The Victorian Novel Project

First off, "Victorian Novel Project" is a misnomer, because Victoria only reigned from 1837-1901, and the project takes in the "long 19th century," say 1790-1914. So far, the project has only included writers from the British isles, but Commonwealth writers (Marcus Clarke, Olive Schreiner) and those with British affinities (Henry James) seem fair game. For a while I conducted the project mainly on the weekends, but it has now become a daily habit -- and given how long those 19th century novels are, that makes plenty of sense. Every day I try to read 20-25 pages of the novel-in-progress (sometimes a little less, sometimes a little more; a lot depends on chapter breaks).

I am reminded daily how much more I bring to the reading of these novels now, at 50, than I possibly could have in my younger days. I'm glad that I started my experience with them as a pre-teen (Dickens and the Brontes were the entry points; I was a precocious reader), because early exposure creates later appetite -- but I question how much I could have understood. Even my collegiate reactions to great literature strike me as hopelessly lame now (although my taste was pretty good; I could always spot the stuff). This Victorian project, along with my other current projects, comes at a time when I finally get things; so even the texts I've read before, I'm going to have to re-read.

So far, I've completed eight novels in this cycle and have a ninth in progress:

Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit
Anthony Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?
George Eliot, Middlemarch
William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair
Jane Austen, Emma
Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native
Charles Reade, It Is Never Too Late to Mend
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent
Charlotte Bronte, Shirley

All of those are acknowledged classics except for the novel by Reade, a friend of Dickens whom I've been meaning to read forever because he sounds odd - and, in the experience, does turn out to be odd. It Is Never Too Late to Mend is the least masterpiece-like of the nine novels (that's a pretty heady group!), but I wouldn't have missed it for anything because Reade's prose manner and compositional method are decidedly jumpy and attention-engaging: you never really know what's coming next. Never Too Late splits jaggedly between a novel of rural marriage intrigues, a romance of the Australian goldfields, and a shockingly strong denunciation of the English prison system.

I wrote a little about the Trollope and Eliot novels here at PMD last year, and all of them will surely come up again, although I don't intend to attempt any sustained critiques -- these novels are too large, they keep academics busy for lifetimes.