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1800s
Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray
Lifespan | b. 1811 (India), d. 1863 (England)
First Published | 1847
First Published by | Bradbury & Evans
Full Title | Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero
Becky Sharp, Thackeray’s self-willed anti-heroine, is visualized in period dress by Vanity Fair’s original illustrator, Frederick Barnard.
For many, the defining moment of Vanity Fair occurs in its opening chapter. Becky Sharp, prospective governess, emerges from Miss Pinkerton’s academy and flings her parting gift of Doctor Johnson’s Dictionary back through the gates. This “heroical act” is our first indication of Becky’s irreverent power to shape her own destiny, but in dispensing with that monument of eighteenth-century control and classification, William Thackeray also symbolically, if not literally, inaugurates Victorian fiction.
Thackeray’s novel is historical: set in the Regency period, it explores the limits of that world, as well as the constitutive conditions laid down for its own. Becky is central to this achievement, as her literary creation draws on the dualistic possibilities of that transitional moment. A constantly calculating adventuress who, devoid of all sentimentality, is thus the perfect mistress of a society in which everything is for sale and nothing possesses lasting value. Yet our perception of the way in which she operates sets her quite apart from any of the satirical heroines of contemporary literature. She is seductive because of her constant power to surprise, balancing often conflicting emotions such as ambition, greed, and selfishness, with poise, warmth, and admiration. Becky makes her way through a hollow world with the Battle of Waterloo at its center, diagnosing the hypocrisies she exploits as well as acting as a foil to illuminate the few moments of generosity that are in evidence, her own included. As a result, she not only makes possible Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, formed directly under Thackeray’s influence, but also Eliot’s Gwendolen Harleth and Hardy’s Sue Bridehead. Placed at the shifting heart of Vanity Fair, she causes its universe to be glitteringly compelling, and uncomfortably familiar. DT
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1800s
Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë
Lifespan | b. 1818 (England), d. 1848
First Published | 1847
First Published by | T. C. Newby (London)
Pseudonym | Ellis Bell
There has been a great obsession with solitude in modern writing, and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights must stand as the most violent expression of the products of extreme austerity and isolation ever written. It is an utterly psychotic love story, as far removed both from the novels of her two sisters and William Wyler’s 1939 film adaptation as imaginable.
Emily Brontë was brought up with great simplicity, encountering only her father, an Irish pastor, and her sisters, with whom she traded stories to pass the time on their remote Yorkshire wasteland. Given her situation, she could not possibly have acquired any true experience of love, so how could she possibly have distilled such unaffected beauty and crazed, passionate fury into a novel? There is a kind of awful modernity in the story of doomed lovers Catherine and Heathcliff, a model of society at its most efficient, squeezing out the elemental and the innocent freedom of childhood in favor of a calculated reason, and it is this process that plunges the two lovers into disaster. Catherine is able to deny the freedom of her youth for a place in adult society, Heathcliff is driven to a furious retribution that will stop at nothing. Wuthering Heights is a model of catastrophe as envisaged by an innocent woman able to express pure desperation. Doubtless this is the reason that compelled Georges Bataille to judge it “one of the greatest books ever written.” SF
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1800s
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Anne Brontë
Lifespan | b. 1820 (England), d. 1849
First Published | 1848
First Published by | T. C. Newby (London)
Pseudonym | Acton Bell
A sensational story of alcoholism and domestic abuse, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall scandalized reviewers on its publicaton. As The American Review put it, the book takes the reader “into the closest proximity with naked vice, and there are conversations such as we had hoped never to see printed in English.” Nevertheless, the book sold remarkably well, and in a Preface to a second edition of the book, Anne Brontë (writing as Acton Bell) defended herself against her critics, by citing the novelist’s moral duty to depict “vice and vicious characters . . . as they really are.”
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, with its feminist themes, is a powerful portrayal of a young woman’s marriage to a Regency rake, her pious struggle to reform him, and, finally, her flight in order to protect their son against his father’s corruption. Told largely from Helen Huntingdon’s point of view, through letters and journals, the novel recounts an abusive relationship at a time in English history when married women had few legal rights. As the novelist May Sinclair wrote in 1913: “The slamming of Helen’s bedroom door against her husband reverberated throughout Victorian England”—a reverberation that continues to resound for readers today. VL
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1800s
David Copperfield
Charles Dickens
Lifespan | b. 1812 (England), d. 1870
First Published | 1850, by Collins (London)
Full Title | The Personal History, Experience, and Observation of David Copperfield
Regarded as Charles Dickens’s most autobiographical work, David’s account of his childhood ordeal working in his stepfather’s warehouse, and his training as a journalist and parliamentary reporter certainly echoes Dickens’s own experience. A complex exploration of psychological development, David Copperfield—a favorite of Sigmund Freud—succeeds in combining elements of fairy tale with the open-ended form of the Bildungsroman. The fatherless child’s idyllic infancy is abruptly shattered by the patriarchal “firmness” of his stepfather, Mr. Murdstone. David’s suffering is traced through early years, his marriage to his “child-wife” Dora, and his assumption of a mature middle-class identity as he finally learns to tame his “undisciplined heart.”
The narrative evokes the act of recollection while investigating the nature of memory itself. David’s development is set beside other fatherless sons, while the punitive Mr. Murdstone is counterposed to the carnivalesque Mr. Micawber. Dickens also probed the anxieties that surround the relationships between class and gender. This is particularly evident in the seduction of working-class Emily by Steerforth, and the designs on the saintly Agnes by Uriah, as well as David’s move from the infantilized sexuality of Dora to the domesticated rationality of Agnes in his own quest for a family. JBT
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1800s
The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Lifespan | b. 1804 (U.S.), d. 1864
First Published | 1850
First Published by | Ticknor, Reed & Fields (Boston)
Original Language | English
The scarlet letter of the title is a gold-bordered, embroidered “A” that the puritanical community of seventeenth-century Boston forces adulteress Hester Prynne to wear. It is both a badge of shame and a beautifully wrought human artifact.
The Scarlet Letter, rich in a symbolism that contradicts its puritanical subject matter, seeks to demonstrate a community’s failure to permanently fix signs and meanings. This waywardness lies at the heart of a series of oppositions in the novel between order and transgression, civilization and wilderness, the town and the surrounding forest, adulthood and childhood. The more this society strives to keep out wayward passion, the more it reinforces the split between appearance and reality. The members of this community who are ostensibly the most respectable are often the most depraved, while the apparent sinners are often the most virtuous. The nov
el crafts intriguing symmetries between social oppression and psychological repression. Dimmesdale’s sense of torment at his guilty secret, and the physical and mental manifestations of his malaise reflects the pathology of a society that needs to scapegoat and alienate its so-called sinners. Eventually, personal integrity is able to break free from social control. Perhaps more so than any other novel, The Scarlet Letter effectively encapsulates the emergence of individualism and self-reliance from America’s puritan and conformist roots. RM
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1800s
Moby-Dick
Herman Melville
Lifespan | b. 1819 (U.S.), d. 1891
First Published | 1851
First Published by | Harper (New York)
Full Title | Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
Rockwell Kent’s illustration for a 1937 edition of Moby Dick shows the great white whale upending a boatful of whalers.
“A whaleship was my Yale College and my Harvard.”
Moby-Dick is often cited as “the Great American Novel,” the high watermark of the nineteenth-century literary imagination. A huge, monstrous, and yet exquisitely refined creation, the novel continues to confound, enthrall (and often defeat) generations of readers around the world. Narrated by Ishmael, a Massachusetts schoolteacher who has forsaken his old life for the romance of the high seas, the novel chronicles the long sea voyage of the Pequod, a whaling ship led by the demonic Captain Ahab. Ahab is hunting for the white whale that has robbed him of one of his legs. All other considerations (including the safety of his crew) become secondary concerns compared with his monomaniacal quest.
No simple plot summary can do justice to the breadth and complexity of Melville’s novel. One can almost feel the book fighting with itself—balancing the urge to propel the narrative forward with the urge to linger, explore, and philosophize. Moby-Dick is a turbulent ocean of ideas, one of the great meditations on the shape and status of America—on democracy, leadership, power, industrialism, labor, expansion, and nature. The Pequod and its diverse crew become a microcosm of American society. This revolutionary novel borrowed from a myriad literary styles and traditions, switching with astonishing ease between different bodies of knowledge. Quite simply, no one in American literature had written with such intensity and such ambition before. In Moby-Dick are abstruse metaphysics, notes on the technicalities of dissecting a whale’s foreskin, and mesmerizing passages of brine-soaked drama. Moby-Dick is an elegy, a political critique, an encyclopedia, and a ripping yarn. Reading the novel constitutes an experience every bit as wondrous and exhausting as the journey it recounts. SamT
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1800s
The House of the Seven Gables
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Lifespan | b. 1804 (U.S.), d. 1864
First Published | 1851
First Published by | Ticknor, Reed & Fields (Boston)
Original Language | English
Nathaniel Hawthorne draws heavily on his New England roots in this novel, which is marked by an extreme determinism, punctuated by withering observations of contemporary materialism, as the residual effects of familial guilt are traced through several generations. Nearly two centuries ago, Colonel Pyncheon constructed the eponymous house on land he had illegally confiscated from the Maule family, incurring a dreadful curse. As a result, the spring that had made the land valuable became stagnant, and the house was never a place of happiness. In the mid-nineteenth century the Colonel’s descendant, Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon, has inherited the Colonel’s power, greed, and hypocrisy. His lodger, Holgrave, is the novel’s crucial unifying figure; the revelation of his true identity offers hope that the sins of the past need not endlessly pollute the future.
The surprising sentimentality of the conclusion palliates the bleak notion of inherited sin, but cannot efface it entirely. Hawthorne’s acute historical consciousness meant that, for him, the past was always near at hand, shaping the physical, moral, and spiritual texture of the present; he felt out of step with nineteenth-century America’s forward-looking faith in “progress,” measured largely in economic terms. The House of the Seven Gables acknowledges this tension and explores the possibility of escaping from the burden of the past. RH
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1800s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Lifespan | b. 1811 (U.S.), d. 1896
First Published | 1852
First Published by | J. P. Jewett (Boston)
Full Title | Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly
Like any bestseller, Uncle Tom’s Cabin fed off its own success, attracting new readers on the basis of numbers already sold.
The first American novel to sell more than a million copies, Uncle Tom’s Cabin has a claim to be the most influential piece of fiction ever written. Stowe was galvanized by the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 into writing what the poet Langston Hughes has called “America’s first protest novel.”
The saintly slave Uncle Tom, having lived most of his life with kindly owners, is sold for financial reasons at the novel’s outset. Refusing to escape, Uncle Tom responds with Christian tolerance and forgiveness, maintaining his faith consistently until his brutal death. Although “Uncle Tom” has become a byword for black complicity in white oppression, for Stowe, Tom displays Christian virtues, and his Christ-like death positions him as the chief moral exemplar of the novel. Besides the overt emotional and physical suffering of slaves, Stowe emphasizes how slavery damages the morality and humanity of white slave owners themselves. The diverse cast of strong females, black and white, displayed how women, too, could help to achieve abolition.
Stowe surely achieved her political aims with this phenomenally successful novel that was to play a significant role in the forthcoming American Civil War, inspiring anti-slavery activism, and deeply antagonizing slave-holding. RH
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1800s
Cranford
Elizabeth Gaskell
Lifespan | b. 1810 (England), d. 1865
First Published | 1853
First Published by | Chapman & Hall (London)
Original Language | English
A 1940 edition of Gaskell’s Cranford uses a portrait of the author herself as the centerpiece of its elaborate title page.
“‘I’ll not listen to reason,’ she said, now in full possession of her voice, which had been rather choked with sobbing. ‘Reason always means what someone else has got to say.’”
At first glance, Cranford might seem insubstantial, but Elizabeth Gaskell has provided a remarkable insight into the ideas and actions behind social change in a small, fictional country town in the early nineteenth century. Gaskell depicts a set of wholly credible characters, with a delicacy fully worthy of Jane Austen. Cranford engrosses the reader in the lives of these characters even as they go about their mundane daily business.
Cranford is essentially a town—and a society—ruled by women, mostly single or widowed. The narrator, Mary, who no longer lives in Cranford and can thus see it from the outside, describes the occasional arrivals, departures, and deaths as seen through their impact on the town’s women. Mary adopts an attitude of amused indulgence toward her friends, but never allows herself to tip toward scorn or mockery. There is a strong sense that life in Cranford is locked into a spiral of genteel decline; even though the women no longer possess the necessary wealth, they stoically attempt to adhere to the traditional rules of social decorum. The men who should be here have defected to the nearby industrial town of Drumble, which, although never seen in the novel, exerts a powerful influence on life in Cranford. What is exceptional about the book is that, although the main characters often seem involved in events and squabbles of the most petty variety, we never lose our sympathy either for their struggles to make ends meet, or for their unceasing attempts to conceal the fragility of their circumstances; indeed, there is an aston
ishing bravery half-hidden within this tale of domestic incident. The reader is made to see that, as this way of life passes away, something valuable beyond the more obvious social facades is being lost. DP
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1800s
Bleak House
Charles Dickens
Lifespan | b. 1812 (England), d. 1870
First Published | 1853
First Published by | Bradbury & Evans (London)
Original Language | English
H. K. Browne (“Phiz”) produced suitably somber illustrations for Dickens’s dark portrayal of fog-bound London in Bleak House.
“The butterflies are free. Mankind will surely not deny to Harold Skimpole what it concedes to the butterflies.”
1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 16