Not the hundred best novels?
By MICHAEL CAINES
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.
1. Don Quixote - 1604 - Miguel de Cervantes
2. The Holy War - 1682 - John Bunyan
3. Gil Blas - 1715 - Alain René le Sage
4. Robinson Crusoe - 1719 - Daniel Defoe
5. Gulliver's Travels - 1726 - Jonathan Swift
6. Roderick Random - 1748 - Tobias Smollett
7. Clarissa - 1749 - Samuel Richardson
8. Tom Jones - 1749 - Henry Fielding
9. Candide - 1756 - Françoise de Voltaire
10. Rasselas - 1759 - Samuel Johnson
11. The Castle of Otranto - 1764 - Horace Walpole
12. The Vicar of Wakefield - 1766 - Oliver Goldsmith
13. The Old English Baron - 1777 - Clara Reeve
14. Evelina - 1778 - Fanny Burney
15. Vathek - 1787 - William Beckford
16. The Mysteries of Udolpho - 1794 - Ann Radcliffe
17. Caleb Williams - 1794 - William Godwin
18. The Wild Irish Girl - 1806 - Lady Morgan
19. Corinne - 1810 - Madame de Stael
20. The Scottish Chiefs - 1810 - Jane Porter
21. The Absentee - 1812 - Maria Edgeworth
22. Pride and Prejudice - 1813 - Jane Austen
23. Headlong Hall - 1816 - Thomas Love Peacock
24. Frankenstein - 1818 - Mary Shelley
25. Marriage - 1818 - Susan Ferrier
26. The Ayrshire Legatees - 1820 - John Galt
27. Valerius - 1821 - John Gibson Lockhart
28. Wilhelm Meister - 1821 - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
29. Kenilworth - 1821 - Sir Walter Scott
30. Bracebridge Hall - 1822 - Washington Irving
31. The Epicurean - 1822 - Thomas Moore
32. The Adventures of Hajji Baba - 1824 - James Morier ("usually reckoned his best")
33. The Betrothed - 1825 - Alessandro Manzoni
34. Lichtenstein - 1826 - Wilhelm Hauff
35. The Last of the Mohicans - 1826 - Fenimore Cooper
36. The Collegians - 1828 - Gerald Griffin
37. The Autobiography of Mansie Wauch - 1828 - David M. Moir
38. Richelieu - 1829 - G. P. R. James (the "first and best" novel by the "doyen of historical novelists")
39. Tom Cringle's Log - 1833 - Michael Scott
40. Mr. Midshipman Easy - 1834 - Frederick Marryat
41. Le Père Goriot - 1835 - Honoré de Balzac
42. Rory O'More - 1836 - Samuel Lover (another first novel, inspired by one of the author's own ballads)
43. Jack Brag - 1837 - Theodore Hook
44. Fardorougha the Miser - 1839 - William Carleton ("a grim study of avarice and Catholic family life. Critics consider it the author's finest achievement")
45. Valentine Vox - 1840 - Henry Cockton (yet another first novel)
46. Old St. Paul's - 1841 - Harrison Ainsworth
47. Ten Thousand a Year - 1841 - Samuel Warren ("immensely successful")
48. Susan Hopley - 1841 - Catherine Crowe ("the story of a resourceful servant who solves a mysterious crime")
49. Charles O'Malley - 1841 - Charles Lever
50. The Last of the Barons - 1843 - Bulwer Lytton
51. Consuelo - 1844 - George Sand
52. Amy Herbert - 1844 - Elizabeth Sewell
53. Adventures of Mr. Ledbury - 1844 - Elizabeth Sewell
54. Sybil - 1845 - Lord Beaconsfield (a. k. a. Benjamin Disraeli)
55. The Three Musketeers - 1845 - Alexandre Dumas
56. The Wandering Jew - 1845 - Eugène Sue
57. Emilia Wyndham - 1846 - Anne Marsh
58. The Romance of War - 1846 - James Grant ("the narrative of the 92nd Highlanders' contribution from the Peninsular campaign to Waterloo")
59. Vanity Fair - 1847 - W. M. Thackeray
60. Jane Eyre - 1847 - Charlotte Brontë
61. Wuthering Heights - 1847 - Emily Brontë
62. The Vale of Cedars - 1848 - Grace Aguilar
63. David Copperfield - 1849 - Charles Dickens
64. The Maiden and Married Life of Mary Powell - 1850 - Anne Manning ("written in a pastiche seventeenth-century style and printed with the old-fashioned typography and page layout for which there was a vogue at the period . . .")
65. The Scarlet Letter - 1850 - Nathaniel Hawthorne
66. Frank Fairleigh - 1850 - Francis Smedley ("Smedley specialised in fiction that is hearty and active, with a strong line in boisterous college escapades and adventurous esquestrian exploits")
67. Uncle Tom's Cabin - 1851 - H. B. Stowe
68. The Wide Wide World - 1851 - Susan Warner (Elizabeth Wetherell)
69. Nathalie - 1851 - Julia Kavanagh
70. Ruth - 1853 - Elizabeth Gaskell
71. The Lamplighter - 1854 - Maria Susanna Cummins
72. Dr. Antonio - 1855 - Giovanni Ruffini
73. Westward Ho! - 1855 - Charles Kingsley
74. Debit and Credit (Soll und Haben) - 1855 - Gustav Freytag
75. Tom Brown's School-Days - 1856 - Thomas Hughes
76. Barchester Towers - 1857 - Anthony Trollope
77. John Halifax, Gentleman - 1857 - Dinah Mulock (a. k. a. Dinah Craik; "the best-known Victorian fable of Smilesian self-improvement")
78. Ekkehard - 1857 - Viktor von Scheffel
79. Elsie Venner - 1859 - O. W. Holmes
80. The Woman in White - 1860 - Wilkie Collins
81. The Cloister and the Hearth - 1861 - Charles Reade
82. Ravenshoe - 1861 - Henry Kingsley ("There is much confusion in the plot to do with changelings and frustrated inheritance" in this successful novel by Charles Kingsley's younger brother, the "black sheep" of a "highly respectable" family)
83. Fathers and Sons - 1861 - Ivan Turgenieff
84. Silas Marner - 1861 - George Eliot
85. Les Misérables - 1862 - Victor Hugo
86. Salammbô - 1862 - Gustave Flaubert
87. Salem Chapel - 1862 - Margaret Oliphant
88. The Channings - 1862 - Ellen Wood (a. k. a. Mrs Henry Wood)
89. Lost and Saved - 1863 - The Hon. Mrs. Norton
90. The Schönberg-Cotta Family - 1863 - Elizabeth Charles
91. Uncle Silas - 1864 - Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
92. Barbara's History - 1864 - Amelia B. Edwards ("Confusingly for bibliographers, she was related to Matilda Betham-Edwards and possibly to Annie Edward(e)s . . .")
93. Sweet Anne Page - 1868 - Mortimer Collins
94. Crime and Punishment - 1868 - Feodor Dostoieffsky
95. Fromont Junior - 1874 - Alphonse Daudet
96. Marmorne - 1877 - P. G. Hamerton ("written under the pseudonym Adolphus Segrave")
97. Black but Comely - 1879 - G. J. Whyte-Melville
98. The Master of Ballantrae - 1889 - R. L. Stevenson
99. Reuben Sachs - 1889 - Amy Levy
100. News from Nowhere - 1891 - William Morris
And those lucky living eight:
An Egyptian Princess - 1864 - Georg Ebers
Rhoda Fleming - 1865 - George Meredith
Lorna Doone - 1869 - R. D. Blackmore
Anna Karenina - 1875 - Count Leo Tolstoi
The Return of the Native - 1878 - Thomas Hardy
Daisy Miller - 1878 - Henry James
Mark Rutherford - 1881 - W. Hale White
Le Rêve - 1889 - Emile Zola

I always view lists as exams: 100 best? Yes, I've usually read at least 80.
Unfortunately, I have never done worse than on this list "exam": I've read 19 of the 100 Best and four of the eight Living."
But I really must catch up on my Elizabeth Sewell, and am much disappointed to find she's not Anna Sewell, author of Black Beauty. Oh well...
Posted by: MsMirabile | 30 Oct 2013 17:49:36
Lists like this are seductive but silly. A week or two back the Guardian had a tremendously irritating one on the ten best LONG novels. Not only is the criterion foolish but the novels on the list, Oh dear! (Sorry, I've just checked: they weren't "novels", they were "reads".) No Tolstoy (eg War and Peace). No Dickens (eg Martin Chuzzlewit). No Thackeray (eg Vanity Fair). No Trollope (eg He Knew He Was Right). No Vikram Chandra (eg Sacred Games, greatly superior to Vikram Seth's Suitable Boy, which was on the list, and terribly long). No Joyce, for Heaven's sake. No Henry Handel Richardson (eg The Fortunes of Richard Mahony--or doesn't a trilogy count?). But "Proust" is there, so multiple-volume works must count. Also on the list is David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: perhaps there should be a competition to discover whether people who put Proust on such lists would also choose poor DFW, and whether such people have read either.
As I said, seductive but silly.
Posted by: Gigi Santow | 31 Oct 2013 12:33:22
All lists are silly, but this one is fun because it's so obviously dated. And it's very nice to see Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin on a Best Novels lists. (Uncle Tom's Cabin is not a classic, but it's an AMERICAN classic, if you see what I mean. Some would say it's an AMERICAN WOMEN'S CLASSIC, but I say it's an AMERICAN CLASSIC...she's at least as great as Hawthorne.)
And now just to amble on a bit: lists are fun if you're not saturated with them on the internet. Somebody is always telling you to go to Flavorwire, whatever that is, or The Guardian to look at lists. If you read only occasional lists, they are amusing.
Posted by: MsMirabile | 31 Oct 2013 19:27:58
Amelia B. Edwards was a successful novelist before she became a cofounder of the Egypt Exploration Fund (which funded the expeditions of William Flinders Petrie, among others) and an inspiration for the late Elizabeth Peters's Amelia Peabody Emerson. See her bestselling nonfiction work _A Thousand Miles Up the Nile_ (1876).
Posted by: Elizabeth Foxwell | 3 Nov 2013 12:47:46
I was slightly surprised, given the buil-up, that I've read thirty-seven of the 100, and five of the eight; I was expecting it to be much more obscure. On the other hand, I've not even heard of most of the books on the list that I haven't read.
Yes, these lists are silly, always and without exception, yet few of us can resist laboriously going through them, counting off the read/owned/liked, etc. At least, I hope that few of us can resist; I certainly can't.
Posted by: Dr Peter J. King | 4 Nov 2013 15:40:56
On the 8th February 1886, the 'Pall Mall Gazette' - which had been running a series on 'The Best Hundred Books' by 'The Best Hundred Judges' - published a letter from Oscar Wilde who suggested that books 'may be conveniently divided into three classes': 1. Books to read (Cicero's 'Letters', Vasari's 'Lives of the Painters'); 2. Books to re-read (Plato and Keats); 3. Books not to read at all (Thomson's 'Seasons', Voltaire's plays). Wilde thought the third class by far the most important. 'To tell people what to read is, as a rule, either useless or harmful . . . but to tell people what not to read is a very different matter, and I venture to recommend it as a mission to the University Extension Scheme. Indeed, it is one that is eminently needed in . . . an age that reads so much that it has no time to admire, and writes so much that it has no time to think. Whoever will select out of the chaos of our modern curricula 'The Worst Hundred Books', and publish a list of them, will confer on the rising generation a real and lasting benefit'.
Posted by: Andrew McCulloch | 4 Nov 2013 17:06:22
I am stunned that someone in the comments wrote that Stowe was as good as Hawthorne.
Posted by: Dex | 5 Nov 2013 07:17:12
Any such list is bound to be personal. Nevertheless, it is fascinating to be reminded of how many good books there are that one hasn't read. I am also rather surprised that anyone could suggest that Silas Marner and Middlemarch don't belong. (I would have chosen Humphrey Clinker over Roderick Random, myself). Old book stores are a treasure house.
Posted by: Harold | 6 Nov 2013 16:11:46
What an interesting list. I have read 52 of the
100 (5 of the 2nd list) and can only attribute that
to my love of literature written before 1900!
Posted by: Susan S | 11 Nov 2013 13:24:52
Like most of those commenting, I find myself drawn to lists like this, even while discounting them. But I can't discount my utter astonishment in seeing that about a third of the authors listed on this one were women. I can't think of a single recent list that came anywhere close to that. Simply an observation.
Posted by: Merle Darling | 11 Nov 2013 14:37:54
This is a sham! The list is officially sick and repelling!
Where in the name of all that writes is One Thousand Night and One? Where is the great Indian novel-form philosophical book Kalilla and Demnna? Or more--where on earth is Hay, Son of Yakeedan?
This is just another European BS!
Posted by: Hacene | 12 Nov 2013 11:19:44
Mr. Shorter had more respect for female novelists than most present day compilers of such lists. At least for dead female novelists. All lviing women in 1898 seem to have suffered from writer's block.
Posted by: Daniel | 12 Nov 2013 21:33:06
That's a surprisingly good list, although obviously there are admissions: Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn," for example, belongs among the appendix of living novelists.
This is a reminder that it's easier to get right the names of the best novelists than which were their single best novels. Dickens is obviously going to be on the list, but earlier generations saw "David Copperfield" as his best, while today's taste favors "Great Expectations."
Posted by: Steve Sailer | 12 Nov 2013 23:30:28
By my count, 31 of the 100 deceased authors are women.
Posted by: Steve Sailer | 12 Nov 2013 23:48:21
This is not a list in order of quality. The books are in chronological order - so the "top ten" are merely the "first ten."
Posted by: Richard Vodra | 14 Nov 2013 21:19:57