Novels of 1847-8: a poll, by w---

Left off Newman's Loss and Gain, Anne Bronte's Agnes Grey, probably some other stuff.

Have this sad thought I'd be sitting around in 1850 complaining that novels have been no good since Scott died.

It's between Eyre, Vanity Fair and Wuthering Heights for me.

Hmmm, haven't read Dombey or the Disraeli or all of Vanity Fair but don't think they would get my vote anyway. Really by rights this is between Ellis and Currer but Mary Barton is great in its own way, probably Gaskell's best book, or at least my favourite. Am voting Wuthering Heights for its mad double plot structure and evocation of the ancient evil of the Moors, but expect Jane Eyre to run it close.

Wuthering Heights is my vote, I think - the moors, yes. Jane Eyre is some hardcore good writing.

Good poll idea!

I was really determined to be contrarian and enjoy Wildfell Hall when I read it but I still remember it as completely intolerable.

Haven't read Tancred myself - on there because people do rep for Disraeli, it sounds quite odd and the real contrarians need something to vote for.

I remember Mary Barton being great; there's a really grim run of industrial accidents and diverse misfortunes in it iirc.

Dombey and Son is a leading example of a book I have definitely read, but have no memory of. I enjoyed it, I remember that. But why?

I need to re-read Wuthering Heights. I feel like it's the right winner – real high eerie weirdness, broken & brilliant narrative structure – but I haven't looked at it in an age, and I have always loved Jane Eyre, sad voice talking to itself, flat life pierced by odd, angry fairy-tale wish story.

I just had to read the Wikipedia summary of Dombey & Son to see if I'd read it, as I was pretty sure I had, but couldn't remember anything about it. I'm still not sure, although I think I remember Mr Toots.

Still -

'Dear grandpapa, why do you cry when you kiss me?'

is the sort of thing that gets Dickens a bad name round my neck of the woods, but fortunately there's usually enough richness elsewhere to make up for this sort of laugh-out-loud mawkishness.

My experience of Wuthering Heights was 'who are these crazies and why should i give a shit?' Will try and read Dombey and Son before poll's end, otherwise will probably lean towards Vanity Fair over Jane Eyre, which has too much of an 'A-level set text' feel for me (unfairly, I'm sure).

i should read some of these.

i never knew jane eyre appeared as 'an autobiography', even. maybe when i finish musil i will try and read the nineteenth century.

If anyone can do it, you can.

Imagining myself further as a man of about 1848, I'd prob think that Vanity Fair is the best thing here - sharper than Dickens, more obviously clever-good than the Bells. I suspect I'd miss what's best about WH & JE, and get caught by Thackeray's brilliance.

The only one I've read is Wuthering Heights. I loathed it.

vanity fair is aces imo

Kind of a toss-up between Jane Eyre and Vanity Fair for me.

Also published in these years

Le Cousin Pons (1847) Balzac

La Cousine Bette (1848 Balzac

La Dame aux camélias (1848) - Dumas, fils

vanity fair is amazing

i somehow managed never to be in a class that assigned wuthering heights and jane eyre, so never read them
doubt i'll ever get around to them now, they seem like the kind of books you need to read when young

Vanity Fair beating Jane Eyre by a nose for me. Great poll idea!

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Almost missed this!

Wuthering Heights over Jane Eyre and VF. Anne Bronte was no slouch herself.

Nearly failed to vote in own poll. Dithered between JE & VF every time I looked, eventually settled on JE. Sorry Becky Sharp, <3 you but it's Jane's haunted & punishing universe for me.

wuthering heights!

Gonna fail in my attempt to finish Dombey and Son before tomorrow but 1/4 of the way through now and it's shaping up as middle tier Dickens, decent enough but lacking in truly compelling of characters.

you should poll the whole century

A top 50 c19th books? Maybe just Victorian novels. That might work.

Or a year-by-year, like with the horror film polls? 'Three Trollopes and The Egoist this year. I have nothing to say'.

latter. yes!

yeah maybe then you'll eventually hit a book i've finished. : /

one time like years ago my sister & i were at a horse race & one of the horses was named becky sharp as knives or something like that & me agreed to put some money on the horse & it won, cemeting our youthful enthusiasm both for the novel & the character

i use that "she's not a social climber, she's a mountaineer" line a lot.

i've read almost none of these though. my 19c experience basically consists of austen, melville, twain, some dickens (but not this dickens), and my beloved russians.

tried to read Jane Eyre last week, made p 40. will be reviewing new film adap instead.

Well, I may not do the whole century (I mean seriously no interest in doing 10 different years that are basically Trollope & Mrs Humphrey Ward & there have got to be other years where Hardy will just no contest the lot(*)), but yeah there are quite a few year/two-year stretches that could work (if not quite as 'hi dere i am the canon' as 47/8).

(*)Maybe not though. Looking at it, he's picking up speed just as genre stuff is coming in.

Cd open it up to novels not first published in English but that might be too much in the other direction.

Yeah, that could be interesting. I don't have much of feel for when stuff happened, exactly, in other literatures, or it's like they belong to different continuities, so Little Dorrit v Madame Bovary might be an exciting Dredd/Batman crossover. Might get a bit out of hand though, yes.

why isn't everything a 19th c novel anyway

i love dickens but little dorrit v. madame bovary would just be a massacre

i kind of hate jane eyre tbh

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

Yeah, that could be interesting. I don't have much of feel for when stuff happened, exactly, in other literatures, or it's like they belong to different continuities

Well Russian lit has had specific moments we look back on (not a key year, but maybe over a 30 year period).

Then other literatures: should do a South American or Central-Eastern European one, but there would be not that much interest, or maybe I'm underestimating.

Yeah! Vanity Fair!

i could argue vigorously and eventually maybe even vote in a Golden Age Russian poll, but i'm too uneducated to make an informed decision if it's opened up to so much as france.

i will follow along at home though!

All three Bronte sisters wrote deeply weird, almost sinister novels. JE boasts a heroine who comes off, quite consciously, as the most uptight prig in English literature (you can almost understand why her aunt and cousins hate her).

Richardson's Pamela was pretty priggish too iirc. I wonder about Jane Eyre in part as a response to that book. Pamela eventually succumbs to her suitor when he offers an acceptable price i.e. marriage, whereas Jane feels much more like a winner at the end of her story, at least within her own terms.

Yeah, think Richardson's the king of prig-bore heroines. Pamela's a big winner tho': she hasn't really given up a thing to get a love-match (which Richardson tries to fill in) & an excellent social position (Shamela works because the deal's so sweet).

I haven't read Jane Eyre in a while, but I guess yeah she wins bigger in a weird, queasy pathological way - flames, destruction, burnt blinded lover in place of a nice utterly boring clerical life.

There are odd moments of overlap between the two (gypsy fortune tellers?), can't believe that CB wouldn't be thinking about it one way or another while writing.

Finally slogged my way to the end of Dombey. Ridiculously mawkish, crazily whimsical, hugely melodramatic, and with dialogue so archly Victorian as to be near incomprehensible. I know these are all par for the course for Dickens, and it would have been ok if it hadn't all been dragged out for 800 goddamn pages. It has over 20 significant characters, each with their own little piece of the story; but instead of giving it a sprawling and epic feel they just seem like so many irrelevant cul-de-sacs. The last 150 pages, with almost endless "never saw that coming <yawn>" revelations and undeserved and underwritten redemptions, I just galloped through, desperate to get it over with.

so...Mary Barton, yes?

v much yes

proto-Marxist critique of industrial economics + one of the first authentic-feeling and sympathetic representations of the new working class + women not-so-secretly run their world + proper "trouble at 't mill" drama

feel like it anticipates Middlemarch in a lot of ways in its careful delineation of power relationships but comes from a much less stable working/middle class struggle

also Gaskell evokes place really well, there's a Sunday walk in the country section iirc which is really beautiful

really

Excellent. After finishing A Pair of Blue Eyes, I'm ready.

otm