This post has some suggestions for additional reading for those of you reading along with the current Victorian book club schedule who would like to explore the period on your own. I am focussing on giving breadth from the reading we have already done.
First, here is the reading schedule we are following with dates for book club meetings. I’ll provide longer essays about all of these topics.
10th August, 19.00 UK time. Tennyson. Morte d’Arthur. This is a reasonably short poem about the death of King Arthur. We will also discuss the final book of Idylls of the King, ‘The Passing of Arthur’, in which Tennyson expanded and altered the original. Do read others like ‘Locksley Hall’, ‘The Dying Swan’, ‘Marianna’, and ‘Ulysses’.
10th September, 19.00 UK time. The Annotated Alice. You may want to supplement with some Edward Lear.
21st September, 19.00 UK time. Christine Rossetti. A Birthday. And ‘Goblin Market.’
22nd October, 19.00 UK time. J.S. Mill, Autobiography.
General comments
This list is highly selective, a little erratic, and chauvinistically English/British. If I recommend everything it becomes unhelpful. I want this to be something you can scan and find interesting places to supplement your reading. I chose shorter books and the sort of books the general reader might enjoy, while adding some stretch and breadth. It’s also a little biased by my taste. I don’t find Elizabeth Gaskell very readable so she’s not on the list. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read her. Sarah Harkness would tell me to read Mrs Oliphant. (It’s on my list!) I am also largely confined to the Victorian period, not earlier C19th, again for selection purposes.
Here is a very good syllabus of nine novels that you may prefer. This is a good alternative syllabus to mine but similar in some regards. The Victorian Web also has many useful pages.
For non-English/British writing, some of the obvious choices are Fathers and Sons, Moby Dick, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment (though I find it dull), Flaubert, Balzac, Chekhov, Baudelaire, Emily Dickinson, Emerson, Gogol, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Jules Verne, Little Women, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Whitman.
Fiction
I have tried to make a list that focuses first on the major realistic writers and then on the more “genre” writing. The nineteenth century is very rich in stories of ghosts, murder, fantasy, vampires, crime. Hardy and Kipling aren’t here but they are good too. There’s also a wealth of children’s writing I haven’t listed. Anyway, hopefully it gives you some ideas…
Silas Marner. A novella by George Eliot that uses a fairy-tale type story to explore the way technology was changing society and religion, praised for its extraordinary realism. (My essay here.)
Other George Eliot novels—Middlemarch is obviously the big one, the peak of realism. The Mill on the Floss is underrated. ‘Poor, poor Maggie!’, Penelope Fitzgerald used to say when she taught that book.
Wuthering Heights. One of the great novels, good to read after Jane Eyre and Elizabeth Gaskell.
Barchester Towers. Many people’s favourite Victorian novel, this is a charming, entertaining story about the very fraught issue of high politics among the High and Low Anglicans. Part of a series of six novels. My wife loved this book. Do read The Warden with it.
The Way We Live Now is a huge and wonderful novel, equal to Dickens and Eliot in its outraged interrogation of moral corruption in public life.
Dracula, Bram Stoker.
Sheridan Le Fanu, esp. Carmilla, the first woman vampire?
The Beetle, initially sold more than Stoker. I have this in a book called Victorian Villanies collected by Graham Greene, which is a good collection.
This is a good essay about Greene’s obsession with Victorian detective fiction. I can’t agree with him about Fergus Hume though, very slow stuff.
Sherlock Holmes—all of them!
The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes is a good way to read around other detective writers from the 1890s. Crime on Her Mind does the same thing for women detectives and goes beyond England in the nineteenth century.
The Aspern Papers, Henry James’ fictional account of a biographer trying to get hold of Shelley’s letters. Edge of your seat stuff.
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde. Gothic inspired, a real page-turner.
Wilde’s Fairy Tales are also splendid. And like everyone else he wrote crime fiction, and very good too. Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories.
The Time Machine, H.G. Wells.
Read also E.M. Forster The Machine Stops, a later response to Wells.
Non-fiction
I have stayed away from biography because I write about it so much elsewhere. Darwin is the only “long” book here. Other than Darwin, people like Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole are good to know about. And the Tractarians. (Useful background for Trollope.)
On Heroes, Carlyle is an absolutely inescapable influence on the nineteenth century and these lectures from 1841 are one of the period’s central ideas—how remarkable individuals make history. I wrote about Carlyle here and about his influence on David Copperfield.
Chartism is another of Carlyle’s essential short books about a crucial Victorian idea.
For the brave—Sartor Resartus, Carlyle’s sprawling, bustling novel that made such a splash in the 1830s when it appeared and was praised as a work of genius by everyone. Now forgotten by all but scholars. Hard work (I never finished it.)
The Natural History of German Life, George Eliot’s essay is to nineteenth century literary criticism what Wordsworth’s preface to the Lyrical Ballads was to Romanticism.
Seven Lamps of Architecture, John Ruskin. A long essay that represents some of the main ideas behind the Gothic revival: inspired later writers and artists like William Morris.
Studies in the History of the Renaissance, Walter Pater. A foundational text for aestheticism and the “art’s for art’s sake” of Oscar Wilde et al. Inspired Yeats.
The Subjection of Women, J.S. Mill. A short intense polemic arguing for sexual equality. Written with Harriet Taylor. Everyone says read On Liberty (and you should) but this is just as important and less recommended.
The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels.
On the Origin of Species, Darwin, possibly no other nineteenth century book had so much influence, other than Marx and Engels…
Poetry
The Poetry Foundation has a good overview of the period and authors. Here are some specific recommendations. The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse and the Oxford Book of English Verse and both good for dipping around in. The book club earlier discussed Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Emily Bronte is just so outstanding.
Charlotte Mew, who I am glad to say is back in print. Key poems are ‘The Farmer’s Bride’, ‘Madeline in Church’.
Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues are considered important innovations but I find him heavy work.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets for the Portuguese.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poetry is a good supplement to his sister Christina and an introduction to the pre-Raphaelite movement.
Some of the famous poems from the period:
Browning = “heavy work”? AYKM! His “My Last Duchess” is one of the most brilliant, and chilling, poems of the 19th century.
Unfortunately, it looks like both of the poetry discussions are scheduled at the same time as a recurring meeting on my work calendar - Thursdays at 7 pm. Any other day of the week, that time would be wide open. Enjoy the discussion! I probably won't be able to make it at those times.