Original Language | English
James Hogg was born into poverty in the Scottish Lowlands and worked as a shepherd before teaching himself to read and write. He put some of his previous work experience to good use in writing a textbook on sheep disea
ses, before composing poetry as the “Ettrick Shepherd,” and moving onto his most famous work, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.
Hogg presented this metaphysical thriller as a true story. Purporting to be a historical reconstruction of the life of two brothers, George and Robert, narrated by the book’s editor, along with the confessional manuscript of Robert, the novel offers a series of doubles and doublings. The editor’s account, some hundred years after the actual events, is contrasted with the confessional religiosity of the sinner’s account. These different stylistic perspectives give the book its bifocal structure, revealing the public and private sides of a killer who styles himself a “justified sinner.”
Abusing Calvinist doctrines of predestination—if you are born one of God’s elect, then you can do no wrong—the confession reveals an orgy of confused fanaticism, through which Hogg conducts his satire on religious fanaticism. Throughout the book, extremism is contrasted with healthier, more honorable and humane good sense, particularly in the resistance shown by the lower classes to their “betters.” Robert is haunted by a shape-shifting stranger who could be either a manifestation of the devil or a symptom of intense psychological trauma. At once gothic comedy, religious horror story, mystery thriller, and psychological study, the novel is both terrifying and terrific. DM
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1800s
The Life of a Good-for-Nothing
Joseph von Eichendorff
Lifespan | b. 1788 (Poland), d. 1857
First Published | 1826, by Vereinsbuchhandlung
First Chapter Published | 1823
Original Title | Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts
A young man lies in the grass, thinking of this and that. His exasperated father, taking a break from a hard day’s work, tells his “good-for-nothing” son to get on his feet and do something. At that, our young hero takes up his fiddle and sets off into the wide world, singing a song as he goes. So begins the delightful picaresque novella The Life of a Good-for-Nothing by the nineteenth-century German Romantic Joseph Von Eichendorff. Better known for his lyrical poetry, Eichendorff, who was a leader of the late Romantics, secured his place as a key figure in Germany’s literary heritage with this brief but vibrant coming-of-age story.
The young protagonist is picked up on the road by two aristocratic ladies who take him to their castle, where he works as a gardener and then, once his eccentricities have endeared him to those around him, as a bookkeeper. He falls in love with one of the ladies, but when he sees her with another man, he picks up his fiddle and, once more defying social conventions, heads back to the road, guided only by serendipity and a longing for adventure. From his lady’s castle, chance takes him to Italy and Prague, through good times and bad, from one adventure to another. Eventually the road takes him back to the castle and to the arms of his true love.
Eichendorff, whose poems have been set to music by such illustrious composers as Robert Schumann and Felix Mendelssohn, infuses his novella with the kind of lyrical prose rarely found outside of the very best poetry. His hero, the ideal “Romantic man,” is the most sympathetic of characters and his whimsical story is never less than fascinating and refreshing. OR
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1800s
Last of the Mohicans
James Fenimore Cooper
Lifespan | b. 1789 (U.S.), d. 1851
First Published | 1826
First Published by | J. Miller (London)
Full Title | The Last of the Mohicans, a Narrative of 1757
The pivotal set piece of The Last of the Mohicans is the massacre at Fort William Henry during the French and Indian War. This is the “factual” event around which Cooper, the first internationally renowned American novelist, builds a compelling tale of wilderness adventure. Drawing heavily on the American genre of the Native American captivity narrative, he creates a template for much American popular fiction, particularly the Western.
Frontiersman Natty Bompo had already been introduced as an old man in The Pioneers (1823); here he appears in middle age, as Hawkeye, a scout working for the British, with two Delaware Native American companions, Chingachgook and his son, Uncas. Having crossed paths with Cora and Alice Munro, the daughters of a British colonel, Bompo and friends spend the rest of the novel rescuing them from captivity, escorting them to safety, or pursuing them through the wilderness.
Cooper’s racial politics are conservative; though the novel raises the possibility of interracial romance between Uncas and the genteel Cora (who has a black mother), the prospect is quashed. Cooper laments the destruction of the wilderness, and of the Native Americans who inhabit it, but all are shown to succumb inevitably to progress, typical of the ideology of nineteenth-century America. RH
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1800s
The Betrothed
Alessandro Manzoni
Lifespan | b. 1785 (Italy), d. 1873
First Published | 1827
First Published by | Pomba; Trameter; Manini
Original Title | I Promessi Sposi
Written in the Florentine dialect, The Betrothed was Alessandro Manzoni’s attempt to put forward an authoritative model for a standardized Italian language as a condition for the cultural and political unification of the country. The novel is set during the seventeenth-century Spanish occupation of the Italian peninsula, and based on an allegedly authentic manuscript that the author reproduces in perfectly baroque style. Manzoni is able to draw on parallels from history to depict his own era, when Italy was under Austrian domination.
From a peaceful little village in Lombardy, where two humble peasants are preparing for their wedding, the story introduces a circus of characters, who scheme to prevent or expedite that union. There is an impressive variety of actors, powerless and powerful, modest and aristocratic, religious and secular. Inspired by the new Romantic culture, The Betrothed examines the abuse of power in all its many forms. Priests use their knowledge of Latin to outwit their parishioners; fathers abuse their paternal authority to force their daughters into a nunnery; crooks kidnap a simple girl who has found refuge in a convent. But, above all, obtuse foreign governments oppress and prevaricate without sympathy for the local population. Nevertheless, the novel’s message is positive: people’s faith in overcoming difficulties and their determination to pursue their goals facilitates a favorable resolution of the story with the union of the betrothed. RPi
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1800s
The Red and the Black
Stendhal
Lifespan | b. 1783 (France), d. 1842
First Published | 1831
First Published by | Hilsum (Paris)
Original Title | Le Rouge et le Noir
The front cover of the first edition of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black carries the subtitle “Chronicle of the 19th century.”
Set in France in the 1830s, Le Rouge et le Noir chronicles Julien Sorel’s duplicitous rise to power and his subsequent fall. The son of a carpenter, Julien seeks initially to realize his Napoleonic ambitions by joining the priesthood. Despite some torrid liaisons during his training, Julien succeeds in becoming a priest and eagerly accepts the invitation of the Marquis de la Mole to become his personal secretary. Even Julien’s affair with the Marquis’ daughter, Mathilde, is the occasion of his ennoblement so that he can marry her without scandal. Before Julien has an opportunity to enjoy his aristocratic life, however, the Marquis receives from Mme de Renal (another of Julien’s conquests when he was training for the priesthood) a letter that exposes him as a fraud. Prevented from marrying Mathilde, Julien exacts revenge.
Sometimes perceived as being a bit too melodramatic to appeal to modern literary taste, The Red and the Black is immensely important in terms of the development of the novel as an art form. On the one hand, it is a story told very much in the Romantic tradition. Sorel may be unscrupulous and roguish in the pursuit of his ambitions, yet set
against a petty and constraining bourgeois French society, his energy and sheer gumption often lure the reader into a reluctant rapport. It is in Stendhal’s narrative style, however, that this novel has proved to be most influential. In largely being told from the vantage point of each character’s state of mind, the novel’s convincing psychological realism prompted Émile Zola to proclaim it the first truly “modern” novel. It is for this reason, quite apart from the fact that it remains a rollicking good yarn, that The Red and the Black should be reserved a place on every serious reader’s bookshelf. VA
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The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Victor Hugo
Lifespan | b. 1802 (France), d. 1885
First Published | 1831
First Published by | Flammarion (Paris)
Original Title | Notre-Dame de Paris
Nicolas Maurin’s contemporary illustration shows a disgusted Esmerelda feeding the grotesque hunchback Quasimodo.
“The owl goes not into the nest of the lark.”
1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 13