Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of… the 1840's, pt. 1 (1840-1845)

in another mood i would have very happily voted for the old curiosity shop. incredibly uneven - of course, it’s dickens - it does contain some of his strangest characters and set pieces. the malignant quilp who wakes up at one point thinking he’s been turned into an insect:


“The first sound that met his ears in the morning - as he half opened his eye, and, finding himself so unusually near the ceiling, entertained a drowsy idea that he must have been transformed into a fly or blue-bottle in the course of the night, - was that of a stifled sobbing and weeping in the room.”

!! Uneasy dreams and all that

ashamed at the number of these i haven’t heard of tbh

Non-omniscience is shameful indeed.

Only one on here I’ve read is Count of Monte Cristo, so probably that one. I expect the only other one on this list I’m particularly likely to ever read is Three Musketeers.

Count of Monte Cristo’s very good btw

Dead Souls is a dire title but it is a good book

am interested in Alexandre Dumas

Within his genre Dumas is a giant.

Haven’t read everything on this list but Monte Cristo in a heartbeat. I presume Vanity Fair is in the other half because that’s probably the one book of the 1840s which would give me pause over choosing Monte Cristo.

Wrong half of the decade, of course.

dead souls is an untranslatable title iirc (not really iirc, i just looked it up)

1840-1845 is of course the first 3/5 of the decade, not the first half

ashamed at the number of these i haven’t heard of tbh

the cottage outside the village and the black spider as well. they sound exciting!

i read the betrothed when i was working in milan about ooh 13 years ago now, and was projecting writing a novel about miasma and plague in milan. although i found much of the betrothed quite boring, it is notoriously excellent on plague.

i’ve just gone back to the notes i took then, (taken in google notes! like reader, quite a useful tool, i guess subsumed in docs now):


Those physicians who were opposed to the belief of contagion, unwilling now to admit what they had hitherto derided, yet obliged to give a generical name to the new malady, which had become too common and too evident to go with-out one, adopted that of malignant or pestilential fevers;—a miserable expedient, a mere play upon words, which was productive of much harm; because, while it appeared to acknowledge the truth, it only contributed to the disbelief of what it was most important to believe and discern, viz., that the infection was conveyed by means of the touch. The magistrates, like one awakening from a deep sleep, began to lend a little more ear to the appeals and proposals of the Board of Health, to support its proclamations, and second the sequestrations prescribed, and the quarantines enjoined by this tribunal. The Board was also constantly demanding money to provide for the daily expenses of the Lazzaretto, now augmented by so many additional services; and for this they applied to the Decurioni, while it was being decided (which was never done, I believe, except by practice) whether such expenses should be charged to the city, or to the royal exchequer.

or

I have deemed it not out of place to relate and put together these particulars, in part little known, in part entirely unknown, of a celebrated popular delirium; because in errors, and especially in the errors of a multitude, what seems to me most interesting and most useful to observe, is, the course they have taken, their appearances, and the ways by which they could enter men’s minds, and hold sway there.

One thing I enjoyed about getting the titles together in this was getting a firmer grasp of who were contemporaries - I think in my head Thackeray and Pushkin were decades earlier than Dickens and Balzac.

Also man did Balzac and Dumas crank them out, they have like seven books each in this period that I didn't include.

i was going to ask about that actually. and i should probably know this, but what’s with four or five major, long novels, having the same publication year (dumas and dickens)? is this publishers taking episodic literature and deciding to issue it in one go because cheaper in terms of production, publicity and marketing?

I've only read Three Musketeers and Monte Cristo. Both good, but I'm not sure I'll ever want to read them again.

Only read a couple (Lermontov and Gogol). I would need to re-read bits of both but I don't have these books with me rn. Toss of a coin if I were to vote at all.

A suggestion here: maybe worth a look at novellas (I was thinking of de Nerval's Sylvie) as a thing that could be included (?) in later decades.

--

Also looking at that list I wonder if that comment in the LRB is right re: 1840s. We have the second half to come.

I’ve read 13 of these. List is missing some stuff— The Deerslayer, Le cure de village, The Black Sheep.

I voted The Bethrothed.

I’ve read 13 of these. List is missing some stuff— The Deerslayer, Le cure de village, The Black Sheep.

A suggestion here: maybe worth a look at novellas (I was thinking of de Nerval's Sylvie) as a thing that could be included (?) in later decades.

ILX has a 50 options limit for polls; Cooper and Balzac both have other works on the list so I cut these. Also why I didn't include novellas.

and i should probably know this, but what’s with four or five major, long novels, having the same publication year (dumas and dickens)? is this publishers taking episodic literature and deciding to issue it in one go because cheaper in terms of production, publicity and marketing?

Yeah, I think that's it.

Shamefully I've read zero of these. Of the authors listed the one I've enjoyed most is Balzac. I should probably read Honorine at some point, the synopsis sounds promising.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

wiki re Honorine v. intriguing spoilers, although I'm sure the way Balzac tells it makes spoiling irrelevant.

so far there's not a lot of fencing (or plot) in The Fencing Master, but it's entertaining anyway

I wouldn't have voted for Cooper's The Deerslayer but I think it's read and taught more than Autobiography of a Pocket Handkerchief ... anyway that was the case when I was in high school in the 1840s

Walt Whitman wrote a novel? Is it good?

I read a lot of Balzac in college; few of those novels are dull.

To give a fuller picture, here are some of the non-novels published in this timeframe:

Poe- Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque
Two Years Before the Mast
Democracy in America Part 2
Emerson- Essays
Kierkegaard- Fear and Trembling
Robert Browning- Dramatic Lyrics
Dickens- American Notes, A Christmas Carol
HC Anderson- New Fairy Tales
Ruskin- Modern Painters
Engels- Conditions of the Working Classes in England
The Narrative of Frederick Douglas
Margaret Fuller- Woman in the Nineteenth Century

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Barry Lyndon was a fun read btw

Should try that, I love the film.

Read 7 of these. If I hadn't missed the poll would have been torn between Gogol and Lermontov.

Voted Lermontov. Dead Souls a worthy winner.

called it

On a whim I read The Black Spider, it was a heck of a ride. As a Christian morality tale it's about as convincing as the Book of Job - despite no personal appearances from the big man he's just as much of a colossal prick - but as weird/macabre fiction it's excellent. It takes a while to get going - the first quarter is a well observed but rather impersonally related framing story - but eventually you get a Machen-esque sense of the curtain being lifted on a universe far more inhuman and frightening than previously known, and a wild carnival of terror and death that rivals Poe. The initial image of the spider growing out of a woman's cheek and malevolently glaring at people is darkly comic but I was soon more emotionally engaged and full of sympathy for the peasants helplessly trapped between their brutal feudal lords, the murderous devil, and a vengeful and jealous God who offers no aid but will strike down with great fury on those who do not honour and obey him.

That sounds rad, will have to check that one out.

It really is great

Has anyone read Fanny Campbell? wikipedia calls Maturin the godfather of pulp fiction which sounds like it might be a good romp.

I have not, but am planning to give it to my wife for her birthday, as she is deep into pirates after watching Black Sails. So I'll let you know how it works out.

http://victorianserialnovels.org/serial-novel-timeline/

This is a pretty cool resource to see what was coming out month by month

nice, thanks for the link