The Great (minor) Victorian Novel

Finding the ideal survey-course novel

This coming fall semester, I am teaching a survey of later British literature (everything from 1800-present), a course that I have never taught before and that I have very little background in (outside of that period’s first 20 years or so). I technically took this same class as an undergraduate, but we met once a week, and my teacher cancelled at least twice because she had migraines, so it wasn’t the most informative experience. I remember loving Gerald Manley Hopkins’s poetry, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound…and that I read E.M. Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread while otherwise having no memory of it (I think there’s a car crash?). In graduate school, I took a class on British Modernist literature, where I enjoyed Elizabeth Bowen’s To the North and Ford Maddox Ford’s The Good Soldier and Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent and mainly stumbled through the rest.

So, I am trying to do as much reading as possible between now and August to prepare my syllabus and coursework. And one of the primary questions when designing a survey class is what novels to assign.

Because the goal of the course is to introduce students to as many different authors and works as you can, poetry works really well in this format. A day on Shelley, a day on Coleridge, a day on Hopkins, and you’re moving right along. Novels, on the other hand, are much harder to program. The most prose that I will assign for a class that meets 3 times a week is 25000 words, which usually comes out to ~70-80 pages, depending on the edition. But even short novels will start at 60,000 words, which means that at minimum, you are dedicating a single week to one work. That may not seem like a lot in the abstract, but when you’re trying to cover 200+ years of literary history, it can eat up a lot of precious space quickly.

So typical practice for these courses is to assign very short novels, which can be frustrating, because most of the best ones are long. My initial instinct, when I was assigned this course, was to somehow force the 800-some-odd page Middlemarch on to the syllabus. My rationale was that if you’re going to go to tackle some mountains, why not just go all in and scale Everest? Sure, that work would take up 2/3 of my syllabus, but isn’t this the most important work students could read from this time period? But, I had to remind myself, a survey class is not mountaineering, it’s hiking; you’re not scaling a single summit so much as traversing hundreds of mile.

So I decided to stick to the traditional format. And that means short novels, ideally at least one for every period or so. But which ones? There is no strict formula to follow, but here are the general principles I used to decide:

• Short

• Exemplary of its time period

• Interesting to discuss

• Famous author

• Influential in its time

• A good read

For Romanticism, the obvious choice is Frankenstein. One of the most famous novels of all time, still culturally relevant, full of Gothic science and educational theories, written by a member of one of the most famous clans of the Romantic period, organized into ~50-page volumes that are easy to assign—it basically assigns itself. The one real downside is that while the first two-thirds are a thrill, the final volume is kind of a slog, as you watch Frankenstein stumble into one bone-headed decision after another.

But with Victorian novels, I wasn’t so sure. Not being as familiar with the period, I read several short Victorian novels to try and narrrow down the options, all in search of the Great (Minor) Victorian novels. Here’s my assessment.

Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë): Not exactly short, but I felt embarrassed I’d never read it, and I wanted to make sure I could speak about it. I don’t think it should be shocking that a 40-year old male didn’t fall head over heels for this novel; I won’t be returning to this one anytime soon.

Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson): Definitely short enough, fun to read, an author who is not as famous as he once was but still popularly known—this work checks a lot of boxes. If anything, it might be too short, with a single plot point that is already so well known that assigning it might be redundant. If it could be assigned in a single day, I’d probably add it.

The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde): About as long as I would want to go, with several passages on aesthetics and morality that would work well in class discussion. Even though he is more famous for his dramatic works, Wilde is still one of the best prose stylists of this period. Also, it would make a great pair with Jekyll and Hyde. I was leaning towards it until I realized that I would either have to omit Wilde’s comedies or end up spending 2 full weeks on the guy, far more than any other single writer. In the end, I’d rather we read one of this plays.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll): I thought it would be good for students to read literary works that they know primarily through adaptations, and this one checks a lot of the boxes above. Could be fun…but I think it’s too idiosyncratic. I have thought about doing a day reading several opening chapters from Victorian children’s literature (Peter Pan, Alice, Wind in the Willows, Water-Babies) just to get a taste of that genre, and that’s probably all of Alice that they really need.

A Study in Scarlet (Arthur Conan Doyle): So this one is really appealing. Introduces the character of Sherlock Holmes, perfectly divided into two parts that could each be assigned for a single day, mysteries always play well—plus, the best part, polygamous Mormons play a key role! (I won’t say how, in case you haven’t read it—which you definitely should). Having students’ faith show up out of the blue in a class that seems far afield from 19th-century Mountain West America is almost too tempting to pass up. And I might still add it. But…it’s still just a mystery story, one students could read on their own, and it would be tough to cut something else out to make room for it. I think it might still make it on the syllabus, but TBD.

Hard Times (Charles Dickens): This is a standard choice for this class: Dickens’s shortest novel, it also captures Victorian topics like factories, unions, utilitarianism, sentimentality, childhood. It checks so many boxes; it’s probably my second-place choice. But even short Dickens is long, and while I liked this novel more than some of his other works, I’m just not enough of a fan to advocate for it.

A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens): This seems like an increasingly popular choice—it’s now included in totality in the Norton Anthology—and I find its appealing for the same reasons that A Study in Scarlet is. But like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the text is not distinct enough from the cultural text to demand its inclusion. Still, it’s hard to imagine no Dickens on the syllabus at all. My inclination is to assign several of his opening chapters (especially Bleak House), which usually stand on their own and exhibit some of most gonzo/Dickensian prose.

The Winner: Silas Marner (George Eliot): This choice was probably inevitable. Even minor Eliot is still superior to almost everything else. Besides fulfilling the basic requirements, I think it’s also the richest of all the works on this list: unlike the caricatures (I mean that with a positive connotation!) of utilitarian thinking that Dickens draws, Marner is more fully realized; his obsession with Mammon proceeds from his disillusionment with religion, not a trait baked into him by Society. Even stock characters like Nancy Lammeter reach unexpected depths in a natural fashion. Plus, like Middlemarch, Silas Marner provides a snapshot of the English countryside that does the work of socio-historical “representation” that’s helpful in this type of course. Finally, it’s just a great read—probably only matched by some of the genre fiction for most engaging. Silas Marner it is.

Addendum: Modernist novels

A Room with a View (E.M. Forster): I mentioned I had read Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread as an undergraduate; writing about this novel, I am reminded that I also read A Passage to India in graduate school. Neither stuck with me; I couldn’t describe a single character or the plot for either one. So I wasn’t expecting much from this one except that, being short, I’d get through it quickly. But it exceeded all expectations. Forster’s style is so finely tuned, working primarily in realism with ever-so-slight surreal and self-referential reflections that leave you unsettled, that create just the right amount of modernist atmosphere. There’s a death that comes early in the novel—not of any named characters, just an event that other characters witness and respond to—that is perfectly wrought. My only hesitation with this one is that it takes place in such rarefied airs, rich Britons trapaising across Europe with nothing to do but insist upon or rebel against social mores. Great writing, but still a little boring.

Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf): While it would be good to have a Modernist novel on the syllabus, I could probably achieve the same effect with less struggle if I just assign the short story “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street.” The same goes for Joyce (“Araby,” “The Dead”) and Katherine Mansfield (“Garden Party”).