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History of Literature
A BRIEF HISTORY OF
WESTERN LITERATURE
The 19th century -
Prose
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The 19th century - Prose
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Thomas Love Peacock
Benjamin Disraeli
Jane Austen
"Pride and Prejudice"
PART I,
PART II
George Sand
Stendhal
Victor Hugo
"The Hunchback of Notre Dame"
VOLUME I,
VOLUME II
Alexandre Dumas,
pere
"The
Three Musketeers"
Dumas
Alexandre, fils
"The Lady of the Camellias"
Honore de Balzac "Father
Goriot"
Gustave Flaubert
"Madame Bovary"
PART
I,
PART II,
PART
III
Charles Dickens
"Great
Expectations"
CHAPTER I,
CHAPTER II-XII,
CHAPTER XIII-XXXII,
CHAPTER XXXIII-LIX
Illustrations by John McLenan
William
Makepeace Thackeray
Anthony Trollope
"Barchester Towers"
Robert
Louis Stevenson
"Treasure Island"
Illustrations by N.C.
Wyeth
George
Meredith
"The Egoist"
George Gissing
Mrs Gaskell
Anne Brontë
Charlotte Bronte
"Jane
Eyre" CHAPTER
I-XXIV,
CHAPTER XXV-XXXVIII
Illustrations by F. H. Townsend
Emily Brontë
George Eliot
"Silas Marner"
Aleksandr
Sergeyevich Pushkin
"The Bronze Horseman"
Illustrations by Alexandre Benois
"Eugene Onegin"
CANTO I,
CANTO II,
CANTO III,
CANTO IV,
CANTO V,
CANTO VI,
CANTO VII,
CANTO VIII
collection:
Portrait in Russian Art
(18th-19th centuries)
Nikolay Gogol
Ivan Turgenev
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
"The Idiot"
Leo Tolstoy
"The Kreutzer Sonata"
Émile Zola
"J'accuse" (I accuse)
Gerhart
Hauptmann
Stephen
Crane
Theodore Dreiser
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Herman
Melville
"Moby Dick or The Whale"
PART I,
PART II,
PART III,
PART IV,
PART V
Illustrated by Rockwell Kent
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain)
"The Prince and the Pauper"
Chapter I-IV,
Chapter V-VII,
Chapter VIII-XI,
Chapter XII-XIV,
Chapter XV-XVII,
Chapter XVIII-XXI,
Chapter XXII-XXVI,
Chapter XXVII-XXXI,
Chapter XXXII-XXXIII
Edgar Allan Poe
1.
"Ligeia"
2.
"The Raven"
Illustrations by
Gustave Dore
3.
"The Fall of the
House of Usher"
4.
Illustrations from
Edgar Poe by Edmund Dulac
5.
Illustrations
from
Edgar Poe
by Harry Clarke
Wilkie Collins
"The Moonstone" PART
I,
PART II
"The Woman in White"
PART I,
II,
III,
IV,
V,
VI,
VI
Illustrations by John
McLenan
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
"SHERLOCK
HOLMES" (contents)
"The
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes"
PART I,
PART II
Illustrations by
Sidney Paget
"Memoirs of
Sherlock Holmes"
PART I,
PART II
Illustrations by
Sidney Paget
"The Return of
Sherlock Holmes"
PART
I,
PART II
Illustrations by
Sidney Paget
"The Hound of the Baskervilles"
PART
I,
PART II
Illustrations by
Sidney Paget
"A
Study in Scarlet",
"The Valley of Fear",
"His Last Bow",
"The Sign of
Four"
G.K.
Chesterton
PART I
"The Innocence of
Father Brown",
PART II
"The Wisdom
of Father Brown",
PART III
"The Incredulity of
Father Brown",
PART IV
"The Secret of Father
Brown",
PART V
"The Scandal of Father
Brown"
Charles Perrault
"The
Tales of Mother Goose"
PART I,
PART II
Illustrated by Gustave Dore
Wilhelm and
Jakob Grimm
"Grimms Fairy Tales"
PART I,
PART II,
PART III
Hans Christian Andersen
"The Fairy Tales"
PART I,
PART II
Illustrations by
Edmund Dulac
PART III,
PART IV
Edward Lear
Lewis Carroll
Lewis
Carroll - photographer PART
2
"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"
PART 3, PART 4, PART 5
Illustrations by John Tenniel
"Through
the Looking-Glass" PART 6, PART 7,
PART 8
Illustrations by John Tenniel
Illustrations by Arthur Rackham
PART
9
Walt
Disney’s "Alice in Wonderland"
PART10,
PART
11
Rudyard Kipling
PART I
"Poems"
PART II
"Kim"
PART III
"The Jungle Book"
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Illustrations
from
Edgar Poe
by Harry Clarke
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THE 19TH CENTURY- PROSE
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In the 19th century the Romantic movement, the Industrial Revolution
and the -
largely hostile - interaction between them, combined to create a
culture markedly
different from the assured and orderly world of the 18th century.
The attempt made
by European statesmen in 1815 to bottle up the effects of the French
Revolution and
the reforms of the Napoleonic era looked to be in constant danger of
disintegration,
especially in the first half of the century. After 1848, growing
material prosperity
reduced the likelihood of bloody revolution and class war,
especially in Britain, but
that is only evident in hindsight. Large social problems remained:
they occupied the
attention of many practitioners of what became the major literary
form - the novel.
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THE 19TH-CENTURY NOVEL
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The development of
the novel in the 19th century is an extraordinary episode in literary
history. Less than 100 years separates
Fanny Burney's Evelina, highly
regarded by discerning judges of the time, from
George Eliot's
Middlemarch, but the cultural gap is similar to that between the Bronze
Age and the Renaissance.
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THE VARIETY OF THE NOVEL
The 19th century provided plenty of evidence for the idea that the novel
is not so much a literary form amenable to categorization as the product
of limitless aspects of popular culture. As the Russian critic
Bakhtin
remarked, the novel draws from 'that broadest of realms, the common
people's creative culture . . . ', and the 19th-century novel is so rich
and various that it is impossible to characterize generically. The
number of novels published in Britain alone during the course of the
century has been conservatively estimated at 40,000. Few topics were
excluded from their pages, few contemporary problems went unaddressed
and, in judging 19th-century novelists, the social and political context
is no less important than the purely artistic.
As for form or character, a profusion of '-isms' can be distinguished,
which often represent contradictory trends. Many themes can be listed,
however none can be said to encapsulate the spirit or character of the
age. Melville's
Moby Dick and
Dickens's David Copperfield were published
within a few months of each other; though both were novels, and were
written in the same language, in nearly every other respect they were
totally different works of art.
THE VARIETY OF NOVELISTS
Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866) is an example of a novelist who
belonged to no literary movement and obstinately avoids classification.
A close friend of
Shelley, he was also a satirist of Romanticism — and
of most other contemporary styles, notions and fashions. Not much
interested in characterization or plot, he set up ideas — and deftly
demolished them - m ingeniously constructed dialogue.
After Scott, it was possible to be a successful professional novelist,
even a comparatively rich one, but only for a very few; even those with
the most compelling vocation were often forced to seek other means of
support.
Peacock was saved from penury by having a clerkship for most of
his life in the East India Company, winning plaudits for designing an
iron steamship.
A novelist such as Edward Bulwer Lytton (1803-73), who had an active
political career and became a peer, exemplifies another way in which
sonic 19th-century novelists elude accepted categories: sheer
versatility. His novels, over 20 of them and in most cases very long,
were only part of his huge literary-output, but they embraced a vast
range of forms — historical novels in the tradition of
Scott, novels of
social protest, of crime, or 'terror', and a Utopian novel The Coming
Race (1871). He was a literary giant in his day, though he is all too
seldom read now.
Social commentary is a major ingredient of 19th-century fiction, and
many novelists became embroiled in public events, notably
Zola in the Dreyfuss affair. The most remarkable exponent of politics combined with
novel writing was
Benjamin Disraeli
(1804— 81), British Prime Minister
and international statesman. The political novels for which he is best
known, Coningsby, Sybil, and Tancred, upholding his romantic, one-nation
ideals, were written in the 1840s, before he achieved high office, but
his last novel, Lothair, was published in 1870, between his two spells
as prime minister. It was almost as lively as his first, the absurd (but
amusing) Vivien Grey, published 44 years earlier.
NOVEL READERS
Although novel reading was often regarded as a frivolous activity,
nearly everyone read novels, as Trollope said, 'from the Prime Minster
down to the . . . scullery maid'. The majority of readers (as well as a
large proportion of the writers) were women - more middle-class wives
than hard-worked scullery maids, no doubt — and it is ironic that, for
most of the century, novelists male and female were seriously hampered
by the need to follow Victorian notions of respectability, so that
female characters had to be either virtuous or damned.
For most of the 19th century, novels in Britain were commonly published
in three volumes and, priced at 55p, were beyond the means of many
readers. However, the price of a couple of novels could buy a year's
membership of a circulating library. Later, novels, including those of
nearly all the major novelists, were published as monthly serials,
either as slim single volumes published independently or, more often as
time went on, in a weekly magazine such as
Dickens's Household Words.
These arrangements had important effects on the form that novels took.
Mudie's, the largest of the circulating libraries, in practice exercised
a kind of censorship by declining novels of which they disapproved: a
refusal could have a disastrous effect on sales. Serial publication,
like TV soap operas today, were inclined to end each instalment with a
cliff-hanger to keep the readers' interest. Plots might be altered,
popular characters written up, unpopular ones dropped, according to
public reaction.
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'Two nations between whom
there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's
habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones
or inhabitants of different planets; who are informed by a different
breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and
are not governed by the same laws.'
'You speak of — ' said
Egremont hesitatingly.
'THE RICH AND THE POOR.'
Disraeli, Sybil, bk. ii, ch. 5.
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JANE AUSTEN
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The difference
between the two most distinguished novelists of the early 19th century
was summed up in his Journal by one of them,
Sir Walter Scott, in a
comment on the other,
Jane Austen: 'The Big Bow-Wow strain I can do
myself like any now going; but the exquisite touch, which renders
ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth
of the description and the sentiment, is denied to me.'
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Jane Austen
"Pride and Prejudice"
PART I,
PART II
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THE RECTOR'S DAUGHTER
The father of
Jane Austen (1775—1817) was rector of Steventon in
Hampshire until his retirement in 1801, when the family moved to the
fashionable spa city of Bath, returning to Hampshire after his death in
1805. Jane Austen never went to school, but was taught by her father,
who encouraged her to read widely. She never married, though she had
several suitors, and continued to live with her mother and sister,
Cassandra, until her death at 41. It was a remarkably uneventful life,
but provided the material for a series of novels which, though not
particularly successful in her own time, have held their readership ever
since - and have recently proved extraordinarily popular in film and
television adaptations. Her career coincided almost exactly with the
era of Napoleon (her brother served in the Navy under Nelson at
Trafalgar), but these were matters famously excluded from the world of
her novels (as one of her characters complained about history, all the
men were good-for-nothings and there were hardly any women at all).
In spite, or because, of her remoteness from the literary world,
Jane
Austen had a clear idea of the scope of her own talent, and was never
tempted to stray beyond it. Her novels were all set within the narrow
circle of the country gentry and her plots were all concerned with
courtship and marriage. At the time, largely as a result of the tales of
terror and romance that supplied the circulating libraries, fiction was
widely regarded as not entirely respectable, but the remark in Northander Abbey that in the novel 'the greatest powers of the mind are
displayed', although charaetenstically ironic, nevertheless indicates a
thoroughly serious approach. Like Fielding,
Jane Austen saw the novel as
an art form, demanding close study and careful planning. What appears a
straightforward story casually told, tempting the ill-informed into
remarks about 'Regency soap opera', is in fact the result of hard-won
precision, all the more remarkable m the light of our knowledge that
the later novels at least were written at the table in the family parlour, where concentration must have been difficult.
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
Owing to the vagaries of publishers,
Jane Austen's novels were not
published in the order m which she wrote them; two, Northanger Abbey,
known to be an early work, and Persuasion, were not published until
after her death. Her first work, written at fifteen, was a burlesque of
Richardson. She had no time for Richardson's high moral tone, nor for
sentimentality either, which she mocked in other early exercises. Her
satirist's eye was directed at the popular taste for the macabre; in
North anger Abbey the episode presented a perceptive view of how
imagined horrors may work on the mind. It was sold to a publisher (for
£10) in 1803, several years after it was written, but remained
unpublished until 1818. Pride and Prejudice was first written in
1797
as 'First Impressions', and rejected by a London publisher. Revised and retitled, it appeared in
1813. It is probably
Jane Austen's best-known,
perhaps her best, book. The intelligent, headstrong Elizabeth Bennett,
the author's favourite heroine, and the supercilious but romantic Mr
Darcy provide the conflict between 'pride' (Darcy) and 'prejudice'
(Elizabeth). Although there is a deepening subtlety m the later novels.
Pride and Prejudice represents an author in full command of her art, and
has a certain extra sparkle of youth. Some vivid minor characters are
almost as familiar as the characters of
Shakespeare or
Dickens.
THE LATER NOVELS
There is a considerable interval in
Jane Austen's work during roughly
the first decade of the 19th century, probably caused by family matters
and her father's death in 1805, when she abandoned work on her current
book. The Watsons. Sense and Sensibility dated back to a sketch of 1795,
and was rewritten twice before publication in 1811. After Pride and
Prejudice there was little difficulty with publishers, and it was
followed by Mansfield Park (1813) and Emma (1816), warmly reviewed by
Scott. Persuasion was written in 1815 and her last book, Sanditon, was
unfinished when she died of Addison's disease.
Jane Austen had many contemporary admirers, including the Prince Regent
(later George IV), but also some critics, including
Charlotte Bronte and
Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Her cult status in English literature dates
from the late 19th century, and her reputation has gone on rising,
though many different views of her as a writer have been put forward,
especially since the rise of feminist criticism.
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THE NOVEL IN FRANCE
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The novel in France
underwent extraordinary development between about 1830 and 1880, with a
succession of innovations introduced by novelists of genius. The
central theme was the ascendancy of Realism. It has always been a thread
through the novel, but it was used in a special sense of the French
novel of the mid-19th century, influenced by the rise of science and the
positivism of Auguste Comte (1798-1857).
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GEORGE SAND
Portraits of George Sand
The novels of
George Sand (Amandine-Aurore Dupin, 1804—76) fall into two
groups. The early novels, written m Paris in the 1830s, were Romantic
tales of women struggling against social restrictions. The second, more
popular today, were deceptively simple pastoral tales, set in the Berry
countryside where she lived. "They included autobiographical elements,
including her liaisons with Chopin and the poet
Musset.
STENDHAL
A prolific writer on many subjects, especially music and art,
Stendhal
(Henry Beyle, 1783— 1842) was nearly always entertaining, if
unreliable. His novels include two classics, Le Rouge et le Noir
(Scarlet and Black, 1830) and La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse
of Parma, 1839). They are generally regarded as the precursors of
Realism, highlighting social life in the provinces and political life in
France and Italy (where Stendhal spent many years) during the
post-Napoleonic era. They are remarkable for their psychological
insights and the passions of the central characters.
HUGO
Victor Hugo
"The Hunchback of Notre Dame"
VOLUME I,
VOLUME II
The first night of Hernani (1830), a verse drama by
Victor Hugo
(1802-85), provoked a riot involving the supporters of
Hugo's Romantic
doctrine - that human nature should be freed from the restraints of
Classicism -and those loyal to the tradition of Corneille and Racine.
Hugo is regarded as a great French lyrical poet, but is mainly
remembered outside France for two great novels, Notre Dame de Paris (The
Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1833 [1831 in Hutchison Encylopedia]), and Les
Miserables (1862), written while
Hugo was m exile as a republican.
Returning in 1870, he found himself a national hero, who received a
state funeral when he died.
DUMAS
The other great French Romantic,
Alexandre Dumas (1802—70), is known as
Dumas pere to distinguish him from his son
Dumas fits (1824— 95), author
of La
Dame aux camehas (Camille, 1848). In energy, ebullience and
productivity (his Complete Works occupy over 300 volumes),
Dumas pere
challenged such giants as
Hugo and
Balzac. His novels of 16th and 17th
century France, full of sudden twists and coincidences, were written
over half a century.
"The
Three Musketeers"
(1844-45), has been the most
popular. The Count of Monte Cristo (1844), set in the Napoleonic era,
has also proved a lasting favourite.
BALZAC
Honore de Balzac "Father
Goriot"
Henry James regarded
Honore de Balzac (1799—1850) as the greatest of
novelists, whose influence on the novel has been huge. His Comedie
Humaine (1842—48) was originally planned as 137 separate but
interconnected novels and stories, of which
Balzac completed 97, plus
rough drafts of several more - all in under twenty years.
Balzac's aim
was to present in fictional terms a comprehensive picture of French
society in the years after the Revolution; it was also to be a critical
analysis, drawing on techniques similar to those of the scientist or the
historian. He divided the novels into three groups: customs, covering
social and political life; philosophical; and analytical, including
aspects of the supernatural. Among the author's main interests were the
working of human emotions, the relationship between the individual and
the environment, and the effects of money, ambition and energy in social
relations. The work glows with
Balzac's formidable vitality (he was
physically and metaphorically a giant) and includes more than 2,000
characters, some of whom reappear in different novels. Notwithstanding
contemporary success, Balzac, who lived an eventful life in spite of
intense work, was constantly in debt until he married a rich Hungarian
countess m 1850, only to die months later.
FLAUBERT
Gustave Flaubert
"Madame Bovary"
PART
I,
PART II,
PART
III
In contrast with the prodigious output of
Hugo,
Dumas and
Balzac,
Gustave Flaubert (1821-80) published only five novels, plus some first
and most famous novel Madame Bovary (1857), the story of a doctor's wife
oppressed by the dull restrictions of life in a small Normandy town who
escapes through adultery and eventually suicide, is one of the most
influential novels ever.
Flaubert was tried for offences against public
morals, and acquitted, the trial doing wonders for sales.
Flaubert, who
disliked the label 'Realist', was the supreme stylist. Plot and
characterization interested him less, although, as befits an acute
commentator on the art of the novel, he acknowledged their importance.
He sought a style 'as rhythmic as verse, as precise as the language of
science' and believed that the author must be 'like God . . . present
everywhere but visible nowhere'. Salammbo (1862), set in a minutely
researched ancient Carthage, restored him to favour with the
Establishment, but his remaining novels (A Sentimental Education, 1869,
The Temptation of St Anthony, 1874, begun 25 years earlier, and Bouvard
et Pecuchet) were less successful.
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DICKENS
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There are clearly
generic differences between the English novel and the French, or the
Russian, novel. Without entering too deeply into a subject where all
generalizations are suspect, it can be said that one feature of the
novelists of the English Victorian novelists is that they always
recognized that part of their duty was to entertain.
Dickens was the
great entertainer, and at one time was regarded as almost exclusively
that. More recently, his social criticism has been taken more seriously,
and his darker, more complex, later works have attracted respectful
attention from serious academic critics.
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"Dickens' Dream" by R.W. Buss
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THE NOVELIST
Charles Dickens
"Great
Expectations"
CHAPTER I,
CHAPTER II-XII,
CHAPTER XIII-XXXII,
CHAPTER XXXIII-LIX
Illustrations by John McLenan
Charles Dickens (1812—70))
came from the poorest reaches of the middle class. His father was
imprisoned for debt when Charles was twelve and he went to work in a
warehouse at 30p a week. He became a reporter, recording Parliamentary
debates in shorthand, and in 1833 sold the first of his 'Sketches by
Bo/.' to a magazine. Pickwick Papers began m 1836, Oliver Twist the following year, and
Dickens's triumphant career was
off to a flying start. In less than 30 years, he produced 14 major
novels and a number of lesser fictions. Yet this was only a part of his
almost frenetic activity.
Dickens was a driven man, who never let up,
constantly busy editing magazines, organizing amateur theatricals,
charitable projects and protest campaigns, entertaining and being
entertained by a huge circle of friends, lecturing, travelling (two
trips to America), and of course writing, and all with extraordinary
energy. In his later years, he had huge popular success with public
readings from his novels, one-man shows by a born actor, and these
exhausting performances on tour are said to have hastened his death. His
private life was less happy. His marriage ended, after 10 children in 20
years. Gossip linked him with his wife's sister; in fact he was in love
with the actress Ellen Ternan, for a time his mistress.
THE NOVELS
Dickens's popular reputation rests on his humour, his spirited
narration, and his ability to create larger-than-life minor characters.
He was such a 'natural' that he never needed to rewrite, which partly
explains the dynamism of his prose and the breathtaking vigour of his
set-piece descriptions, such as his famous descriptions of London, the
city with which he was so strongly and ambivalently involved. His faults
are also obvious: sentimentalism, the vapid nature of his heroines, and,
to some extent, his heroes too. It can also be said that his highly
original minor characters, are generally two-dimensional, more
caricature than character.
Besides Pickwick, containing the immortal coachman Sam Weller, and
Oliver Twist, with the two disparate villains Fagin and Bill Sykes, his outstanding novels are (dates
given here arc of first serial publication): NichoLis Nicklcby (1838), a
swingeing attack on private schools (Dotheboys Hall, Wackford Squeers,
headmaster), but with many joyful and lively episodes; The Old
Curiosity Shop (1840), containing the notorious tearjerking scene of
Little Nell's death, adored by the Victorians but not us; Rarnaby Rudge
(1841), set in the time of the anti-Catholic Cordon riots; Martin
Chuzzlewit ; 1843), partK' based on
Dickens's experience of America (he
was critical), but one of his funniest; A Christmas Carol (1843), first
of a projected Christmas series, in which miserable old Scrooge is
redeemed by his Christmas dream; Dombey and Son (1848), written in
Switzerland and taken as marking the beginning of a more serious
approach by
Dickens to his art; David Copperfield, partly
autobiographical (Mr Micawber seems to owe something to
Dickens's
likable but improvident father); Bleak House (1852), Dickens's most
impressive novel of social protest, especially for its devastating
attack on the Court of Chancery; Hard limes (1854), an attack on
soulless utilitarianism in the person of Mr Cradgrind (a typically
inspired name); Little Dorrit (1855), including an attack on the
absurdities of the system in which honest men (like
Dickens's father)
could be imprisoned indefinitely for debt, and emphasizing the
responsibility of the individual; A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Dickens's
untypical - it is historical, set partly abroad and has little humour
- novel of the French Revolution; Great Expectations (1860—61), many
people's favourite, with a more believable hero (also the narrator)
whose development from selfish youth to humane young man is the unifying
theme, some memorable descriptive passages, an especially rich
assortment of minor characters and, until he was persuaded to change it,
a downbeat ending; Our Mutual Friend (1864),
Dickens's most pessimistic
novel, a dense, complex and, despite initial impressions, coherent
picture of contemporary society.
Dickens died suddenly in 1870 leaving
The Mystery of Edwin Drood unfinished. The question who, if anyone,
murdered Edwin Drood has exercised the ingenuity of surprisingly
numerous writers since and spawned several attempts to complete the
novel.
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ENTERTAINMENT AND SOCIAL CONSCIENCE
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At the 1997 Booker
Prize, the annual British award for fiction, someone drew up a short
list that might have figured in 1847, had the Booker Prize existed then.
On it were Dickens's Dombey and Son,
Thackeray's Vanity Fair,
Trollope's
The Macdermots of Ballycloran, and novels by each of the three Bronte
sisters, Wuthering Heights (Emily), Jane Eyre (Charlotte) and Agnes Grey
(Anne). Suffice to say that all those authors, and most of the books,
are more familiar to readers today than any one of the six authors or
books nominated in 1997.
A telling illustration of the standard and range of Victorian fiction.
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THACKERAY
Had there been a prize awarded by popular vote in 1847,
William
Makepeace Thackeray (1811-63) would have won.
Vanity Fair was greeted as
a challenge to Dickens. Set a generation earlier, it is a sweeping
satire of contemporary English mores, in particular the materialism of
the industrial age. It contrasts the fortunes of two female friends,
Amelia Sedley and the immortal Becky Sharp, poor, bright, cynical and.
inevitably, on the make, whom
Thackeray, compelling his readers to make
their own moral udgements, cannot bring himself to consign to the
unhappy end that convention demanded for less than virtuous women. It
also contains one or two set pieces of scintillating humour.
Thackeray
wrote for a living, demanding a huge journalistic output. None of his
other novels quite measured up to Vanity Fair, although Henry Esmond
(1852) comes close, followed by Pendennis (1848) and The Netycomes
(1853). He was an admirer of, and expert on, the novels of the 18th
century, and shares the vigour and liberality of Fielding and his
contemporaries.
TROLLOPE
Anthony Trollope
"Barchester Towers"
Anthony Trollope (1815—82) sat down every morning at 5.30 for three
hours to write 3,000 words before leaving for his work in the Post
Office. He bruised his reputation as an artist in his Autobiography
(1883) by insisting that novel-writing is merely a craft. Framley
Parsonage (1860) was written in only six weeks in response to an offer
of £1,000 for serial rights from
Thackeray's Cornhill Magazine.
Trollope's straightforward image disguised a penetrating knowledge of
human nature and in his later works, notably The Way We hive Now (1874),
he took a less optimistic view of society than the image of the genial,
fox-hunting chronicler of Barchester would suggest. It was the first of
the Barchester novels, The Warden (1855), that made him famous. They are
probably still the most read, though closely followed by the Palliser
series, in which the theme is political rather than ecclesiastical.
STEVENSON
Robert
Louis Stevenson
"Treasure Island"
Illustrations by N.C.
Wyeth
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850—94) was once regarded as a children's
writer and minor essayist — an entertainer then. In more recent times,
Stevenson, a friend of
Henry James, has come to be seen as a serious
novelist and as an early exponent of modernism (his poetry and drama
have not shared in this revival). Brought up in Edinburgh, as a child
his lungs were weak, but fragile health did not prevent him travelling
extensively; he is another example of the writer as wanderer. He finally
left Britain for the Pacific in 1888, settling in Samoa, where he
enjoyed a period of intense activity, much of it channelled into fierce
attacks on European exploitation of the Pacific islanders. For most
people, he is still pre-eminently the author of two classics: the
children's tale of adventure, Treasure Island (1883), and the
brilliant, resonant tale of horror, The Strange Case of Drjekyll and Mr
Hyde (1886). Probably the best of his other novels are Kidnapped (1886)
and The Master of Ballantrae (1889).
MEREDITH
George
Meredith
"The Egoist"
A poet first,
George Meredith (1828-1909) is today better remembered as
a novelist. That he is not more popular is largely due to his
convoluted style, cultivated in a prolonged attempt to develop a form
of prose that shared the lyric intensity of poetry. His first novel, The
Ordeal of Richard Feverel, was not published until 1859, but 'the sage
of Box Hill' (Surrey) still had fifty years ahead of him. At regular
intervals he published novels, short stories, poetry and criticism,
notably On the Idea of Comedy . . . (1897). By general consent, his best
novel is
The Egoist (1879), which, in its cool examination of the
absurd Sir Willoughby Patterne, also reveals
Meredith's gift for comedy.
GISSING
The reputation of
George Gissing (1857-1903) has risen in the past 30
years. Unlike
Trollope or
Meredith, he fits the image of the born
artist, devoted to his art, alienated from society -
Gissing was drawn to
the working class from which he unsuccessfully picked two wives. In
spite of his grim realism, he was relatively prosperous and productive.
His subjects were human misery, poverty and failure, and what he
described as 'the hideous injustice of our whole system of society'.
In Neif Grub Street (1891), he contrasts the careers of two writers, the
first facile, selfish and successful, the second a genuine artist,
hampered by poverty and rejection.
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WOMEN OF WORDS
|
With the
19th-century novel, men and women for the first time in any literary
genre stood on equal footing. The majority of novel readers were women,
and possibly the majority of novelists were too. Plots and settings
were usually domestic - traditionally the woman's sphere - even if they
were concerned with non-domestic themes, and intelligent middle-class
women whose activities were severely constricted by social convention
found opportunities to express themselves in writing fiction. As
George
Eliot remarked in her essay, 'Silly Novels by Lady Novelists', 'No
restrictions can shut women out from the materials of fiction, and
there is no species of art which is sofree from rigid requirements.'
The literary significance of all this is hard to judge. Today, gender is
perhaps exaggerated. Some feminist critics would say that there is no
essential difference between male and female writers, and that to
maintain otherwise is to perpetuate traditional prejudice.
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ELIZABETH GASKELL
Mrs Gaskell, wife of a minister, began writing to distract herself after
the death of her baby son. She attracted favourable attention from
Dickens, and most of her work was first published in Household Words and
its successor. A thoroughly admirable person, devoted wife and mother,
friend (and biographer) of
Charlotte Bronte among many others, she was a
perceptive and sympathetic observer of human nature, a sound researcher
(notably on the conditions of industrial workers) and a powerful force
for greater social cooperation. In her day, she was very highly
regarded, and her reputation, which dipped after her death, is now again
high. One novel in particular has always remained popular: Cranford
(1851), a charming picture of life in her native town, Knutsford, and a
quiet affirmation of ordinary human decency.
THE BRONTES
The Brontë sisters, painted by their brother, Branwell c. 1834.
From left to right, Anne, Emily and Charlotte
Charlotte Bronte
"Jane
Eyre" CHAPTER
I-XXIV,
CHAPTER XXV-XXXVIII
Illustrations by F. H. Townsend
This extraordinary family grew up in the vicarage of Haworth, a bleak
village on the Yorkshire moors and now one of the most visited literary
shrines in Britain. They were never really happy anywhere else, though
chiefly because life, and hereditary tuberculosis, gave them little
chance to be. With their brother Branwell, the three girls,
Charlotte
(1816-55),
Emily
(1818-48) and
Anne
(1820-49), made up elaborate stories
and fantasies and in 1846 published a combined collection of poetry as
the brothers Bell.
Charlotte, the eldest, then persuaded her sisters to
publish the novels that all had by now written, and as a result her own
"Jane
Eyre",
Emily's Wnthering Heights and
Anne's Agnes
Grey all appeared in 1847, still under the names Currer, Acton and Ellis
Bell, suspected by many of being one person. All too soon, private disasters crowded out
their public success. Branwell, an alcoholic, died in 1848, followed
within months by
Emily and, after her second, better novel. The Tenant
of Wild fell Hall (1848), by
Anne.
Charlotte remained to cope with her
stricken father. Although shy and lacking self-confidence, she did
begin to mix in literary circles, becoming a close friend of Mrs
Gaskell, and in 1854 she married her father's curate. She died at 39
when pregnant with her first child.
Charlotte, having lived the longest, appears to be the most substantial
novelist, though some regard
Emily as the most brilliant.
Charlotte's
best novel after fane Eyre is probably Villette, based on the traumatic
nine months she spent in Brussels in 1842 where she fell m love with her
middle-aged and married employer. However,
Emily's only novel, Wutbering
Heights, is probably the best known of the works of the Brontes, a
passionate and powerful love story with a positively terrifying lover in
Heathcliff, saved from toppling into melodrama by its solid Yorkshire
roots.
GEORGE ELIOT
George Eliot
"Silas Marner"
Virginia Woolf remarked that
George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans, 1819—SO) was
the first English novelist to write exclusively for adults. Her powerful
intellect and insight extended the novel's range and gave it greater
seriousness, and, notably in Middlemarch, she displayed detailed
comprehension of an enormous range of subjects, from medicine to
politics. She began writing articles in about 1850 and in 1853 started
an affair, which developed into a life-time partnership, with a married
man, G. H. Lewes. Though very learned himself, he put her literary
ambitions first, encouraging her to write novels and forsaking his own
work, which included the standard work on
Goethe in English, to take
over the housework. She adopted a male pseudonym, though
Dickens for
one, writing a fan letter in 1858, correctly deduced her sex.
Eliot's 1859 novel Adam Bede confirmed the accuracy of Lewes's judgement
that his partner was the greater talent; The Mill on the Floss (I860)
and Silas Marner ( 1861) followed. Not everything came easily - Remold
(1863), set in Renaissance Italy, turned her, she said, from a young
woman to an old one in two years - but in 1871 she published what is
generally regarded as her masterpiece, Middlemarch. 'I he death of Lewes
in 18~8 was a shattering blow, but two years later she married a man 20
years younger, shortly before her own death.
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TНЕ RUSSIANS
|
Russia's arrival on
the literary scene was sudden and dramatic. In general, the great
Russians, although well versed in European literature, owed little to
the West. Their situation was entirely different. They lived in a vast
and backward country, where the mass of the population was illiterate
and the educated elite was very small. They were, or were expected to
be, committed. They were, in a sense, prophets, with serious purposes -
social, political, philosophical or religious - and a novel was a
manifesto. Under a reactionary regime, writing was a dangerous trade. A
hint of subversion and there was a danger of being sent to Siberia, as
Dostoevsky was.
Suspicion remains that
Pushkin (1799-1837), who was killed in a duel,
was the victim of a tsarist plot. His early death cut short the career
of a great poet and deprived the world of a potentially great novelist.
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PUSHKIN
Aleksandr
Sergeyevich Pushkin
"The Bronze Horseman"
Illustrations by Alexandre Benois
"Eugene Onegin"
CANTO I,
CANTO II,
CANTO III,
CANTO IV,
CANTO V,
CANTO VI,
CANTO VII,
CANTO VIII
collection:
Portrait in Russian Art
(18th-19th centuries)
1799, Moscow, Russia
died Jan. 29 [Feb. 10], 1837, St. Petersburg
Russian poet, novelist, dramatist, and short-story writer;
he has often been considered his country's greatest poet and
the founder of modern Russian literature.
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GOGOL
Sometimes regarded as the first Russian realist and a progenitor of
modernism,
Gogol (1809— 52) also belonged obliquely to the Romantic
movement, as the man who 'put the gargoyles on the Gothic tower of
Romanticism'. An admirer of
Sterne, lie created a unique, fantastic,
grotesque fictional world, aided by his formidable imaginative power and
command of a language that was, like English in
Shakespeare's time,
young, vigorous and malleable. His famous play, The Government Inspector
(1836), satirizes stupidity and corruption in a provincial town,
representing Russian society, and his St Petersburg stories, including
'The Overcoat', take place in a surreal city. His masterpiece is the
comic epic Dead Souls (1842), many years in the making. He subsequently
underwent a long spiritual crisis, and burned the second part of Dead
Souls shortly before his death.
TURGENEV
The most Westernized of the great Russians,
Ivan Turgenev
(1818-83) knew
Flaubert,
Dickens and
George Eliot, and received an honorary degree from
Oxford. The
Goncourt brothers described him as 'a charming colossus . .
. who looks like the good spirit of a mountain or a forest'. Once the
most admired of the Russian writers, his reputation has declined partly
because he is no great Russian wild man like
Gogol or
Dostoevsky, but an
altogether gentler artist. His first large prose work, Notes of a Hunter
(1847-51) is a neglected masterpiece.
Turgenev's novels examine
prevailing social, political and philosophical questions through the
lives of individuals. The best known today is Father and Sons (1862), in
which he introduced the word nihilist to describe the central figure,
but the work probably most familiar today outside Russia is his play, A
Month in the Country (1850), an influence on
Chekhov, amongst others.
DOSTOEVSKY
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
"The Idiot"
It is hard to imagine two more different writers than Russian
contemporaries,
Turgenev,
swanning around the literary salons of Paris
and London, and
Dostoevsky (1821-81) who, after a ghastly childhood, was
condemned to four years in a hideous prison and four more in Siberian
exile. He made use of these experiences in his first masterpiece,
Memoirs From The House of the Dead (1860), first serialized in a
magazine he started with his brother, in which he condemns as
'contaminated to its very foundation' a society that permits the
brutality and savagery he had witnessed. He travelled in Western Europe
in 1862, and was appalled by the excesses of capitalist England.
London's Crystal Palace (built for the Great Exhibition of 1851) appears
as a symbol of the corrupt modern world in Notes from Underground
(1864), the first of the works that support his huge reputation today:
Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1868) and above all The Brothers
Karamazov (1880).
Dostoevsky was admired by every 20th-century thinker
from Freud to
Sartre, and his influence on the novel is hard to
exaggerate. His greatest single quality is his understanding of the most
complex depths of individual character.
TOLSTOY
Leo Tolstoy
"The Kreutzer Sonata"
Not everyone liked
Dostoevsky.
Henry James and
D. H. Lawrence were
notable dissidents. The Russian giant was not he but
Tolstoy
(1828-1910), author of probably the world's best-known novel, War and
Peace (1863-69), a magnificent epic which traces the fortunes of three
aristocratic families during the era of Napoleon's invasion. It was
followed by the almost equally famous Anna Karenina (1873-7"7}.
Tolstoy's profound concern with moral questions led to a spiritual
revolution in the 1880s and a dramatic change in the character of his
work, as manifest in novels such as The Death of Ivan lllich (1886) and
"The Kreutzer Sonata" (1889). His radical rejection of private property
and of political and ecclesiastical authority led to his works being
banned in Russia, but made him a revered sage and his home, a large
inherited estate in central Russia where he lived all his life, a place
of pilgrimage.
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'. . . he had dreamt
that the entire world had fallen victi.ni to some strange, unheard of
and unprecedented plague . . . Some new kind of trichinae had appeared,
microscopic creatures that lodged themselves in people's bodies. But
these creatures were spirits, gifted with will and intelligence. People
who absorbed them into their systems' instantly became rabid and insane.
But never, never had people considered themselves so intelligent and in
unswerving possession of the truth as did those who became infected , .
, each person thought that he alone
possessed the truth ..."
Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, vi, 11, (trans. David Me Duff 1991],
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NATURALISM
|
Naturalism, an
allegedly more exact and 'scientific' extension of Realism, is
associated in particular with
Zola and the
Goncourt brothers. It was
influential primarily in French, German and European literature, to some
extent in America but perhaps least of all in Britain. It never formed
anything like a school or a movement in the English novel, though its
influence is evident in the novels of Gissing,
Arnold Bennet and
especially the less well-known Arthur Morrison, author of the crusading
novel of London's East End, Child of the Jago (1896).
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ZOLA
Émile Zola
"J'accuse" (I accuse)
Emile Zola (1840-1902), who described his ideas in The Experimental
Novel (1880), saw human beings as creatures determined by heredity and
environment. He was influenced by contemporary scientific ideas,
especially the work of Prosper Lucas on heredity, and the writings of
the determinist historian Hippolyte Tame, author of a notable history of
English literature. He saw the novelist's task as akin to that of an
experimental scientist, taking characters of distinctive temperaments,
placing them in apposite social circumstances and observing the results.
At heart he was a social reformer, and his characters generally belong
to the lower or middle classes.
Zola's ideas were first deployed in Therese
Raquin (1867), but were
more fully expressed in his ambitious cycle of twenty novels under the
general title Les Rougon-Macquart (1871— 93), in which he traced the
'natural and social history' of two branches of a particular family.
Overall, he presents a wide-ranging prospect of mid-19th century social
life, pain-stakingly researched, with the customary realist emphasis on
the more grimmer aspects of human behaviour.
Zola's individual novels
deal with particular communities or topics, and the general pessimism is
relieved by lyrical passages and, despite the overall impression of
human beings as 'weasels fighting in a hole', by
Zola's faith in the
possibility of improvement. That emerges more strongly in his later,
unfinished sequence, Les Quatres Evangiles [The Four Gospels,
1899-1902). The third land last) of these deals with the Dreyfuss Case,
in which he had made a momentous intervention on behalf of justice with
his open letter to the French president,
J'accuse (1898), published in
the newspaper L'Aurore.
HAUPTMANN
The leading exponent of German naturalism was the young
Gerhart
Hauptmann (1862-1946), epic poet and novelist but most famous as a
playwright, in which role he was strongly influenced by Ibsen. The best
known of his novels, at least in his naturalistic phase, is Signalman Thiel (1888), and his first major theatrical success, Before Sunrise
(1889), depicting peasant life, was a landmark in the development of the
naturalistic German theatre. His most famous play, proclaimed a
masterpiece by James Joyce, is The Weavers (1892) based on a weavers'
revolt in his native Silesia in 1844, in which the protagonist is the
group rather than an individual. A humane social critic,
Hauptmann's
work varied widely in style, form and subject matter, attracting
comparisons with Goethe. Besides his social realism, he manifested
profound spiritual yearnings, which are most evident in later works,
where naturalism has long given way to poetic symbolism. The late works
are also marked by his horror at what had happened to Germany under the
Nazis — who, of course, had no time for him.
AMERICAN NATURALISM
Although influenced by Zola, American Naturalism arrived later than in
Europe and was less rigid in conception, placing more emphasis on
environment than heredity, and owing much to the native regional novel.
An early example was Maggie, Girl of the Streets (1893) by
Stephen
Crane, best known for his Civil War novel. The Red Badge of Courage. The
most thoroughly naturalistic of American novels is An American Tragedy
(1925) the masterpiece of Theodore Dreiser (himself a child of the
slums), in which the failures of the weak-willed hero are blamed on the
social environment and, implicitly, on the capitalist system. Naturalism
is an element in the work of many other American writers, especially in
its disposition in favour of the weak and oppressed.
John Steinbeck's
Grapes of Wrath (1939) is probably the most acclaimed work in this
tradition.
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THE AMERICAN NOVEL
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In the 1840s,
Dickens's sales in North America were relatively as high as in Britain,
but in the years before the Civil War he was increasingly
challenged by American novelists. As in England there were many women
novelists, no Jane Austens or
George Eliots perhaps, but
Harriet Beecher
Stowe far surpassed them (and everyone else) in sales of her first book,
the melodramatic but influential, anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin
(1852). However, neither slavery nor the Civil War figured much in the
work of the two great writers who, together with
Walt Whitman, were
chiefly responsible for the establishment of uniquely American
literature on level terms with that of European countries.
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HAWTHORNE
Culturally, North America in the early 19th century lagged behind
developments in Europe and, inasmuch as a dividing line can be drawn
between Romanticism and Realism, it was situated in the Civil War,
although the conflict had less of an effect than the rapid
industrialization that followed. Both
Hawthorne and
Melville were
rooted in Romanticism.
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64) was descended from 17th-century Puritans
in New England and one of his ancestors was among the persecutors of the
accused witches of Salem, where
Hawthorne was born. He had a solitary
childhood with an eccentric widowed mother, read widely and in 1837
achieved fame with the publication of a collection of short stories in
Twice Told Tales. He could not initially make a living from his writing
(his first novel, Fansbawe, 1828, was published at his own expense), in
spite of much hack editorial work and successful children's stories,
such as Tanglewood Tales (1852-53), based on stories from classical
mythology. He was influenced by Emerson and the Transcendentalists,
although he took a far more pessimistic view of life, and spent some
time at the Brook Farm community, the basis for his novel The Blithedale
Romance (1852).
THE SCARLET LETTER
Hawthorne was concerned with the past, whereas the Transcendentalists
were interested in nature and the present. The Scarlet Letter (1850) was
set in 17th-century New England and its successor, The House of the
Seven Gables (1851), though relating contemporary events, is rooted in
the same period. The title of
Hawthorne's masterpiece refers to the
scarlet letter 'A' (for 'adulteress') which his heroine is forced to wear
after she had produced a baby in her husband's prolonged absence and
refused to name the father. It is a powerful allegory of the moral
effects of sin and punishment, a subject with which the dark genius of
Hawthorne was so deeply, not to say neurotically, concerned. The House
of the Seven Gables was based on a curse, tradition had it, pronounced
on the
Hawthorne family (disguised as the Pyncheons) when the author's
great-grandfather was a judge in the Salem witch trials.
In his last decade, much of it spent as U.S. Consul in Liverpool,
Hawthorne seems to have been less tormented, and though continuing to
write, he produced nothing to compare with The Scarlet Letter.
MELVILLE
Herman
Melville
"Moby Dick or The Whale"
Illustrated by Rockwell Kent
Herman
Melville
"Moby Dick or The Whale"
PART I,
PART II,
PART III,
PART IV,
PART V
Illustrated by Rockwell Kent
Like Hawthorne,
Herman Melville (1819-91) was troubled by inner demons.
After his father's bankruptcy and early death, Melville left school
early, worked in assorted jobs and sailed as a cabin boy to Liverpool in
1839, gaining a lifelong love of the sea. In 1841, he sailed on a
whaling ship to the South Pacific, jumped ship and lived on the Pacific
Islands, working at one time as an agricultural labourer in Tahiti. He
served a year on a U.S. warship, before returning to New England and
embarking on a literary career, partly to support a growing family. His
first five books were essentially pot-boilers, based on his varied
experiences, and they, especially the first, Typee (1846), gained him a
large readership and introduced him to literary circles. In 1847 he
settled on a Massachusetts farm, and became a friend of
Hawthorne.
MOBY-DICK
Melville's greatest work,
"Moby Dick or The Whale" (1851), was dedicated
to Hawthorne, who may have been partly responsible for his more
ambitious approach to this new tale of the sea. The symbolic story of
Captain Ahab's obsessive pursuit of the white whale responsible for
crippling him is America's greatest tragic epic. It is written in a
variety of styles, ranging from nautical slang to Shakespearean
bombast, and the narrative is often interrupted by extraneous tales and
dissertations. The book received some admiring notices, especially in
Britain, where
Melville - to a lesser extent
Hawthorne too - was more
highly regarded than in America. The general public, however, preferred
its sea stories in
Melville's earlier, less demanding style, and,
although he continued to produce both fiction and, increasingly, poetry
(latterly printed privately), his popularity rapidly faded. Unlike
Hawthorne, he was unable to land an appointment as a U.S. Consul and in
his later years toiled as a customs officer in New York. On his death,
which passed almost unnoticed in his own country, he left unpublished
another minor masterpiece, Billy Budd.
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SAMUEL CLEMENS
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain)
"The Prince and the Pauper"
Chapter I-IV,
Chapter V-VII,
Chapter VIII-XI,
Chapter XII-XIV,
Chapter XV-XVII,
Chapter XVIII-XXI,
Chapter XXII-XXVI,
Chapter XXVII-XXXI,
Chapter XXXII-XXXIII
Sam Clemens grew up in the riverside town of Hannibal, Missouri,
apparently enjoying an enviably unfettered, frontier childhood, and he
began writing for his brother's newspaper when apprenticed to a printer.
Printing soon bored him, and he became a river pilot on the Mississippi
steamships, an important character-forming experience, shortly before
the railways made the magnificent old stern-wheelers redundant. He drew
his pen name from the call of the leadsman sounding the depth, and years
later gave a fascinating and knowledgeable account of Life on the
Mississippi (1879), a minor classic. His early writing was encouraged
by Artemus Ward and
Bret Harte, with whom he collaborated.
The volume
of 'sketches' headed by the 'Celebrated Jumping Frog' in 1867 made him
famous, and his popularity increased even further with his personal,
irreverent accounts of his travels, The Innocents Abroad, 1869),
Roughing It (1872), and A Tramp Abroad (1879). By that time he was a
well-established and extremely popular lecturer, and was married and
settled in the New England town of Hartford, Connecticut.
HUCKLEBERRY FINN
Mark Twain's most famous works are his novels of boyhood. The Adventures
of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
(1884), which drew heavily on the author's experience and painted a
vivid picture of life on the Mississippi frontier. Huckleberry Finn is
his masterpiece and probably the best-known and most loved of all
American novels. Relating Huck's picaresque adventures with a runaway
slave on a raft down the Mississippi, it is a marvellous adventure
story that is also a powerful commentary on American society and
institutions, brilliantly conveyed through the observations of simple
and naive characters. It is told in exuberantly racy and realistic
language, employing local dialect that is entirely convincing without
hindering the progress of the storv. Some critics have called it the
first modern American novel; it certainly marked a great shift in
language.
In 1894, as the result of the failure of a firm m which he had invested
heavily, Twain was forced to declare himself bankrupt, though within
four years, by dint of hard work including a world lecture tour, he
paid off his debts. However, that experience, followed by the deaths of
his daughter and his wife, encouraged the growth of the misanthropic
element that was always evident in his character, as it is in that of
most great humourists. There is a bitter note m his allegorical satire,
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) and his story 'The
Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg' (1898) takes a jaundiced view of human
nature. His later writings, including two disappointing stories about
Tom Sawyer, fell far short of his best work.
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THRILLERS AND WHODUNNITS
|
Crime and its
ramifications has always been a concern of creative writers and plays a
proportionately larger part in literature than it does in real life. In
the past hundred -. years or so, crime has provided the subject matter
for a huge variety of popular fiction under various labels -". mystery,
thriller, suspense, 'whodunnit', spy novel, etc. - much of which,
however entertaining, cannot honestly be classed as literature. However,
the detective novel has long been established as a respectable subgenre
of literature and one that can be easily identified by its form. In the
detective novel, a crime and its solution are the primary ingredient;
character analysis, social comment, etc., though they may be present,
are secondary to the solution of the crime. As a rule, the reader is
implicitly invited to second-guess the detective, who may or may not be
a professional investigator and is frequently a 'serial' character, such
as Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot, reappearing a succession of
stories.
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РОЕ AND COLLINS
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Edgar Allan Poe
1.
"Ligeia"
2.
"The Raven"
Illustrations by
Gustave Dore
3.
"The Fall of the
House of Usher"
4.
Illustrations from
Edgar Poe by Edmund Dulac
5.
Illustrations
from
Edgar Poe
by Harry Clarke
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Wilkie Collins
"The Moonstone"
PART
I,
PART II
"The Woman in White"
PART I,
II,
III,
IV,
V,
VI,
VI
Illustrations by John
McLenan
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Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
"SHERLOCK
HOLMES" (contents)
"The
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes"
PART I,
PART II
Illustrations by
Sidney Paget
"Memoirs of
Sherlock Holmes"
PART I,
PART II
Illustrations by
Sidney Paget
"The Return of
Sherlock Holmes"
PART
I,
PART II
Illustrations by
Sidney Paget
"The Hound of the Baskervilles"
PART
I,
PART II
Illustrations by
Sidney Paget
"A
Study in Scarlet",
"The Valley of Fear",
"His Last Bow",
"The Sign of
Four"
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It is generally agreed that
Edgar Allan Рое, pioneer of the modern
horror story, originated the classic model of detective fiction with his
stories of 'ratiocination' involving the French detective, С. Auguste
Dupin. The best known is probably The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Like
Sherlock Holmes later, Dupin is a brilliant eccentric whose somewhat
blockheaded friend is the narrator of the story.
In Britain, the prototype of the full-length detection novel was
Wilkie
Collins's (1824—29)
"The Moonstone"
(1868). His early work consisted of
articles written for the magazines of his friend
Charles Dickens, and
his first novel, Antonina (1850); was set in ancient times.
"The Woman in White" (I860), a 'mystery' — related to the Gothic romance, rather than a
detective novel - falls into the category that literary historians call
the 'novel of sensation". With its gripping opening scene based on a
real-life experience, it demonstrated
Collins's mastery of suspense and
skilful plotting.
T. S. Eliot described The Moonstone as 'the first, the longest, and the
best of modern English detective novels'. Brilliantly plotted, with a
notable twist in the investigator's discovery that he himself was
responsible for the disappearance of the eponymous stone, it is also
sharply characterized: the gloomy Sergeant Cuff is a memorable
detective. Collins wrote many more novels, but the standard declined
and his narrative gift was latterly almost submerged by his engagement
with social issues, but he continued to command large sales, not only in
English-speaking countries, but also in translation.
CONAN DOYLE
The most famous fictional detective
of all time is without doubt Sherlock Holmes, the violin-playing,
drug-taking intellectual of 22IB Baker Street:, the creation of
Arthur
Conan Doyle (1859-1930). Like Holmes's friend and narrator, Dr Watson,
Conan Doyle was a physician, a G.P. who began writing stories when short
of patients. The first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet,
appeared m a Christmas magazine in 1887, but his extraordinary
popularity dates from the short stones that appeared in The Strand
Magazine from 1891 and were later published in two volumes as The
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892) and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
(1894). The first person to tire of Holmes was his creator, but when he
attempted to kill him off in 'The Final Problem', the outcry was such
that he had to resurrect him. The author never did shed the character
with whom he came to be irritatingly (to himself) identified, but he
wrote many other books. Non-Holmesian novels included The Lost World
;19I2). featuring another 'serial' protagonist. Professor Challenger,
the progenitor of many science-fiction stories on the 'extinct monsters'
theme.
GOLDEN AGE'
The success of Holmes encouraged others. Among the most notable was
Father Brown, the insignificant but astute priest invented by
G. K.
Chesterton (1874-1936). The short story was still the usual vehicle
(there were only four Sherlock Holmes novels). A classic of the
detective novel was F. C. Bentley's Trent's Last Case (1912), which
refined the form of the genre and led to the 'golden age' of the
1920s—1940s, dominated by women writers such as Dorothy F. Savers,
Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, and the 'queen' of the detective novel,
Agatha Christie (1890— 19~6:. The creator of Hercule Poirot and Miss
Marple was one of the biggest international bestsellers of the century,
but she was a writer whom it is hard to imagine working effectively in
am' other milieu.
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CHILDREN LIТЕRATURE
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Although books for
children were written as early as the 17th century, their purpose was
generally didactic rather than entertaining. Children might find
entertainment in adult books, such as
Aesop's Fables or the travel tales
of a Defoe or a
Swift, but not until the late 18th century, under the
influence of Rousseau and other educational reformers, did books appear
that were written to amuse them, and a strong moral purpose still
remained in many children's stories throughout the 19th century.
Practically all the classics of children's literature date from the past
150 years.
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CHAPBOOKS AND FAIRYTALES
Chapbooks were crudely printed pamphlets including versions of old
romances and tales such as 'Dick Whittington' and 'Jack the
Giant-Killer', illustrated with rough woodcuts. They circulated from the
Renaissance to the 18th century. They sometimes included an alphabet,
but were not exclusively designed for children. The name is modern,
deriving from 'chapmen', the itinerant pedlars who sold them.
Fairytales may be read by children purely for amusement, but they
generally have a moral purpose and, in the present century, they have
been subject to 'deconstruction', especially under the influence of
Freud. That there was more to fairytales than mere amusement was
realized long before. In the 19th century their suitability for children
caused Inch' argument. The most influential early collection, based on
French folk tradition, was published by
Charles Perrault in 1697, and in
English translation as Mother Goose Tales in 1729. It included such favourites as 'Cinderella'. The
brothers Grimm published their famous
collection of German fairytales in 1812—15 (English translation 1823).
Some lesser-known tales - including an incident in which someone is
rolled downhill in a barrel with inward-projecting spikes - seem hardly
suitable for children. Nothing so repulsive is to be found m the
haunting Danish tales of
Hans Christian Andersen (1805—75), which were
mostly based on Danish tradition ('The Ugly Duckling', 'The Emperor's
New Clothes').
ENGLISH CLASSICS
The generation after
Lewis Carroll produced several classics of English
children's literature. Like Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit and company,
the characters were often anthropomorphized animals, though in
Kipling's
stories they are authentic animals and in
A. A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh
(1926) they are toys, the central character being a human child,
Christopher Robin. Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (1908) owes
its continued appeal chiefly to the thoroughly 'human' character of the
ineffable Mr. Toad. Other stories, notably those of E. Nesbitt
(1858-1924), are about children, the greatest example being Peter Pan,
originally a play (1904), the masterpiece of J. M. Barne.
LEVIS CARROLL
A Book of Nonsense (1845) by
Edward Lear 1812-88) exploited children's
love of the sound of words, regardless of meaning, and included main1
limericks of which Lear was the master, although not the inventor. Lear,
who was an accomplished watercolourist, illustrated his own books. Since
adult novels were often illustrated, children's stories naturally were
too, but pictures were generally subsidiary, at least until the time of
Beatrix Potter (1866-1943) in whose tales text and illustrations carry
equal weight.
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Probably the most famous children's story of the century was Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll, the pseudonym of a
somewhat cranky Oxford mathematician, C. L. Dodgson (1832-98). Like
Lear, Dodgson was awkward in adult society and adored little girls,
adapting the book from stories he told the daughter of a colleague. It
blends humour and fantasy, set against a very down-to-earth heroine, and
includes memorable comic verse, often parodying Victorian party pieces.
The sequel, Through the Looking Class (1871) is almost equally good,
but Carroll's later children's story, Sylrie and Bruno (1889-93; is less
memorable. His nonsense poem, ' The Hunting of the Snark' (1876),
employs the same mad logic typical of dreams, in which Alice's
adventures are set. Like most of the best children's books, the Alice
stories appealed as much to adults as to children. They have remained
hugely popular both m English and, in spite of obvious problems of
translation, other languages.
Lewis Carroll
Lewis
Carroll - photographer PART
2
"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"
PART 3, PART 4, PART 5
Illustrations by John Tenniel
"Through
the Looking-Glass" PART 6, PART 7,
PART 8
Illustrations by John Tenniel
Illustrations by Arthur Rackham
PART
9
Walt
Disney’s "Alice in Wonderland"
PART10,
PART
11
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KIPLING
Rudyard Kipling
PART I
"Poems"
PART II
"Kim"
PART III
"The Jungle Book"
Born in India, but educated in England,
Rudyard Kipling (1865—1936)
returned in 1882 as a journalist on the Lahore Gazette. His early
stories were collected as Departmental Ditties (1886), Plain Tales From
the Hills (1888), etc. Together with his poems, published as
Barrack-Room Ballads in 1892, they established him in literary circles
after he returned to England in 1889. In 1892, having married an
American, he moved for some years to Vermont, where he wrote the classic
jungle Book and its sequel. By 1897, the family were back in England,
eventually settling in Sussex though
Kipling spent long visits in South
Africa, where he wrote some of the Just So Stories (1902). In 1911 he
became the first English writer to win a Nobel Prize.
KIM
Kipling's masterpiece is his novel,
"Kim" (1901, illustrations by the
author's father) m which the loyalties of the bоу-hero are divided
between an old Tibetan lama (representing the contemplative life) and
the British spymaster Colonel Creighton (representing the life of
action). The real interest of the novel lies in its panoramic picture of
India and the characters encountered along the Grand Trunk Road. Most
Indian and British critics agree that it is the best British novel about
India, though admittedly a winner in a small field.
Kipling's reputation faded before his death, some critics finding him
too facile. It suffered later because of his identification with British
imperialism, but has recovered recently. Kipling is the inventor of many
great characters, several of them boys (Mowgli, Kim), and some of them
animals (Bagheera the panther, Rikki-tikki-tavi the mongoose). 'Tommy
Atkins' ;the ordinary soldier) and 'the white man's burden' are among
his contributions to the language. His output was huge (so were his
sales) and he was extraordinarily fluent, especially in verse, with a
good ear for colloquial speech. He knew intimately the everyday life of
India, ordinary people of all sorts, Afghan horse traders and Bengali
clerks, as well as British (and Irish) soldiers, the ways of the jungle
and the military camp.
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