Some 19th Century perspectives on (mostly) 19th Century literature

September 16, 2017 2:27 AM

Reviews of Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Moby-Dick, Huckleberry Finn, and Dracula show the sometimes surprising reactions of 19th C. readers to 19th C. literature in English. In a letter from 1888, Nietzsche points toward the sometimes surprising coverage of another source, suggesting that The Main Developments in Literature during the Nineteenth Century by the Danish critic Georg Brandes "is still today the best Kulturbuch in German on this big subject": v. 1; v. 2; v. 3; v. 4; v. 5; v. 6.

The Main Developments in Literature during the Nineteenth Century is also on Will Durant's One Hundred Best Books for an Education (ca. 1929). Many texts that Brandes discusses are available online in English.

• Volume 1: The Emigrant Literature
• François-René de Chateaubriand: Atala, René, and Memoirs from Beyond the Grave v.1, v.2, v.3, v.4, v.5, and v.6
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Julie, or the New Heloise v.1, v.2, v.3, and v.4
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther
• Étienne Pivert de Sénancour: Obermann
• Charles Nodier: Le peintre de Saltzbourg may only be available in French but a story from Contes fantastiques is available for checkout
• Benjamin Constant de Rebecque: Adolphe
• Madame de Staël: Delphine, Corinne, Ten Years' Exile, and Germany
• Prosper de Barante: A View of French Literature During the Eighteenth Century

• Volume 2: The Romantic School in Germany
• Friedrich Schiller: The Robbers and Wilhelm Tell
• Friedrich Hölderlin: Hyperion
• Ludwig Tieck: William Lovell parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 and Puss in Boots
• Jean Paul: Titan
• Friedrich Schlegel: Lucinde
• Percy Bysshe Shelley: Queen Mab
• Novalis: Hymns to the Night
• E.T.A. Hoffmann: The Devil's Elixir parts 1 and 2 and Weird Tales parts 1 and 2 (The Best Tales of Hoffmann is also available for checkout)
• Adelbert von Chamisso: Peter Schlemihl and The Marvellous History of the Shadowless Man
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and Wilhelm Meister's Travels
• Joseph, Baron von Eichendorff: The Life of a Good-For-Nothing
• Ludwig Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano: selections from The Boy's Magic Horn
• Clemens Brentano: Honor; or, The Story of the Brave Caspar and the Fair Annerl
• Heinrich von Kleist: The Prince of Homburg is available for checkout in three editions, including a collection along with Amphitryon
• Zacharias Werner: The Templars in Cyprus and The Brethren of the Cross
• Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué: Undine, The Magic Ring, and Thiodolf the Icelander

• Volume 3: The Reaction in France
• François-René de Chateaubriand: The Genius of Christianity, Travels to Jerusalem and the Holy Land, through Egypt, and The Martyrs
• Joseph de Maistre: Considerations on France and Letters on the Spanish Inquisition
• Alphonse de Lamartine: "The Lake," Raphael, and Graziella
• Victor Hugo: selections from Odes and Ballads
• Alfred de Vigny: Cinq Mars

• Volume 4: Naturalism in England
• Percy Bysshe Shelley: Julian and Maddalo, Hellas: A Lyrical Drama, The Revolt of Islam, Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci, The Witch of Atlas, "Stanzas Written in Dejection, near Naples," "The Cloud," The Triumph of Life, "Ode to the West Wind," Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude, The Masque of Anarchy, Rosalind and Helen, Oedipus Tyrannus, or Swellfoot the Tyrant, Peter Bell the Third, etc.
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey: The Fall of Robespierre
• William Wordsworth: Poems Dedicated to National Independence and Liberty, The White Doe of Rylstone, "Influence of Natural Objects in Calling Forth and Strengthening the Imagination in Boyhood and Early Youth," etc.
• William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Christabel, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, "Hymn Before Sunrise, in the Vale of Chamouni," "France: An Ode," etc.
• Robert Southey: Wat Tyler, Joan of Arc, The Curse of Kehama, and Thalaba the Destroyer
• Walter Scott: Rob Roy, The Heart of Midlothian, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion, A Tale of Flodden Field, The Lady of the Lake, Waverley, Quentin Durward, etc.
• Lord Byron: Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Lara, "The Dream," Hours of Idleness, "To Florence," "Lines Written in an Album, at Malta," "Stanzas Composed during a Thunderstorm," "Stanzas Written in Passing the Ambracian Gulf," Don Juan, "The Curse of Minerva," The Siege of Corinth and Parisina, Hints from Horace, The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, "Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte," Manfred, Cain, Marino Faliero, "Ode on Venice," Beppo, The Prophecy of Dante, Sardanapalus and The Two Foscari, The Prisoner of Chillon, Heaven and Earth and Age of Bronze, The Vision of Judgment, etc.
• John Keats: Hyperion, "Sleep and Poetry," "Ode to a Nightingale," Endymion, Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil, Epistles, etc.
• Thomas Moore: Lalla Rookh (especially "The Fire-Worshippers"), Irish Melodies, The Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Little, Esq., "A Canadian Boat-Song," Fables for the Holy Alliance, The Fudge Family in Paris, etc.
• Thomas Campbell: "The Battle of the Baltic," "Ye Mariners of England," The Pleasures of Hope, "Stanzas on the Battle of Navarino," "Lines on Poland," "Hallowed Ground," etc.
• Walter Savage Landor: Imaginary Conversations, Hellenics, Pericles and Aspasia, Gebir and Count Julian
• Lady Caroline Lamb: Glenarvon

• Volume 5: The Romantic School in France
• Victor Hugo: Hernani, Notre-Dame de Paris, selections from Les Orientales, The Burgraves, Lucretia Borgia, and Mary Tudor
• Honoré de Balzac: The Chouans, Beatrix, The Magic Skin, "The Fair Imperia," "The Conscript," Domestic Peace, A Woman of Thirty, Eugenie Grandet, "Facino Cane," Father Goriot, Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau, Cousin Betty, Lost Illusions, Seraphita, Modeste Mignon, Louis Lambert, The Lily of the Valley, Letters of Two Brides, etc.
• André Chénier: miscellaneous poems in A Memorial
• Alfred de Musset: Emmeline, Carmosine, The Confession of a Child of the Century, The Chandler, Rolla, The Follies of Marianne, A Caprice and Bettine, The Two Mistresses, etc.
• George Sand: Consuelo volumes 1, 2, 3, and 4, The Devil's Pool, Letters of a Traveller, Jacques, Teverino, Indiana, Mauprat, and (available for checkout) Lélia
• Stendhal: The Charterhouse of Parma, The Red and the Black, and On Love
• Prosper Mérimée: Collected Writings / Stories including "The Etruscan Vase," Carmen, Letters to an Unknown, Colomba, "How the Redoubt Was Taken," A Chronicle of the Reign of Charles IX, "The Blue Room," "The Venus of Ille," Arsène Guillot, "Lokis," and The Double Mistake
• Théophile Gautier: Collected Writings including Mademoiselle de Maupin, Fortunio, The Grotesques, and Captain Fracasse
• Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve: Selections from Poésies de Joseph Delorme
• Alexandre Dumas: Gabrielle de Belle Isle, A Marriage of Convenience, period: Louis XV, and The King's Gallant, or King Henry III and His Court (novelization)
• Alphonse de Lamartine: History of the Girondists, volumes 1, 2, and 3
• Philothée O'Neddy: "Fanaticism" from Feu et flamme

• Volume 6: Young Germany
• Ludwig Börne: Briefe aus Paris seems unavailable in English, but the short essay "How to Become an Original Writer in Three Days" has been translated
• Heinrich Heine: Poems, Poems and Ballads, Prose Writings, etc.
• Karl Immermann: The Oberhof
• Karl Gutzkow: Sword and Queue (a.k.a. "Sword and Pigtail" in Brandes)
• David Strauss: The Life of Jesus (translated by George Eliot)
• Bettina von Arnim: Goethe's Correspondence with a Child
• Charlotte Stieglitz: from Gedichte und Briefe the one charming poem (unmentioned by Brandes) "If only I were a whale"
• Eduard Mörike: Poems

posted by Wobbuffet (24 comments total)

And I thought I was done with reading. Guess not.

Thank you for this wonderful post!
posted by shoesfullofdust at 4:03 AM on September 16, 2017

Holy crow, this is great.
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 5:15 AM on September 16, 2017

It is strange how the novels "Frankenstein" and "Dracula" have worked their way onto the classics shelf. I imagine its simply because the titles have become well known through their movie adaptations.

Neither "Frankenstein" or "Dracula" is particularly deep, well-written or entertaining (or for that matter, scary or horrifying). They are not even enjoyably trashy. If not for the fact that their public domain status made them cheaply available for film adaptation, both would have been rightly consigned to the same obscurity enjoyed by many of the works linked to in this post.

"Frank" and "Drac" don't deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as "Wuthering Heights", "Huckleberry Finn" or "Moby Dick", and the opportunity cost of reading them is the time you could have spent reading Trollope, Hawthorne or Stevenson (to name a few).
posted by Modest House at 5:29 AM on September 16, 2017 [1 favorite]

Neither "Frankenstein" or "Dracula" is particularly deep, well-written or entertaining (or for that matter, scary or horrifying).

“Oh is that what we're going to do today?”

Frankenstein is one of the most fascinating texts from the Romantic period and it touches on so many interesting subjects: nature vs nurture, science, faith, creation, sexual repression, Victorian ambition, class, and so much more. Maybe I'm a bit bias because I love that period of writing and this novel is a favourite. You're more than welcome to your opinion, but I find your comments on Frankenstein to be a bit reductive.
posted by Fizz at 5:39 AM on September 16, 2017 [18 favorites]

So, when is the midterm? I don't see it on this syllabus.
posted by briank at 6:01 AM on September 16, 2017 [9 favorites]

Frankenstein does have an interesting literary-historical origin, it's by a woman author (something we don't canonize enough), and it's not a bad book at all! It could stand to use the big words a little less (my son counted the number of times "countenance" was used instead of face when he read it), but it remains a decent read, if not quite Moby Dick material.

Then again, Moby Dick is a deeply weird book. All the footnoting and oddness of structure that David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers and that ilk is just cribbing off Moby Dick. It's hilarious to read those reviews, because--good and bad--they are so understandable. You can make a lot of complaints about the book that are totally justified: insane structure and textual experimentation, too much information about whales and whaling, the characters and plot kind of disappear for long stretches of the book, etc. But if you give yourself over to it instead of complaining about it, the mad English (as one reviewer puts it) becomes poetry, philosophy, satire, everything you could ask for in literature stuffed into one book (even fart jokes!) As well known as it is, I feel it's underappreciated. It was multimedia before multimedia. It was postmodern before postmodern. It's not easy to read, and it's even harder to convince someone else to read it. But for crying out loud, if you can read George RR Martin, you can read Moby fucking Dick, and you won't have to wait for the sequels.
posted by rikschell at 6:01 AM on September 16, 2017 [16 favorites]

Brandes' English canon is pretty conventional for the late 19th c., with Southey, Moore, and Campbell, in particular, still qualifying as major poets. I was wondering how Glenarvon got in there, but see that he was thinking primarily of the Byron connection.

Frankenstein's diffusion into pop culture happened quite quickly--as William St. Clair points out, the original and revised editions of the novel rapidly went out of print (and stayed there) until the late nineteenth century, so that people who "knew" the novel actually were much more likely to be acquainted with either a) a chapbook adaptation or b) a play.

Personally, I've always been fond of this well-known review of Walter Scott's fiction, which is remarkably forthright in its assessment of Scott's strengths and weaknesses. Of course, it's also (mostly*) by Scott, which is a little, er, awkward.

*--Three people were involved, with Scott as the primary author (see here, note on Article 8).
posted by thomas j wise at 6:48 AM on September 16, 2017 [3 favorites]

If not for the fact that their public domain status made them cheaply available for film adaptation, both would have been rightly consigned to the same obscurity enjoyed by many of the works linked to in this post.

Do these other works not have the same public domain status?
posted by Segundus at 6:52 AM on September 16, 2017 [1 favorite]

Reading the Dracula reviews I was struck by the one that was amazed how medieval superstition was integrated into modern times. Basically, he viewed it as urban fantasy, old folk tales in a modern setting. I never considered that the elements might have seemed incongruous to a contemporary reader.

To add my two cents on the merits: Dracula is not deep but thought it was a great enjoyable adventure story. Better than maybe 75% of vampire movies and probably 100% of Dracula movies. I didn't like Frankenstein (too much angst and guilt) but I'm the outlier among people I know who've read it.
posted by mark k at 8:50 AM on September 16, 2017 [5 favorites]

*works up AskMe about how to treat brain fever*
posted by thelonius at 9:24 AM on September 16, 2017

Dracula is in its own way a feminist novel, when you consider what bumbling idiots the male characters - all of them, Dr. Seward, Dr. van Helsing, Harker, the rejected suitors - are, compared to Mina Harker. Alan Moore knows.
posted by thelonius at 9:27 AM on September 16, 2017 [3 favorites]

drooling here. thank you for this post!
posted by supermedusa at 10:55 AM on September 16, 2017

Terrific aggregation in this post.

Ah, I used to love teaching contemporary reviews in lit classes. They usually led in different directions than students were seeing.
posted by doctornemo at 11:59 AM on September 16, 2017 [2 favorites]

Reading some of the contemporary Huck Finn reviews, it was interesting how several them pointed it out as a historical piece, how well it captured a certain time in the 'old Southwest' of, for them, 40 years ago. Which is an aspect that I had really thought about, since time had collapsed the 19th century into a single aspect by the time I read it.
posted by tavella at 12:17 PM on September 16, 2017 [3 favorites]

Also, not directly related, but when I was looking up the publication date for Huck Finn, I found this in the wikipedia article:

In one instance, the controversy caused a drastically altered interpretation of the text: in 1955, CBS tried to avoid controversial material in a televised version of the book, by deleting all mention of slavery and omitting the character of Jim entirely.

The mind boggles.
posted by tavella at 12:20 PM on September 16, 2017 [1 favorite]

As someone who has read a lot of the classics and then veered off for a couple years to read Gothic fiction, there's no doubt a lot of it is horrible but fascinating. You have to ask "why was it written?" and "Why was it read?". "Varney the Vampire" is awful as literature, but thought-provoking all the same.

I look forward to reading through these.
posted by acrasis at 12:44 PM on September 16, 2017 [2 favorites]

in 1955, CBS tried to avoid controversial material in a televised version of the book, by deleting all mention of slavery and omitting the character of Jim entirely

So, like "Garfield without Garfield", except Garfield is slavery.
posted by Huffy Puffy at 3:44 PM on September 16, 2017 [3 favorites]

Dracula is in its own way a feminist novel, when you consider what bumbling idiots the male characters - all of them, Dr. Seward, Dr. van Helsing, Harker, the rejected suitors - are, compared to Mina Harker. Alan Moore knows.

I'm having trouble remembering much bumbling or idiocy among any of the protagonists in the book, male or female. In fact, the two reactions I had when I finally read the original in my 30's where how different it was than most adaptions in making the various narrators traditionally heroic (albeit still two-dimensional) and that Dracula was a monster, without barely a hint of romantic brooding.
posted by mark k at 4:19 PM on September 16, 2017

Too much information about the whales.
posted by Devils Rancher at 9:58 PM on September 16, 2017

Dracula was also the first epistolary novel, if my memory serves me correctly. It's also basically a CSI-urban fantasy sort of deal - lots of cutting edge technology used against old monsters, as tavella pointed out. It really was a novel and new piece of writing, we've just forgotten its context.

This is a great post, Wobbuffet, thank you!
posted by Jilder at 7:28 AM on September 17, 2017 [1 favorite]

The critical introduction to my paperback edition of Dracula says it's all about Irish immigration. A quick look at Wikipedia shows that there is little consensus:

In the last several decades, literary and cultural scholars have offered diverse analyses of Stoker's novel and the character of Count Dracula. C.F. Bentley reads Dracula as an embodiment of the Freudian id.[42] Carol A. Senf reads the novel as a response to the powerful New Woman,[43] while Christopher Craft sees Dracula as embodying latent homosexuality and sees the text as an example of a 'characteristic, if hyperbolic instance of Victorian anxiety over the potential fluidity of gender roles'.[44] Stephen D. Arata interprets the events of the novel as anxiety over colonialism and racial mixing,[45] and Talia Schaffer construes the novel as an indictment of Oscar Wilde.[46] Franco Moretti reads Dracula as a figure of monopoly capitalism,[47] though Hollis Robbins suggests that Dracula's inability to participate in social conventions and to forge business partnerships undermines his power.[48][49] Richard Noll reads Dracula within the context of 19th century alienism (psychiatry) and asylum medicine.[50] D. Bruno Starrs understands the novel to be a pro-Catholic pamphlet promoting proselytization.[51]

It's definitely not about vampires though!
posted by thelonius at 8:38 AM on September 17, 2017 [1 favorite]

I'm having trouble remembering much bumbling or idiocy among any of the protagonists in the book, male or female.

Defending against mysterious nocturnal attacks by isolating the women in bedrooms opposite the lunatic asylum, for one.
posted by thelonius at 8:40 AM on September 17, 2017

No wait, it was IN the asylum, opposite the house that Dracula just bought.
posted by thelonius at 8:44 AM on September 17, 2017

Dracula was also the first epistolary novel, if my memory serves me correctly.

That piece of trivia got misfiled in your brain, some of the earliest novels in English were epistolary novels (e.g., Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa) and it was a big thing in the Romantic period too.
posted by mark k at 9:26 AM on September 17, 2017