Each week for the past two years The Daily Telegraph's literary editor has asked a contributor to name and describe his or her "Book of the Century". . . . [cut -- DT.] The full selection invites comparison with a list drawn up by The Telegraph a century ago; we print both here.
The comparison cannot, however, be exact. All the books chosen in 1899 were fiction -- the paper offered its readers the "100 Best Novels in the World", selected by the editor "with the assistance of Sir Edwin Arnold, K. C. I. E, H. D. Traill, D. C. L, and W. L. Courtney, LL. D."
The modern list includes poetry, plays, history, diaries, philosophy, economics, memoirs, biography and travel writing. It is certainly eclectic, ranging from Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, selected by David Sylvester, to The Wind in the Willows, chosen by John Bayley, and Down with Skool, Wendy Cope's Book of the Century.
The 1899 list, on offer at the time in a cloth-bound edition at nine guineas the lot (easy terms available), is homogeneous, as the modern one is not, not only because it consists entirely of works of fiction but also because the selection was made by a small group. And since they were picking the 100 Best Novels, they were able to include books that nobody might name as a single "Book of the Century" but which many might put in their top 20 or so.
The difference in criteria between the two lists is instructive. That we today have asked our contributors to make personal choices may reflect our less deferential society. We are less willing than the Telegraph editor was in 1899 to deliver "ex cathedra" decrees and offer a list of "best books" that is not only prescriptive but splendid in its self-assurance. That said, one should bear in mind that the 1899 list was offered as a commercial proposition; ours is not.
Some of our contributors have chosen books for their influence, or for the way they have reflected or shaped our times, rather than for their literary merit or entertainment value. Perhaps if the selection committee of 1899 had prepared a list of the best books of their century, rather than of the best fiction, they would have included Hazlitt, Macaulay, Carlyle, Darwin, Arnold, Newman, Pater and Ruskin among their authors. And their list would have been much richer in poetry than ours is, for who can doubt that, say, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Tennyson and Browning all mattered more to 19th-century readers than any poet has to readers in our own century?
The 1899 list was not confined to the 19th century. It included also Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews, Tristram Shandy and two Smollett novels, Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle. They had all enjoyed more than 100 years of life already, and have all a lingering, shadowy existence still.
Few foreigners were then included: only Balzac (Père Goriot), Dumas, Hugo (each with three novels), Eugène Sue and Tolstoy, but with Anna Karenina and not War and Peace. So, no Stendhal, no Flaubert (thought immoral?), no Turgenev, no Dostoevsky. To be fair, Dostoevsky was then available to English readers only at two removes, in translations made from French versions of his novels. But we may fairly guess that he would not in any case have appealed to the editor of The Daily Telegraph then. Scott, with seven books, is the novelist best represented. Dickens has five, Thackeray three and Austen two. In each case, however, the selection will appear strange to modern taste. The Scott list omits Waverley, The Heart of Midlothian and Redgauntlet, which most of his modern admirers would rate among his best. (The Prime Minister's favourite -- Ivanhoe -- is also missing.)
Early Dickens is preferred to the now much more admired late: the two masterpieces, Bleak House and Great Expectations, are absent. The Thackeray trio does not, astonishingly, include Vanity Fair, while Sense and Sensibility would be thought by few today superior to Emma and Persuasion. Some Victorian novelists whose books are still read were not thought worthy of inclusion. George Eliot, admittedly, scrapes in, but with Scenes from Clerical Life, not Middlemarch. There was no place for Emily Brontë (although there is for Charlotte), and Hardy, Henry James and Stevenson are also missing.
There are good novelists who have fallen out of fashion, but whose names at least still signify something: Harrison Ainsworth -- I loved The Tower of London in my youth; Captain Marryat and Charles Reade -- both admired by Orwell, himself in so many ways a man of Victorian tastes; and also Ouida, whose Under Two Flags (included) is not as fine a novel as her The Massarenes.
But many of the names ring only a faint tinkle, and some not even that. Their presence here stands as a reproach to the vanity and aspirations of authors. Hands up, those who have read, or even heard of, The Atonement of Leam Dundas by E. Lynn Linton, or Valentine Vox by Henry Cockton. Do I see no movement? I calculate that about 40 of these novels have vanished so completely that only academics or those in search of an unexplored subject for a PhD thesis will ever now come across them.
Sad, really. Once, evidently, they gave much pleasure, may even have seemed, in that word so carelessly thrown about by us reviewers, "important". And now? "One with Nineveh and Tyre," to quote Kipling, the only writer to appear in both the 1899 list (with Soldiers Three) and the modern one, with Kim, chosen by Barbara Trapido.
Given that each contributor was asked to nominate only one outstanding book, there is a chance that fewer of our selection will be forgotten. But some certainly will. Others may be known by name, but little read. Even now few people pore over Wittgenstein or curl up with Mein Kampf (Tony Benn's choice). Its significance is unquestionable, but already faded. In 100 years it will be meat only for professional historians and the occasional lunatic zealot.
Journalism has a short lifespan. Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, chosen by Michael Shelden, no longer retains urgency. Artemis Cooper's choice -- Rachel Carson's Silent Spring -- which mattered when it appeared, is perhaps commonplace already.
Though humour often dates, I think, and trust, that Wodehouse will last: John Mortimer picked The Inimitable Jeeves. But while, like Philip Ziegler, I delight in 1066 and All That, I wonder what it means, even now, to a generation that learns almost no history before that of the 20th century.
As for the poetry and the fiction, much should fare better. Three people (William Boyd, Penelope Lively and Auberon Waugh) chose books by Nabokov (one his memoir, Speak, Memory). They may be right to bet on his survival; but 100 years ago many would have bet on George Meredith. Who reads him now? Nabokov, like Meredith, is a mannered writer, likely to seem tiresomely so in the future.
Richard Holmes selected Kerouac's On the Road; a tribute to his own youth, one may suppose, rather than to that confused and ultimately empty book's message. It is almost as dated as Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt, although that was written almost 40 years before.
One of the pleasures of the list, though, is the strongly individual and surprising nature of some selections. Penelope Fitzgerald chose A. E. Housman's Last Poems. Sixty years ago Orwell thought Housman finished: "it just tinkles", he wrote. Well, not for Penelope Fitzgerald, and not for me either. Housman lives, no doubt about it.
It is good that David Profumo selected William Trevor's Collected Stories; sad that no one went for V. S. Pritchett's. Two extraordinary travel books are here: Jan Morris�s choice of Charles Doughty's Travels in Arabia Deserta -- nothing else like it in our language -- and Claudio Magris's Danube (Nicholas Shakespeare's selection), an exploration of Mitteleurope.
Some writers here do seem to have their tickets booked for such immortality as books may enjoy: Proust, Joyce, Ford, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Waugh, Powell, Thomas Mann. Faulkner? Perhaps. Lampedusa -- for art and nostalgia? Henry James -- yes, but not perhaps The Golden Bowl, which Grey Gowrie chose. A Passage to India? -- surely not. Sons and Lovers, chosen by Claire Tomalin, may be read as a historical curiosity only. [Leavis, thou shouldst be living at this hour! -- DT.]
There are authors not represented here with a chance of survival: Conrad obviously, Camus, Mauriac, Bassani, Cheever, Simenon, Greene, Kingsley Amis, Angus Wilson, Spark; the list runs on . . . And what of the literature of, for want of a better word, entertainment? Conan Doyle has lasted more than 100 years, Buchan 70 or 80, Chandler 60. Will readers a century hence still delight in Holmes, Hannay and Marlowe? Or will they all be dead as Queen Anne?
Somerset Maugham used to put down those who babbled of undiscovered geniuses -- and console himself? -- with the observation that enduring books are chosen from those that are successes in their own day. On the whole the old boy was right. The 1899 list shows that, but it also shows that even a lasting success in your own century does not guarantee that you will be read in the next.
But what of Maugham himself? At least we can say this: as long as English is the international language, there will be a market for his short stories -- since there is no easier text offering such entertainment.
W. H. Ainsworth
The Tower of London Old St Paul's Windsor Castle Jane Austin Pride & Prejudice Sense & Sensibility Honoré de Balzac Pere Goriot J. M. Barrie A Window in Thrums W. Besant and J . Rice The Golden Butterfly Rolf Boldrewood Robbery Under Arms M. E. Braddon Lady Audley's Secret Charlotte Bronte Jane Eyre Shirley Hall Caine The Deemster Henry Cockton Valentine Vox Wilkie Collins The Woman in White The Moonstone J. Fenimore Cooper The Last of the Mohicans The Pathfinder The Prairie F. Marion Crawford Mr Isaacs Charles Dickens Martin Chuzzlewit Nicholas Nickleby The Old Curiosity Shop Dombey and Son Oliver Twist Conan Doyle The Firm of Girdlestone Alexandre Dumas The Three Musketeers Twenty Years After The Count of Monte Cristo George Eliot Scenes of Clerical Life Henry Fielding Tom Jones Joseph Andrews Mrs Gaskell Mary Barton |
James Grant
The Aide de Camp The Romance of War Bret Harte Gabriel Conroy N. Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter The House of the Seven Gables O. W. Holmes Elsie Venner Anthony Hope The Prisoner of Zenda Thomas Hughes Tom Brown's Schooldays Victor Hugo Les Misérables Toilers of the Sea Notre Dame Charles Kingsley Two Years Ago Alton Locke Hypatia Henry Kingsley The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn Rudyard Kipling Soldiers Three George Lawrence Guy Livingstone Charles Lever Harry Lorrequer Charles O'Malley E. Lynn Linton The Atonement of Leam Dundas Samuel Lover Handy Andy Rory O'More Lord Lytton Last of the Barons Night and Morning Rienzi The Caxtons Captain Marryat The King's Own Peter Simple Jacob Faithful Midshipman Easy George Meredith Diana of the Crossways D. M. Muloch John Halifax, Gentleman Ouida Under Two Flags Charles Reade It is Never Too Late to Mend Peg Woffington and Christie Johnstone Hard Cash |
Capt Mayne Reid
The Headless Horseman Amelie Rives Virginia of Virginia Olive Schreiner The Story of an African Farm Michael Scott Tom Cringle's Log Cruise of the Midge H. Sienkiewicz Quo Vadis? Sir Walter Scott Rob Roy The Bride of Lammermoor Old Mortality Kenilworth Guy Mannering Woodstock The Talisman Frank E. Smedley Frank Fairlegh Tobias Smollett Roderick Random Peregrine Pickle Mrs F. A. Steel On the Face of the Waters Laurence Sterne The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman H. B. Stowe Uncle Tom's Cabin R. S. Surtees Soapey Sponge's Sporting Tour Eugene Sue The Wandering Jew W. M. Thackeray The History of Henry Esmond The Newcomes The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon Count L. Tolstoy Anna Karenina Anthony Trollope Orley Farm Mrs H. Ward Robert Elsmere D. C. L. Warren S. £10,000 a Year E. Wetherell The Wide, Wide World G. J. Whyte-Melville Market Harborough Inside the Bar Mrs Henry Wood East Lynne |
J. R. Ackerley
My Father and Myself (chosen by Francis King) W. H. Auden Collected Poems (P. D. James) J. G. Ballard The Atrocity Exhibition (Michael Moorcock) Gregory Bateson Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Nicholas Mosley) Samuel Beckett Waiting for Godot (Simon Armitage) Saul Bellow Humboldt's Gift (Justin Cartwright) Brigid Brophy Flesh (Shena Mackay) Mikhail Bulgakov The Master and Margarita (Elaine Feinstein) Rachel Carson Silent Spring (Artemis Cooper) C. P. Cavafy Collected Poems (Paul Bailey) Apsley Cherry-Garrard The Worst Journey in the World (Beryl Bainbridge) John Stewart Collis The Worm Forgives the Plough (Angela Huth) Cyril Connolly The Unquiet Grave (Sybille Bedford) Jim Corbett Man-Eaters of Kumaon (Martin Booth) Charles Doughty Travels in Arabia Deserta (Jan Morris) T. S. Eliot The Waste Land (David Lodge) William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury (Joyce Carol Oates) F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby (Anthony Powell) Ford Madox Ford The Good Soldier (William Trevor) E. M. Forster A Passage to India (Anita Desai) Robert Frost Mountain Interval (Paul Muldoon) North of Boston (D. M. Thomas) Kenneth Grahame The Wind in the Willows (John Bayley) Gabriel García Márquez Love in the Time of Cholera (Mary Wesley) One Hundred Years of Solitude (Rose Tremain) Henry Green Pack My Bag: a Self-Portrait (Emma Tennant) Vasily Grossman Life and Fate (Antony Beevor) Thomas Hardy Collected Poems (Dan Jacobson) Ernest Hemingway In Our Time (Allan Massie) Christopher Hibbert Cavaliers & Roundheads (Barbara Cartland) Adolf Hitler Mein Kampf (Tony Benn) Gerard Manley Hopkins Poems (Rachel Billington) |
A. E. Housman
Last Poems (Penelope Fitzgerald) Aldous Huxley Brave New World (J. G. Ballard) Henry James The Golden Bowl (Grey Gowrie) Sebastian Junger The Perfect Storm (Patrick O'Brian) James Joyce Ulysses (Salman Rushdie) Franz Kafka The Trial (Mordecai Richler) Jack Kerouac On the Road (Richard Holmes) J. M. Keynes The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (Roy Jenkins) Rudyard Kipling Kim (Barbara Trapido) Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa The Leopard (Peter Vansittart and William Waldegrave) D. H. Lawrence Sons and Lovers (Claire Tomalin) Halldór Laxness Independent People (Fay Weldon) Munro Leaf The Story of Ferdinand (Victoria Glendinning) Primo Levi If This Is a Man (Marina Warner) Sinclair Lewis Babbitt (Jeremy Lewis) Wyndham Lewis Blasting and Bombadiering: an Autobiography 1914-1926 (George Walden) Hendrik Willem Van Loon Van Loon's Lives (Bernard Levin) Rose Macaulay The Towers of Trebizond (Joanna Trollope) Robert McAlmon and Kay Boyle Being Geniuses Together: 1920-1930 (Carmen Callil) Claudio Magris Danube (Nicholas Shakespeare) William Manchester The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill - Alone 1932-1940 (George V. Higgins) Thomas Mann Joseph and His Brothers (David Malouf) Daphne du Maurier Rebecca (Patrick Gale) Michael Moorcock Jerusalem Commands (Iain Sinclair) Vladimir Nabokov Pale Fire (William Boyd) Speak, Memory (Penelope Lively) Lolita (Auberon Waugh) Flann O'Brien The Third Policeman (A. L. Kennedy) F. S. Oliver The Endless Adventure (W. F. Deedes) George Orwell Animal Farm (Ruth Rendell) |
Homage to Catalonia
(Michael Shelden) Nineteen Eighty-four (Alan Judd and Jane Gardam) Frances Partridge Good Company: Diaries (Susan Hill) Boris Pasternak Doctor Zhivago (Clare Francis) Anthony Powell A Dance to the Music of Time (Hilary Spurling) John Cowper Powys A Glastonbury Romance (Margaret Drabble) Marcel Proust A la recherche du temps perdu (Muriel Spark, Anita Brookner and Doris Lessing) Erich Maria Remarque All Quiet on the Western Front (Dirk Bogarde) Henry Handel Richardson The Getting of Wisdom (Germaine Greer) Salman Rushdie Midnight's Children (Malcolm Bradbury) Bertrand Russell The Problems of Philosophy (Francis Partridge) History of Western Philosophy (John Cole) J. D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye (Christopher Hope) André Schwarz-Bart The Last of the Just (Bernice Rubens) W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman 1066 and All That (Philip Ziegler) Vikram Seth A Suitable Boy (Gerald Kaufman) Mikhail Sholokov Quiet Flows the Don (Hilary Mantel) Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn The Gulag Archipelago (Brian Aldiss) W. Olaf Stapledon Last and First Men (Arthur C. Clarke) Edward Thomas Poems (Andrew Motion) William Trevor The Collected Stories (David Profumo) Barbara Tuchman The Proud Tower (John le Carré) John Updike Pigeon Feathers (Carol Shields) Kurt Vonnegut Breakfast of Champions (Maggie Gee) Sylvia Townsend Warner Mr Fortune's Maggot (Michael Holroyd) Evelyn Waugh The Loved One (Alice Thomas Ellis) H. G. Wells The History of Mr Polly (Michael Foot) Geoffrey Willans Down with Skool (Wendy Cope) Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire (Christopher Bigsby) Chester Wilmot The Struggle for Europe (John Keegan) Ludwig Wittgenstein Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (David Sylvester) P. G. Wodehouse The Inimitable Jeeves (John Mortimer) Virginia Woolf The Diary of Virginia Woolf (Isabel Colegate) W. B. Yeats The Tower (Barry Unsworth) |
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