See all books from the 1800s
1800s
Max Havelaar
Multatuli
Lifespan | b. 1820 (Netherlands), d. 1887
First Published | 1860
First Published by | De Ruyter (Amsterdam)
Given Name | Eduard Douwes Dekker
When it first appeared in print, Max Havelaar caused a stir that saw its author challenging the Dutch government to refute its essential truth: that colonial policy as practiced in Java at the time was nothing more than a series of extortions and cruel tyrannies that oppressed the peoples of the Dutch Indies by forcing them to forego planting rice crops in order to supply their overseas masters with coffee and tea. No one took up the challenge at the time, although much later, the main substance of the book was found to be accurate.
This notoriety, and the book’s success in provoking some positive changes in the region, much as Uncle Tom’s Cabin helped to focus attention on the plight of, and consequently improve the situation for, American slaves, does not relegate it to the status of a worthy tract that has attained its purpose. Beyond the missionary service accomplished, Max Havelaar remains a work to be read and enjoyed for its satirical humor. Recounting the adventures of a colonial administrator at odds with the government he serves, it takes on and renders laughable the bourgeois businessman and colonial administrator alike.
Multatuli, which means “I have suffered greatly” is now the name of both a Dutch literary prize and a museum in the Netherlands, and the Max Havelaar Foundation is a fair-trade labeling organization. While these homages are fitting, they remain only facets of a more complex novel. ES
See all books from the 1800s
1800s
Great Expectations
Charles Dickens
Lifespan | b. 1812 (England), d. 1870
First Published | 1861
First Published by | Chapman & Hall (London)
Original Language | English
Miss Havisham, in her bridal gown, intimidates the young Pip in Marcus Stone’s illustration of Great Expectations.
“I never had one hour’s happiness in her society, and yet my mind all round the four-and-twenty hours was harping on the happiness of having her with me unto death.”
Great Expectations works on numerous levels: as a political fairy tale about “dirty money,” an exploration of memory and writing, and a disturbing portrayal of the instability of identity.
Looking back from some undistinguished and unspecified future, Pip recalls his childhood, living with his fierce sister and her gentle, blacksmith husband in the Thames marshland, and the fateful effects of his encounter with the escaped convict, Magwitch, by his parents’ graveside. When Pip later comes into a mysterious financial inheritance, he assumes that it can only have come from the mummified Miss Havisham, preserved eternally at the moment of her own altarside jilting. But Dickens’s great stylistic coup is to make ceiling and floor change places—as in an Escher picture.
Shorter and more quickly composed than Dickens’s giant social panoramas of the 1850s, Great Expectations gains from this pacing, as it unfolds like a fever-dream. Victorian writers were fond of “fictional autobiographies,” but Dickens’s novel has another layer of unsettling irony, in that it tells of someone who has been constructing himself as a fictional character. And as Pip shamefully reviews his past life on paper, it often seems that the act of writing is the only thing holding his fractured identities together. Perhaps autobiography should ideally be an act of recovery, but Great Expectations dramatizes instead the impossibility of Pip’s lending his life coherence, or atoning for the past. BT
See all books from the 1800s
1800s
Silas Marner
George Eliot
Lifespan | b. 1819 (England), d. 1880
First Published | 1861
First Published by | W. Blackwood & Sons (London)
Full Title | Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe
Silas Marner weaves elements of fairy tale and traditional ballad into an exploration of the meaning of the family and the nature of belonging. Set in a “far-off time” when “superstition clung easily around every person or thing that was at all unwonted,” it charts the moral, psychological, and social transformation of Silas, the weaver. He is cast out of his northern primitive Methodist community, and arrives as a stranger in the rural Midlands village of Raveloe. Isolated and feared, the weaver is reduced to miserly obsession and mechanical repetition. His fractured identity is recreated when he adopts Eppie, the abandoned child of an opium addict. The story of Silas’s social assimilation into the community, and of Eppie’s upbringing, contains some of George Eliot’s most powerful writing. Set within this redemptive tale is the disclosure of Eppie’s origins as the child of a disastrous secret marriage: that of the son of the local squire, Godfrey Cass, who finally acknowledges Eppie as his own. Eppie, however, decides to stay with her adoptive father and her working-class community, and the novel profoundly reworks the “family romance” that underpins so much English fiction, in which the child discovers noble origins and a “true self.” Here, the family is seen primarily as a set of emotional and social bonds, rather than a genetic inheritance. Community takes the place of individual aspiration, and for all its static, pastoral quality, Silas Marner is a moving exploration of how social selves are made. JBT
See all books from the 1800s
1800s
Fathers and Sons
Ivan Turgenev
Lifespan | b. 1818 (Russia), d. 1883 (France)
First Published | 1862
Original Title | Otti I deti
Original Language | Russian
Published only a year after the emancipation of the Russian serfs, and during a period when Russia’s young intellectuals were increasingly agitating for revolution, Fathers and Sons was very much a novel of the time in its depiction of two generations with widely differing political and social values.
The central and most memorable character in the novel is the self-proclaimed nihilist, Bazarov, who claims to accept no form of authority, and is only interested in ideas that can be verified by scientific materialism. The narrative follows Bazarov and his acolyte, Arkady, as they visit their parental homes: what results is a confrontation between the old order of the traditional fathers and its new challengers, their idealistic sons. As well as the contemporary political resonances, this antagonism demonstrates the timeless conflict between youth and its elders. Tensions are also explored within the relationship of the charismatic, domineering Bazarov and his initially star-struck disciple, with their differences becoming manifest when they fall in love with the same woman.
Turnegev’s skill lies at the level of characterization: the profound (mis)communication that operates between the main protagonists ensures that, even when their actions and rhetoric may appear misguided, they are ultimately understandable and extremely human. Fathers and Sons remains a classic and beautifully drawn examination of the necessity and power of youthful idealism, and its pitfalls. JC
See all books from the 1800s
1800s
Les Misérables
Victor Hugo
Lifespan | b. 1802 (France), d. 1885
First Published | 1862
First Published by | A. Lacroix & Verboeckhoven
Original Language | French
The image of Cosette created by Hugo’s illustrator, Emile Bayard, is now famous as the logo for the musical based on the novel.
Les Misérables is one of only a few novels that have taken on a vivid afterlife long after their initial publication. There have been (horribly) abridged versions, rewritings, movies, and, of course, the world-famous musical, yet in order to understand the true scale of Victor Hugo’s achievement, one must return to the text itself.
Like Tolstoy’s War and Peace, this novel is concerned with the way in which individual lives are played out in the context of epoch-defining historical events. What is “History”? Hu
go asks us. Who creates “History”? To whom does it happen? What role does the individual play in such events? The character of Jean Valjean is thus the key to Les Misérables, an escaped convict whose desperate need to redeem himself through his adopted daughter, Cosette, lies at the heart of the novel. Valjean is pursued throughout by the extraordinary Inspector Javert, with whose life his becomes irrevocably entwined, and who is relentless in his determination to uphold the law and to apprehend him. This personal drama of hunter and prey is then cast into the cauldron of revolutionary Paris as Cosette falls in love with the radical idealist Marius and Valjean grapples with the possibility of losing all that he has ever loved. The novel draws the reader into the politics and geography of Paris with a vividness that is unparalleled, and then leads on, incorporating Hugo’s characteristic meditations upon the universe, to the Battle of Waterloo, and the final, astonishing denouement. There are not many texts that can be termed national classics, but Les Misérables is one, and is a landmark in the development of the historical novel that stands alongside the greatest works of Dickens and Tolstoy. It is also a deeply compelling read. MD
See all books from the 1800s
1800s
The Water-Babies
Charles Kingsley
Lifespan | b. 1819 (England), d. 1875
First Published | 1863
First Published by | Macmillan & Co. (Cambridge)
Full Title | The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby
Tom the chimneysweep becomes an object of curiosity to his fellow water-dwellers in J. W. Smith’s 1920s illustration.
Often mistakenly thought of as a children’s book, Charles Kingsley’s masterpiece, The Water-Babies, was first published in Macmillan’s Magazine just four years after Darwin’s The Origin of Species. A ten-year-old chimneysweep named Tom, cruelly exploited by his master, Grimes, falls down the wrong chimney at Sir John Harthover’s country estate into little Ellie’s bedroom. There is a great hue and cry, and Tom, supposed to be a burglar, is chased through the grounds and drowns in a pond, but does not die. His memory of his land-dwelling life has gone and he is transmogrified into a water-dweller. He begins a voyage of physical and psychological exploration in this new world, rediscovering his own identity as he interacts with, and learns from, the other various sea creatures. In this watery realm, Tom learns the teachings of Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby, and evolves from a dirt-encrusted chimneysweep into a clean Victorian gentleman.
The Water-Babies touches on most of Kingsley’s favorite themes: the impact of poverty, education, sanitation, pollution, and evolution. In Tom’s spiritual regeneration, Kingsley presents a vision of nature as at once the tool and the expression of divine reality. It is this aspect of the novel, where he shows that he is able to present Darwin’s theory of evolutionary development as a series of parables, that we see Charles Kingsley at his best. More interestingly, Kingsley is also able to articulate and interact with notions of the degeneration of the species that would not become a common currency in the novel for another quarter of a century. In 1887, a special edition of the novel was published to commemorate Kingsley’s death. The marvelous illustrations by Linley Sambourne are as violent, shocking, and completely unexpected as Kingsley’s prose. VC-R
See all books from the 1800s
1800s
Notes from the Underground
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Lifespan | b. 1821 (Russia), d. 1881
First Published | 1864
First Published by | Epokha magazine
Original Title | Zapiski iz podpolya
“The more conscious I was of goodness . . . the more ready I was to sink in it altogether.”
As the title suggests, the anonymous narrator of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground is a voice from beneath the daylight world—a troubled consciousness leaking out from a crack in the floorboards of Russian society. The novel is both the apology and the confession of a bitter, misanthropic civic official living alone in St. Petersburg. Divided into two sections, it reflects two key stages in Russian intellectual life during the nineteenth century: the rationalist utilitarianism of the 1860s and the sentimental, literary romanticism of the 1840s. Across these two parts, the narrator launches a series of dazzling, provocative attacks on the many changing orders of his lifetime—aesthetic, religious, philosophical, and political. He is a highly educated but deeply disillusioned soul, savaging both the “beautiful and lofty” romanticism of his youth and the new socialist principles that correspond with his middle age. No target is immune from scorn.
Notes from the Underground is Dostoevsky’s darkest and strangest work. On the one hand, it is a kind of “case study”—an analysis of alienation and self-loathing, a novel that situates itself distinctly on the faultline between society and the individual. On the other hand, it is a tragicomic theater of ideas. It offers a powerful rebuttal to both enlightenment idealism and the promises of socialist utopianism. It bravely rejects notions of “development” and a “higher consciousness” and instead depicts human beings as persistently irrational, defiant, and uncooperative. According to Nietzsche, it is a work that expresses “the voice of the blood.” Notes from the Underground is a shadowy, difficult, and compelling novel, which deserves to be recognized as forming much more than simply a critical prelude to Dostoevsky’s later, more celebrated works. SamT
See all books from the 1800s
1800s
Uncle Silas
Sheridan Le Fanu
Lifespan | b. 1814 (Ireland), d. 1873
First Published | 1864
First Published by | R. Bentley (London)
Full Title | Uncle Silas: A Tale of Bartram-Haugh
“Later in life he married, and his beautiful young wife died.”
Uncle Silas arises principally from the genre of Victorian sensationalist fiction, and, like the works of Wilkie Collins, combines the interest of a hidden mystery with the compulsion of a determined investigation. Yet this story about the inheritance of a Derbyshire country house has also been shown to be a political allegory for the dissolution of Anglo-Irish society, and a metaphysical version of Emanuel Swedenborg’s speculations about death and the afterlife.
The compelling heroine, Maud Ruthyn, functions as both an investigator and victim, enquiring into her father’s secrets, and then suffering the consequences in her uncle’s house. Silas’s estate, Bartram-Haugh, represents one aspect of a poisonous paralysis of Protestant culture, but is also “a dream of romance,” populated by the fantastic and the grotesque. There is nothing supernatural in Uncle Silas: all of its events can be accounted for purely by human malignity. Evil is not represented as spiritually evanescent but instead is manifest in physical characteristics: we are led to suspect characters because of their excessive appetites, “fatfaced” appearance, and dull, cunning expressions. A lexicon of corporeality leads the reader from the merely unconventional or malicious, to those “lean,” white-faced figures who, like Uncle Silas himself, are merely deathly visiters in the world of the living. As such, these creations lie behind the unsettling ghost stories of the Edwardian age.
Sheridan Le Fanu’s astute diagnosis of the Anglo-Irish tradition meant that his texts were also powerfully resonant for William Butler Yeats and James Joyce, arguably making Uncle Silas one of the less frequently acknowledged antecedents of the great works of twentieth-century modernism. DT
See all books from the 1800s
1800s
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll
Lifespan | b. 1832 (England), d. 1898
First Published | 1865
First Published by | Macmillan & Co. (London)
Given Name | Charles Lutwidge Dodgson
Preceded by the white rabbit, Alice falls into the underworld in this illustration by W. H. Walker for a 1907 edition of the book.
Sir John Tenniel’s original illustrations for Alice in Wonderland are an integral part of the book’s imaginativ
e universe.
Wholly familiar as an integral part of our culture, Lewis Carroll’s trip down the rabbit hole is a children’s book containing enough bizarre satire, wordplay, and comedy to satisfy any adult reader. Indeed, the Surrealist André Breton wrote of Alice that here, “accommodation to the absurd readmits adults to the mysterious realm inhabited by children.” Far from patronizing children, the book is positively educative for jaded adults. Published in 1865, the same year as Lautréamont’s infernal The Songs of Maldoror and Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, Alice may be a radically English, genteel journey into a dream landscape, yet it is not without its dark side.
1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 18
