Bleak House begins with fog: “Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.” And at the center of the fog, but murkier still, is the High Court. Legal corruption permeates this novel like a disease, issuing in particular from the Byzantine lawsuit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, with which all the book’s characters have a connection. This suit, the narrator tells us, has become so complicated and of such longevity “that no man alive knows what it means.” People live and die as plaintiffs in the case. Structured around Chancery’s tortuous machinations, Dickens’s narrative is less picaresque than other of his works but nevertheless provides his customary, witty dissection of the layers of Victorian society. Whether they live in the sunny aristocratic milieu of the Dedlocks in Lincolnshire or in the slums of Tom-All-Alone’s in London, there is always someone with a stake in the Jarndyce case.
In reality, it is the public sphere as a whole that is satirized in Bleak House. Everything resembles Chancery: Parliament, the provincial aristocracy, and even Christian philanthropy is caricatured as moribund and self-serving. At some unconscious level, all public life is tainted with a complicity between class, power, money, and law. Private and inner life is affected too. The narrative, which is split between the third person and the novel’s heroine, Esther Summerson, concerns moral disposition as much as social criticism. Characters—from the wearyingly earnest to the brilliantly shallow, from the foolish and foppish to the vampiristic and dangerous—are all illuminated in the darkness of Dickens’s outraged, urbane opus. DH
See all books from the 1800s
1800s
Walden
Henry David Thoreau
Lifespan | b. 1817 (U.S.), d. 1862
First Published | 1854
First Published by | Ticknor & Fields (Boston)
Full Title | Walden; or, Life in the Woods
This frontispiece from the first edition of Thoreau’s Walden emphasizes the return to a simplified lifestyle.
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life . . .”
Walden is not exactly a novel, but it is indisputably a cornerstone of American literature. Between July 1845 and September 1847, Henry David Thoreau lived a solitary, austere, self-sufficient life in a simple cabin on the shore of Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts, where he developed and practiced his personal and political philosophy. In a series of eighteen essays, distilled from his voluminous journal entries, Walden records Thoreau’s thoughts and experiences of this time.
Convinced that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” Thoreau sought to “simplify” his life in every way, eating only what he found in the wild, or could cultivate himself. Apart from physical exercise such as walking, fishing, and swimming, the remainder of his time was devoted to observing the natural world around him, writing, reading, and thinking. His greatest luxury was the leisure to pursue these ends; he notes that “a man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.” Deeply influenced by the transcendental philosophy of Emerson, Thoreau rejected religious orthodoxy, seeking instead a personal bond with God, discovered through Nature. For Thoreau, however, Nature is not only spiritual; he describes with equal reverence his occasional approach toward primal savagery. He also refuses to feel hidebound by tradition, encapsulating the untapped potential of youth in the image of the West. This ethos underpins the appeal of Walden to generations of Americans, despite its rejection of aggressive capitalism. Thoreau’s experiment was neither misanthropic nor revolutionary. Practical, honest, and beautiful, it is the record of one man’s efforts to live “a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.” RH
See all books from the 1800s
1800s
Green Henry
Gottfried Keller
Lifespan | b. 1819 (Switzerland), d. 1890
First Published | 1854
First Published by | Friedrich Vieweg und Sohn
Original Title | Der grüne Heinrich
A seminal example of the Bildungsroman, Green Henry is written in the tradition of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, presenting the reader with a sensitive and thoughtful portrait of childhood, adolescence, and maturity. Called “Green Henry” because of the color of his clothes, Henry Lee grows up in a small Swiss village with his doting mother. Keller documents the passing joys and tragedies of childhood in painstaking detail, emphasizing the freshness and innocence of Henry’s response to village life and the natural world, as well as his strong bond with his mother.
Henry grows older, moves to town, and begins to attend school, and Keller focuses on his moral and philosophical development, which leads to a desire to become an artist and to an attraction toward two women, the pure and innocent Anna and the earthy, sexually experienced Judith. Driven by these two forces, Henry confronts love, loss, and eventually artistic defeat, finally experiencing maturity through the putting-aside of his artistic ambitions in favor of a small but useful career in the provinces. Although the lessons that Henry learns growing up are painful, they are none the less instructive. Displayed throughout Green Henry is a skillful merging of larger social concerns with the vagaries of personal life. Often compared to Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, it features vivid and realistic characters, whose place on the novel’s stage, while often tragic, is ennobled by Keller’s sympathy for the human condition. AB
See all books from the 1800s
1800s
North and South
Elizabeth Gaskell
Lifespan | b. 1810 (England), d. 1865
First Published | 1855, by Harper (New York)
First UK Edition | Chapman & Hall
First Serialized | 1854–55, by Household Words
North and South is, as its title suggests, a study in contrasts. Its heroine, the daughter of a clergyman who resigns because of her religious doubts, is displaced from the southern village of Helstone (a pastoral, traditional backwater) to the bustling manufacturing city of Milton Northern, a fictionalized Manchester in northwest England. The city teems with the energy of industrialization, its rising capitalist class, and all that comes with it: pollution, worker unrest, illness, atheism, and a host of other apparent evils. In this environment, the Hale family are truly foreigners, with their country-gentry habits and values. It is a “condition of England” novel that looks unflinchingly at the plight of factory workers, and at worker–”master” relations.
To this end, we find our heroine, Margaret Hale, befriending struggling families such as the Higginses, and speaking out for reconciliation between millhands and millowners. Interwoven in opposition to this story is the narrative of Margaret’s coming of age, worked out in the romance plot between Margaret and her ideological antithesis, Mr. Thornton, a prominent factory owner and self-made man. Margaret loses her parents and the apparent certainty of her youthful rural values, but gains a more nuanced understanding of change, political as well as personal, and its possibilities. ST
See all books from the 1800s
1800s
Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert
Lifespan | b. 1821 (France), d. 1880
First Published | 1857
First Published by | Charpentier (Paris)
Original Language | French
The follies of the novel’s eponymous heroine are presented mercilessly, yet without alienating the reader’s sympathy.
Madame Bovary is a revelation; almost 150 years old, it feels as fresh as if it were tomorrow’s novel. Readers who are accustomed to think of nineteenth-century novels as rambling, digressive, plot-driven stories will have a shock when they encounter a novel from that long century that is digressive and has a compelling plot but wraps all these up in a prose style so exquisite that the book feels fragile and sturdy all at once.
Flaubert takes the st
ory of adultery and presents it as banal, an unheroic element of the unheroic provincial petit bourgeois world he is immersed in. But he also makes it beautiful, sordid, melancholy, and joyous, revels in emotions run amok and the mess of feelings that clichés can neither hide nor contain. Emma Bovary, a beauty confined to a marriage that bores her, yearns for the gigantic and gorgeous emotions she finds in the romance novels she devours. Her life, her husband, her imagination is not enough; she takes a lover and then another, but they, too, fail to sate her appetites. She shops, using an array of material objects as a means of fulfillment; when these also give way before the depths of her yearning, she finally kills herself, in debt and in despair.
Flaubert does not mock Emma Bovary; neither does he sentimentalize, moralize, or treat her joy or desperation as heroic. The impersonal, prosaic narrator—a monster of precision and detachment yet endearing, almost charming—mocks all with his aloofness, and cherishes all with his lavish and meticulous attention to detail. The result is a rich context—not just for Emma Bovary but for the novel, for writing itself. For so much scrupulous care to be given to something, that something must be precious. Flaubert makes this novel precious. PMcM
See all books from the 1800s
1800s
Indian Summer
Adalbert Stifter
Lifespan | b. 1805 (Austria), d. 1868
First Published | 1857
First Published by | Gustav Heckenast (Budapest)
Original Title | Der Nachsommer
The title page of the first edition of Stifter’s Indian Summer is illustrated with a restrained etching by Peter Johann Geiger.
Adalbert Stifter’s Indian Summer is a novel that defies many expectations of the genre. For a work of such length, its plot does not seem very exciting at first glance, and the style is deliberately plain. The novel offers few of the majestic scenes of Bohemian forests and mountains otherwise found in Stifter’s stories, which have been well known to many generations of schoolchildren in Central Europe.
It is characteristic of the novel’s design that the name of the young narrator, Heinrich, is not revealed until quite some way into the text, after his scientific expeditions have already taken him several times to the Freiherr von Risach’s remote country house. Heinrich, for his part, is never curious to find out his kind host’s name. Like Heinrich, the reader is not told the story of Risach’s youth—the only tragic episode that interrupts the novel’s serene course—until near the end, when the love between Heinrich and Natalie, benignly watched over by his parents, her mother, and Risach, has blossomed into marriage.
The rewards of this novel lie not in sudden revelations or dramatic conflicts but in the fruits borne by diligent work of the kind to which Risach dedicates himself—cultivating roses, restoring old furniture. Thus, the flowering of a delicate cactus in Risach’s greenhouse is one of several late scenes in the novel that reward the reader’s patience. Equally, Risach allows Heinrich’s artistic sense to mature gradually, enabling Heinrich in another late “blossoming” scene to appreciate fully the beauty of a statue that he had previously overlooked.
This is a novel that may not appeal to everyone. On its first appearance, it was widely criticized, but Nietzsche, significantly, regarded it as one of the few gems of German prose because its serenity so defied the hectic spirit of its time. LS
See all books from the 1800s
1800s
Adam Bede
George Eliot
Lifespan | b. 1819 (England), d. 1880
First Published | 1859
First Published by | W. Blackwood & Sons (London)
Given Name | Mary Ann Evans
The high-minded village carpenter Adam Bede has less impact on the reader than Eliot’s more rounded female characters.
George Eliot’s first full-length novel is at once a fine example of, and contains a passionate artistic manifesto for, literary realism. Set in the English Midlands, in the early nineteenth century, the eponymous character, a carpenter, is in love with the flighty, shallow, and vain Hetty Sorel. She, in turn, is seduced by the likeable but irresponsible local squire, Arthur Donnithorne, who leaves town shortly after getting her pregnant.
The main drama lies in the gripping rendition of Hetty’s lonely and unsuccessful journey to find her lover, her eventual infanticide, and her moving confession to her cousin, Dinah Morris. The confession, in its charged moment of interpersonal communication and sympathy, provides the symbolic and moral climax of the book.
Eliot’s agnostic humanism enables her to retain—without any spiritual belief—the Christian ethical schema of confession, forgiveness, and redemption. It is at this moment that Eliot’s writing moves away from documentary fidelity of the Dutch realists, whose paintings, she suggests, are analogous to her own work, to a heightened diction that conjures with the unknown and the sublime. Indeed, while the novel is peopled with lovingly sketched rural characters, it is almost more compelling at times such as this, when the language of realism develops into something stranger. Despite its suggestion of something that lies beyond the everyday life of human affairs, the novel’s “realist” impulse is to suggest that one should subdue one’s own desires to an acceptance of duty and the here and now. Contemporary readers might find the conclusion somewhat hard to swallow, but there remains much to relish in this vividly narrated and emotionally convincing novel. CC
See all books from the 1800s
1800s
Oblomov
Ivan Goncharov
Lifespan | b. 1812 (Russia), d. 1891
First Published | 1859
Movie Adaptation | 1981
Original Language | Russian
One of the world’s great novels, Oblomov came to be seen as the definitive representation of the lethargic and myopic Russian aristocracy of the nineteenth century. A principal target of the novel is the institution of serfdom; like many Russian intellectuals, Goncharov felt that Russia could not modernize and compete with the rest of the developed world unless it abolished the institutions and social practices that hampered it so severely.
But Oblomov would not be a remarkable novel if it were only a critique of an important, but now long gone, problem. A bittersweet tragicomedy, it centers on one of the most charming but ineffectual protagonists in literature. Oblomov is good-natured but lacks the willpower to put his ideas into practice. He relies on his much more able servant, Zakhar, to organize his pointless existence, in an updated version of the relationship between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Falling in love with the beautiful Olga, he simply cannot take the necessary actions to secure her affections, and he loses her to his practical but rather less appealing friend, Stolz. After this predictable failure Oblomov sinks further into lethargy, rarely leaving his bedroom, despite the good offices of his well-intentioned landlady. Oblomov is a brilliant and unusual novel about wasted opportunity: how many works of literature tell the story of a hero who fails to secure the object of his affections through inactivity? And how many can convince most readers that he is still a good man? AH
See all books from the 1800s
1800s
The Woman in White
Wilkie Collins
Lifespan | b. 1824 (England), d. 1889
First Published | 1860
First Published by | S. Low, Son & Co. (London)
Original Language | English
Opening with the hero Walter Hartright’s thrilling midnight encounter with the mysterious fugitive from a lunatic asylum, The Woman in White was an instant hit when it first appeared as a weekly serial.
Different narrators present their accounts like witnesses in a trial. The plot investigates how a “legitimate” identity is built up and broken down through a set of doublings and contrasts. The rich, vapid heiress Laura, married to the villain Sir Percival Glyde, is substituted by her uncanny double, the woman in white, Anne Catherick. While Laura is drugged and placed in a lunatic asylum, Anne dies of a heart condition and is buried in La
ura’s place. The plot, mastermined by the engaging rogue Count Fosco, is narrated by Laura’s feisty half-sister Marian, a character probably based on George Eliot. From the sensational moment when Walter Hartright sees his beloved Laura standing by her own grave, the story turns into a quest to reconstruct her. Walter’s increasingly obsessive drive to prove Laura’s identity leads to two disclosures of illegitimacy.
This book defined the sensation novel of the 1860s. Wild and uncanny elements of gothic fiction are transposed into the everyday world of the upper-middle-class family, appealing directly to the nerves of the reader and exploiting modern anxieties about the instability of identity. JBT
See all books from the 1800s
1800s
The Mill on the Floss
George Eliot
Lifespan | b. 1819 (England), d. 1880
First Published | 1860
First Published by | W. Blackwood & Sons (London)
Given Name | Mary Ann Evans
Tom and Maggie Tulliver are about to be overwhelmed by the flood in a late-Victorian visualization of the novel’s climax.
The Mill on the Floss reworks elements of George Eliot’s own history into a study of childhood and of how a woman’s identity is shaped and constrained by circumstance. Following the development of Maggie and Tom Tulliver, the two children of the miller of Dovecote Mill, it stresses the unpredictability of family inheritance. Stolid Tom takes after his mother, while his sister Maggie—dark, impulsive, and imaginative—favors her father. Unlike Tom, Maggie is intellectually sharp, and is a tomboy in contrast to her cousin, Lucy Deane. The story is set in the 1840s, within the wider provincial middleclass community of St. Oggs, and explores the competing forces of continuity and change. Tulliver is financially ruined by the modernizing lawyer Wakem; and while Tom labors to reclaim the family property, Maggie strives to overcome past feuds through her friendship with Philip, Wakem’s disabled son. However, it is the brother–sister bond and the conflict between the claims of family ties that drive the novel. In a moment of impulse, Maggie gives way to her suppressed desire for Lucy’s fiancé, Stephen, drifting with him down the stream, before returning, disgraced, to her family. In a tragic denouement, Maggie is ultimately reconciled with Tom; however, as the narrator comments on the aftermath of the flood, “Nature repairs her ravages—but not all.” JBT
1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 17