Top ten and top 100 lists are everywhere, it seems, but just how useful are they? In the Times Literary Supplement blog, Michael Caines shared a list from more than a hundred years back, showing what the compiler of that year thought were the “best” novels:
Is it true, as Samuel Johnson declared, that nothing “odd”, in literary terms, will last? As mentioned a while ago, for a certain well-placed critic, writing in 1898, that odd book Tristram Shandy could not be considered among the hundred best novels ever written. Now here’s what he actually thought were the best.
Sometime editor of the Illustrated London News, an authority on the Brontës and Napoleon, Clement K. Shorter was in the middle of a flourishing career when this list appeared in the monthly journal called The Bookman. He doesn’t explain what exactly makes a book one of the “best”, only that he has deliberately limited himself to one novel per novelist. Living authors are excluded – although he cannot resist adding a rider of eight works by “writers whose reputations are too well established for their juniors to feel towards them any sentiments other than those of reverence and regard”. In fact, I’d say if he’d been trying to prophesy what would still be regarded as a classic a century later, Shorter’s shorter list is more proportionally successful than his longer one.
As intended, Shorter’s list might still serve as an “actual incentive” to discovery, as he hoped, for “the youthful student of literature” (one to put next to David Bowie’s, maybe) at least partly because of what seem now to be its many oddities. People have become less hesitant, for example, before praising the living (the more junior the better) and, one suspects, less willing to praise P. G. Hamerton’s Marmorne. I’m not sure Bracebridge Hall is even in print on this side of the Atlantic. And would you have chosen Silas Marner over Middlemarch?
It’s just a list, of course, and Shorter acknowledged that others could probably come up with “numerous omissions”. It’s curious to see what we might call classic or canonical novels among the works they’ve outlasted, though. Praise for, say, Jane Austen might have echoed down the centuries, but this doesn’t mean that we share the same aesthetic values as readers who praised her in the early nineteenth or early twentieth centuries.
It’s difficult to imagine any except the most foolhardy of readers reading every book on Shorter’s list now, let alone agreeing with him. In John Sutherland’s compendious Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction, however, may be found informed summary views of many of the lesser-known names below – see the parenthetical quotations for the ones that interested me.
For that full 1898 flavour, names and dates are as Shorter gives them.
