25 favorite novels, 1800-1899

But when you talk about destruction, don't you know that you can count me out/in

You shouldn’t take this list too seriously—other amateur readers have covered the time period more broadly and deeply. Nevertheless, you might find some amusement in the perspective of someone who acquired a reading habit through early 2000s contemporary fiction, and only later went back and found 19th century lit unusually captivating. Below, sparks of my beloved modernism are valued, but I find the greatest interest in reactions to a hitherto unprecedented rate of change (whereas nowadays people who write about The Way We Live Now tend to be intolerable unless they do it via talking robots.) The shocks to the city and the country were easiest to observe undistractedly in England, so the list is heavy on the Raymond Williams Austen-Dickens-Brontës-Eliot-Hardy mainline; these happen to be the only authors whose bibliographies I’ve plumbed in any depth. The Russian, French, and American traditions are the only others I’ve engaged with at all, though Michael Kohlhaas would be on there if I didn’t declare it too short. To conserve everyone’s attention, I’ve only annotated picks that aren’t completely obvious, or which I have jokes for.

1. Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace

2. Charlotte Brontë: Villette

George Eliot and Virginia Woolf both said this was her best, and they would know. The sheer intensity of first-person feeling was unprecedented, while the fact that it comes from such an outwardly placid character is an inspiration to introverts everywhere, as well as making the book a forerunner to so much “you don’t understand meeee” art. If such art has been largely annoying for the last century and a half, Brontë gives Lucy a purity that survives her anti-Catholic rants and encounters with dead nuns. As for the ending, yeah, I’m still not ready to talk about the ending.

3. Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Brothers Karamazov

4. Fyodor Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment

5. Victor Hugo: Les Misérables

6. Charles Dickens: David Copperfield

7. Honoré de Balzac: Père Goriot

Another reason you shouldn’t take this list too seriously is that this and Pride and Prejudice are the books on it that I’ve read twice, and in this case it was accidental: I got all the way to the protagonist’s deathbed before I realized I’d read it before. Hard to say why you should listen to someone who could forget Vautrin, one of literature’s great criminals, or the brief history of Goriot’s vermicelli empire. The ending, however, is apparently unforgettable.

8. George Eliot: Middlemarch

9. Thomas Hardy: The Mayor of Casterbridge

This evoked so vivid a sense of place that I felt a strong drive to visit Dorchester. Google Maps shows Henchard’s house is now a Barclays next to a Goulds Fashion Store:

Of course, what Hardy really evoked was a sense of time and place, and one long-gone by the time he wrote the novel. Hardy and Eliot were far-and-away the finest chroniclers of 19th century life in towns-not-cities; suffice to say that if you think understanding this is crucial to understanding history as is understanding London and Paris, you should read multiple books by both (as this list instructs.)

10. Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice

11. George Eliot: Silas Marner

Middlemarch is her peak (copy-paste something about “knowable communities” here), but this is a much more accessible, and shorter, place to start. There’s opium and cleromancy, plot contrivances and rich skeletons, all treated with the useful kind of realism. Marner’s return to Lantern Yard is Eliot’s single-best scene, full of profoundly mixed emotions about progress.

12. Charles Dickens: Dombey and Son

Lots of people like middle Dickens the best (chops at peak, self-parody not yet a major risk), but I don’t anyone else who takes it to the extreme that I do, claiming the three in the middle are the great books. This one’s out of fashion, but it has some of his most sensitive characterizations—Edith Granger has a complexity no other male author at the time granted a woman. And it’s his clearest consideration of the industrial city as an organism that overwhlems mere character—the Florence Dombey wandering around London scene is surpassed only by the Amy Dorrit wandering around London scene in a later, more pat book.

13. Herman Melville: Moby-Dick

14. Nikolai Gogol: Dead Souls

Probably the weirdest of the consensus Great Russian Novels (I guess some of the Dostoevskies are close, but only when they’re bad.) As Nabokov and others have pointed out, it’s not simply satirical, and yet it’s not not satirical (and it’s definitely funny.) If it’s too cynical to take seriously as a diagnosis of the Russian Problem, it leaves you in no doubt there is a problem. Structurally it was supposedly a response to Dante, but in practice it seems like a bunch of essentially random shit happening to Chichikov. As for the ending, it would not be until the twentieth century that

15. Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights

16. Henry James: The Portrait of a Lady

17. Gustave Flaubert: Sentimental Education

I found this easier to like than Bovary because it’s more obviously mean, not just to Frederic but to everyone, even that nice young man Dussadier; at least the latter has some shining moments, while all Frederic gets for his David Brent-level instinct for doing the wrong thing is a reasonably comfortable bourgeois life. The deadpan flatness of the prose is pretty funny (l admire the sheer work Flaubert put in to include all that historical detail and make it seem as mundane as possible) yet I have no idea why this became the standard way of doing “realism” for writers who weren’t doing a bit.

18. Thomas Hardy: Tess of the d’Urbervilles

Seems like Tess is increasingly viewed as a straightforward heroine; waiting for the movie director who hands her a Rambo gun with which to shoot every bourgie man in Wessex. I prefer the R. Williams line that Tess has just enough education to be frustrated that she can’t move up in the world, and that this is a character flaw despite there being absolutely nothing she could have done about it, which makes one rethink what “character flaw” means.

19. Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina

20. Jane Austen: Emma

21. George Eliot: The Mill on the Floss

There’s a proto-Hardean rawness here that Eliot never quite recaptured, perhaps because she couldn’t disentwine it from fatalism. One of the era’s most compelling depictions of a sibling relationship (maybe Little Women is better at this, but Eliot doesn’t stop to remind us to be good Christians every chapter.)

22. Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

23. Mary Shelley: Frankenstein

Yes yes it’s the fountainhead of modern genre fiction, but what really struck me was how fucking Romantic it was, though in this case the individualist Romantic genius ends up getting everyone murdered, which could’ve been prevented if he was more of a Chad.

24. Charles Dickens: Bleak House

Dickens’s most interesting experiment with narration, and such a successful female protagonist that you wonder why he didn’t try that more often. But really, it’s mostly about the names: Jarndyce and Jarndyce! Guppy! Sir Leicester Dedlock! Inspector Bucket!

25. Thomas Hardy: The Woodlanders

Hardy’s greatest ending, with agrarian spirit Marty, who at the beginning of the book submitted to capital by getting a haircut, outlasting everyone, suggesting nature and, more speculatively, love will still be around long after this civilization has gone.