1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die
Page 19
Dozing on the bank of the River Isis, seven-year-old Alice spies the waistcoated White Rabbit anxiously checking his watch and decides to follow him underground. In her pursuit of the punctilious bunny, she stumbles into an assortment of odd predicaments. As she tipples potions and nibbles fungi she grows and shrinks from the size of a mouse to the size of a house, or sprouts a neck as long as a snake’s. She encounters characters now inscribed on all our consciousnesses: the Mouse, bobbing in the “Pool of Tears,” whose tale is typographically rendered as a tail; the hookah-puffing Caterpillar; the horrifying Duchess, nursing a pig; the disappearing grin of the Cheshire Cat; the tea-drinking Mad Hatter and March Hare squeezing Dormouse into a teapot; the murderous Queen of Hearts, who plays croquet with flamingo-mallets; and the dolorous Mock Turtle, who teaches her the Lobster Quadrille. Ever the prim ingénue, Alice tries to confront madness with logic, in a story that digs gently at the unsympathetic puritanism of Victorian bourgeois child-rearing practice. This is a book that must be read with Tenniel’s original illustrations. DH
See all books from the 1800s
1800s
Journey to the Center of the Earth
Jules Verne
Lifespan | b. 1828 (France), d. 1905
First Published | 1866
First Published by | P-J. Hetzel (Paris)
Original Title | Le Voyage au Centre de la Terre
Jules Verne wrote other imaginary tales, a selection of which were published in this elaborately bound edition.
E. Riou’s illustration for Journey to the Center of the Earth is captioned: “We descended a kind of winding stairs.”
Journey to the Center of the Earth revives the literary tradition of the descent into hell, completely renewed in the form of science fiction. One of the great scientific questions of the mid-nineteenth century, which the novel explores, concerned the geothermic temperature deep within the earth’s core, and the question of whether hot or cold temperatures prevail under the earth’s crust. In the character of Axel, a kind of intellectual alter-ego, the novelist creates a defender of the theory of a central fire, who is opposed to his uncle, the woolly-minded professor Lindenbrock, defender of Humphry Davy’s theory of a cool center. With extraordinary imaginativeness, the novel adopts the latter hypothesis and takes place in a Gruyèrelike Cold Earth, where the volcanoes and the sea are linked by a series of channels.
Having managed to enter the earth through an extinguished volcano in Iceland, named the Sneffels, the characters find themselves in a huge cavity, sheltering an “inner Mediterranean sea,” which they explore until they are ejected by the volcanic lava flow of the erupting Stromboli chimney. Their journey can be divided into two main parts. The first takes the heroes back through time, through successive geological layers, until they reach the “primitive granite.” The second is the discovery of the inner sea—that is, of a paleontological space populated with “living fossils,” where all periods of biological classification are mixed. The discovery of a human jaw in Abbeville, in 1863, prompted the writer to introduce into his narrative an “antediluvian shepherd,” recalling the great anthropoids, who were—for the Darwinians who were debating the issue of evolution at the time—the ancestors of modern man. JD
See all books from the 1800s
1800s
Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Lifespan | b. 1821 (Russia), d. 1881
First Published | 1866
First Serialized in | Russkii Vestnik periodical
Original Title | Prestupleniye i nakazaniye
Crime and Punishment is a masterpiece of Russian and world fiction, as captivating as it is, in the end, mysterious. Quite near the novel’s beginning, the protagonist Raskolnikov commits, for reasons opaque to himself and to the reader, a double murder. For the rest of the book he walks, rambles, or staggers through the streets of St. Petersburg. He doubts whether his crime—which he barely regards as a crime at all—will be discovered. The concrete world around him is dissolving into the stuff of dreams.
It is often said that Crime and Punishment is a study of guilt, but this is not strictly accurate: Raskolnikov does not feel guilt, but he does feel terror and an extraordinary depth of alienation from the rest of humanity. Even though friends make their best efforts to help him, he is unable to accept their help. He is even unable to understand their feelings of love and sympathy, because he regards himself as an outcast—his ability to kill is the embodiment of that alienation rather than its cause or effect.
As readers, we are plunged into one man’s delirium, a symbol for the incomprehension that might overtake us all if we looked closely enough at our fellow human beings. Although written in 1866, Crime and Punishment stands as the great antecedent to the twentieth-century literature of alienation of such figures as Camus and Beckett. DP
See all books from the 1800s
1800s
Last Chronicle of Barset
Anthony Trollope
Lifespan | b. 1815 (England), d. 1882
First Published | 1867
First Published by | Smith, Elder & Co. (London)
Original Language | English
Written between 1855 and 1867, the six novels that form the so-called Barsetshire Chronicles are a reflection of Anthony Trollope’s fascination with everyday provincial life, together building up a panoramic view of the Church, marriage, politics, and country life in mid-Victorian England. The Last Chronicle of Barset has always held a special place among Trollope’s novels. Its scope and scale, together with Trollope’s masterly evocation of his famous mythical county, has meant that it is regarded as one of the most ambitious Victorian novels, and seems to sum up Trollope’s work as a whole. It revisits the lives of some of Trollope’s much-loved characters who appear in earlier Barsetshire novels. These include the poverty-stricken clergyman, Josiah Crawley, whose humiliation after being charged with stealing a check (wrongly as it turns out) forms the central crisis. Crawley, a proud, exasperatingly unsociable man, revels in his status as victim-martyr.
Parallel to the Crawley plotline, heroine Lily Dale clings onto the memory of the man who, some years before, had jilted her. Lily, a younger and prettier version of Dickens’s Miss Havisham, now refuses to consider marrying anyone else, and at only twenty-four she determines to remain an “Old-Maid.” Lily’s obstinacy exasperated contemporary readers, but some recent critics have read Lily as a kind of protofeminist, whose strong sense of selfhood allows her to refuse to marry merely to conform to the expectations of her day. AM
See all books from the 1800s
1800s
Thérèse Raquin
Émile Zola
Lifespan | b. 1840 (France), d. 1902
First Published | 1867
First Published by | A. Lacroix (Paris)
Serialized Title | Un Mariage d’Amour (1867)
Thérèse Raquin is not the best of Émile Zola’s novels; it has the hesitancy of a beginning and the dogmatism of a defense, rather than the assured scope of his later masterpiece Germinal (1885). Yet it is precisely the properties of uncertainty and of extravagance that make Thérèse Raquin significant.
In keeping with the developing creed of naturalism, Zola chose two “specimens” to enact his theories about sexual desire and remorse. But Raquin and Laurent, her lover, are so heavily invested with the responsibility of embodying Zola’s mechanical determinism that they become strange, tortured creatures. The result is a novel seemingly divided against itself, a wonderful amalgam of wild eroticism and meticulous detachment. The impersonality of the third-person narrator is pushed to outrageous extremes as the would-be “scientific” narrator is forced to provide ever more elaborate explanations for the conduct of the two lovers. Thérèse Raquin herself is a magnificent creation; she enters the text as a site of mute desires and fears, as the “human animal” without free will, subject to the inexorable laws of her physiology. Gradually, however, and then volcanically, her history cumulate
s to give her voice and movement, and a superb consciousness of herself as a woman and of the bodily pleasures of being a woman. PMcM
1800s
The Moonstone
Wilkie Collins
Lifespan | b. 1824 (England), d. 1889
First Published | 1868
First Published by | Tinsley Brothers (London)
Original Language | English
The Moonstone is often regarded as the first—and, by some, the greatest—English detective novel. It concerns the theft of an invaluable diamond, but from this starting point it ranges across the whole history of the gem, from its original position adorning a Hindu god, through a succession of lootings, until it reappears in the nineteenth century as a wedding gift, and is immediately stolen. At this point, Sergeant Cuff is brought in and, with a little help, he eventually unfolds the mystery.
One of the remarkable features of the novel is that it is told in the first person from a variety of viewpoints, which compounds the mystery because it is not always clear whose account the reader should trust. Much of the novel is composed of dialogue between characters, which enables the reader to move surprisingly rapidly through the intricacies of the plot. Over the course of this long novel, Collins displays a remarkable ability to unpack the workings of people’s minds; unusually, perhaps, for a nineteenth-century male writer, the minds of women as much as of men. There is a remarkable vividness to the scenes in which the novel is set, and a force of action that holds the reader spellbound from start to finish. Considered a landmark in English literature, The Moonstone is a mystery to be unravelled, but it is also a presentation of the essentials of nineteenth-century society, related with the lightest of touches and with the utmost realism of dialogue and characterization. DP
See all books from the 1800s
1800s
Little Women
Louisa May Alcott
Lifespan | b. 1832 (U.S.), d. 1888
First Published | 1868
First Published by | Roberts Bros. (Boston)
Full Title | Little Women; or, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy
A timeless evocation of idealized family life, Little Women was an instant success, and became one of America’s best-loved classic novels. Originally a story for young girls, its appeal has since transcended the boundaries of time and age.
Little Women chronicles the lives of the four March sisters, growing up in New England against the backdrop of the American Civil War. The story details their struggles with poverty and hardship, their moral failings, and personal disappointments. While their father is away with the Union armies, the sisters, Meg, Jo, Amy, Beth, and their mother are left to fend for themselves, under the watchful eyes of their wealthy neighbors. The routine of their daily lives is punctuated by their letters and plays, misdemeanors and acts of kindness, as well as by their dreams and aspirations. The girls’ progress into womanhood is marked by Meg’s departure to be married, Jo’s struggles to become a writer, Beth’s untimely death, and Amy’s unexpected romance. Partially autobiographical, Little Women offers a representation of Alcott and her own sisters. Perhaps it is this immediacy that gives this evocative portrait of nineteenth-century family life a lasting vitality, endearing it to generations of readers and inspiring new women writers, from Simone de Beauvoir to Joyce Carol Oates and Cynthia Ozick. LE
See all books from the 1800s
1800s
The Idiot
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Lifespan | b. 1821 (Russia), d. 1881
First Published | 1868–1869
First Serialized in | Russkii Vestnik periodical
Original Title | Idiot
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s second long novel reworks the “holy fool” motif: the apparently naive person who may secretly be wise. The “idiot” in this case is the saintly Prince Myshkin, an epileptic (like the author himself), whom we encounter returning to Russia from a Swiss sanatorium to stay with his distant relative, Mrs. Yepanchin, the wife of a wealthy general. Set in the rapidly developing St. Petersburg of the 1860s, the narrative follows Myshkin’s impact on the Yepanchins and the social milieu they inhabit. The prince serves as a catalyst for conflict between social hypocrisy and the emotions it masks, dealing with money, status, sex, and marriage. Like any good Russian novel, The Idiot includes a long list of characters with difficult names, and roils with intrigue and passion against the backdrop of an emergent bourgeois modernity.
At the outset, Myshkin befriends rich, wilful young buck Rogozhin, his opposite in every way. But the two men subsequently become rivals for the affections of Nastasya Filippovna. She is an orphan adopted by a General Totsky, who, it is strongly hinted, raped her in her adolescence. Her status is thus dubious, a fallen woman, but Myshkin, who can eerily divine inner characters, perceives in her a suffering soul; a spiritual bond forms between them, in sharp contrast to Rogozhin’s fierce desire for her. How, Dostoevsky asks, does the ethereal, frequently insufferable spirituality of a Myshkin sit in relation to the more primitive drives of a Rogozhin? DH
See all books from the 1800s
1800s
Maldoror
Comte de Lautréamont
Lifespan | b. 1846 (Uruguay), d. 1870 (France)
First Published | 1868–1869
First Published by | Albert Lacroix (Paris)
Original Title | Les Chants de Maldoror
Although Lautréamont was unknown during his lifetime, his narrative prose poem Les Chants de Maldoror is now recognized as one of the earliest and most unsettling works of Surrealist fiction. The first canto of Maldoror was published anonymously in Paris just two years before the author’s early death aged twenty-four. However, it was not until a Belgian literary journal took the bold step of republishing Lautréamont’s work, in 1885, that he began to find an audience among the European avant-garde.
Maldoror tells the tale of the eponymous “hero” who rebels against God by committing an extraordinary succession of depraved and immoral acts. This is a wild, hallucinatory, poetic, and disturbing work—radical not only for its stylistic innovation (which the Surrealists so admired) but also for its blasphemous content. The tale encompasses murder, sadomasochism, putrefaction, and violence. It is a celebration of evil, a work that depicts Christ as a rapist and includes a protracted fantasy about intercourse with sea creatures. Each new act of inhumanity fails to bring Maldoror any kind of respite or satisfaction, and his fury increases as the book progresses. Maldoror retains its power to shock and bewilder, but perhaps its most interesting feature is the lyrical power of Lautréamont’s prose, which succeeds in making the utterly repellent appear beautiful and enchanting—a disorienting effect that challenges both conventional morality and our assumptions about language itself. SamT
See all books from the 1800s
1800s
Phineas Finn
Anthony Trollope
Lifespan | b. 1815 (England), d. 1882
First Published | 1869
First Published by | Virtue & Co. (London)
Full Title | Phineas Finn, the Irish Member
Like the eponymous Irish hero of this novel, Anthony Trollope also had political ambitions, standing (unsuccessfully) as the Liberal candidate for Beverly in 1868. Chastened by his experiences, he channeled them into a series of six novels (the Palliser series), which analyzes the lives and loves of government ministers and their families, set against the backdrop of parliamentary intrigue and real-life politicians.
Phineas Finn MP is a familiar Trollopian hero: handsome, well mannered, impressionable, but weak and easily flattered. As he rises up the political greasy pole, attracting the notice of powerful government men, his private life grows more complicated. Although already engaged, Phineas becomes entangled with three different but equally alluring women—the brilliant Lady Laura Standish, the heiress Violet Effingham, and the mysterious Madame Max Goesler—all outstanding matches for the ambitious politician. Phineas’s tendency to dither is typical of Trollope’s young men
and much of the novel is about how he reconciles his conscience with his ambitions and love of the bright lights. The capital of a great, self-confident empire, London is also a place where principled behavior is always threatened by political expediency, and good connections are much more important than mere ability. Trollope’s interest lies not in political philosophy but rather in psychology, and in what makes mid-Victorian people “tick.” His penetrating insights are much on display here. AM
See all books from the 1800s
1800s
Sentimental Education
Gustave Flaubert
Lifespan | b. 1821 (France), d. 1880
First Published | 1869, by M. Lévy Frères (Paris)
Original Title | L’Education sentimentale: Histoire d’un jeune homme
“The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him.”