Whirligigs of time and taste
Fascinating list of 100 Best Novelz EVAH as published in 1898 in The Bookman by litcritic Clement Shorter.
And apart from the usual thing with such lists that it includes significant numbers of works which have not stood up to the test of time, there are several other interesting points about it.
The earlier entries are pretty much Ye Canonical Founders of Ye Novel, although I was a bit surprised to see The Holy War rather than Pilgrim's Progress, but I suppose one should not judge standard critical opinion of Bunyan's works on Louisa May Alcott's invocation of PP in LW.
He's pretty well up in Euro-lit, and also what was happening across the Atlantic - though no Mark Twain, WTF?!
Do we detect something of an inclination towards Scots authors? though also a number of works from Ireland. Both of these doubtless with extensive passages of phonetically rendered quaint local dialect.
Some of his picks for Canonical Writers are kind of weird: Silas Marner rather than Middlemarch? again, WTF, not to mention Ruth rather than e.g. North and South.
A number of writers one has heard of, whom nobody reads anymore, or who exist as an Awful Warning (Bulwer-Lytton, e.g.).
I have heard of Valentine Vox because Robertson Davies wrote about it somewhere as an example of a bad book which was once immensely popular, and why certain works become popular at particular times.
We are rather impressed that Mr Shorter includes a very large number of writers of what he may have referred to as the gentler or the fair sex. While he seems to have enjoyed swashbuckling adventure, he also seems to have had some taste for weepy sentimentality, if not the sensationalist melodrama of e.g. Lady Audley's Secret. Though apparently not one of the manly Victorians sobbing into his beard over The Heir of Redcliffe.
I bet quite a lot of those works are now available via Project Gutenberg.
It's a very eclectic list, go Clement Shorter, even if I don't concur with all of his choices
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