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

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