The Best Books of 1813 - who am I kidding, the Best Book - I cannot prate in puling strain

“Frosty Morning” by J. M. W. Turner, courtesy of Tate Britain.  Turner liked it so much he never sold it, for which I do not blame him.  It was completed in 1813, a sparse year for surviving literature.

Only one lasting novel, for example, but what an example.  Pride and Prejudice has become an inescapable book, even a best-selling book.  I wish I could remember where I read that – you have to add all of the different editions together to get it onto the bestseller list, but then Jane Austen would be side by side with James Patterson.

It was not always so.  Pride and Prejudice was never anything like a forgotten book, but it was not so gigantic until recently, surprisingly recently.  I turn to my favorite problematic but simple tool for quantifying status, the MLA International Bibliography, a database of articles, monographs, etc. reaching back to 1947, where I count 505 articles, etc. with a Pride and Prejudice tag.  The distribution by decade, roughly:

1947-1973: 13
1974-1983: 32
1984-1993: 112
1994-2003: 116
2004-2013: 232

In other words, a full 45% of the academic articles, etc. about Pride and Prejudice have been published within the last ten years!  That is amazing.  Austen was not always so ubiquitous.

My guess would have been that the 1980s Austen revival was owed to feminist criticism, and perhaps that was the first spark, but a glance through the article titles from the 1980s suggests that all kinds of approaches were making good use of Pride and Prejudice.  It is such a rich text.

1813 was an important year for English poetry.  Percy Shelley’s first major work, the allegorical radical fairy poem “Queen Mab,” was published to no interest; a decade later it had become a central text for English laboring-class reformers and revolutionaries, a story almost as surprising as the long, slow rise of Pride and Prejudice.  I am afraid, or perhaps happy to say, the contents of the poem itself have slipped from my memory.

Lord Byron had hit the jackpot in 1812 with the first parts of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which he followed in 1813 with two long Orientalist romances mostly in rhyming couplets, The Giaour: A Fragment of a Turkish Tale and The Bride of Abydos: A Turkish Tale, both immensely popular, both pretty silly, and both quite a lot of fun for readers who enjoy the poetry (if not, they are unreadable).  It is all just an excuse for Byron to show off his gift:

‘The cold in clime are cold in blood,
    Their love can scarce deserve the name;
But mine was like the lava flood
    That boils in Ætna’s breast of flame.
I cannot prate in puling strain
Of ladye-love, and beauty’s chain:
If changing cheek, and scorching vein,
Lips taught to writhe, but not complain,
If bursting heart, and madd’ning brain,
And daring deed, and vengeful steel,
And all that I have felt, and feel,
Betoken love –  that love was mine,
And shown by many a bitter sign.’  (“The Giaour,” 1099-1111)

In some sense I have still only come up with a single book for 1813.  What was going on in literature outside of England?  I do not know.  A number of European countries were understandably preoccupied.  Spain was being destroyed in the Peninsular War, yet Francisco Goya was creating the etchings that make up The Disasters of War and paintings like The Madhouse (none of these have firm dates).

It seems I often turn to Goya in these Best of 181X posts.  Well, of course.

The Best Books of the Year - 1810 - Horrors that Demons might be proud to raise

I have to start my year end roundup a bit earlier than I would like this year. Calendar, vacation, etc.

1810 was a thin year for great literature, quantitatively.  I count two books and a play that I know are worth reading, and scrounged up a couple more possibilities.

The star of the year is Heinrich von Kleist.  The play Prince Friedrich von Homburg, and his book of stories – “The Earthquake in Chile,” “The Marquise of O-,“ and “Michael Kohlhaas” – that’s the year’s bounty.  The play is the one where the characters, including the title’s prince, are constantly fainting.  Is that meant to be funny?  I think so.  Hard to tell, sometimes, with slippery Kleist.  In the stories, it’s the reader who is constantly fainting at the sight of blood, horror, and general moral outrage.  Fantastic stuff.

What else is going on in the world of literature?  Very little that has survived.  In English poetry, you can read Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake or the very young Shelley’s self-published juvenilia and tell me how they are.  I’ll read the one book I know is outstanding, The Borough by George Crabbe, a poetic tour of a country district, surprisingly weird and powerful.  Crabbe seems to have lost his audience.  I have theories, but who wants to hear them.  The Borough has survived because of the “Peter Grimes” canto, the source of the Britten opera:

    Cold nervous Tremblings shook his sturdy Frame,
And strange Disease - he couldn't say the name;
Wild were his Dreams, and oft he rose in fright,
Waked by his view of Horrors in the Night, -
Horrors that would the sternest Minds amaze,
Horrors that Demons might be proud to raise:
And though he felt forsaken, grieved at heart,
To think he lived from all Mankind apart;
Yet, if a Man approach'd, in terrors he would start.

Let’s see.  Madame de Staël’s On Germany, which I have not read.  Goethe’s short play Pandora, which I have read, although I remember nothing about it.  There must be more.  One source for these year-end posts is the handy year-in-literature Wikipedia pages.  Here is 1810 (and a separate page for poetry). What have I missed?  The Mysteries of Ferney Castle by Robert Huish?  Please note the usual Wikipedia limitations – no hint of Kleist, easily the Writer of the Year, on that page.*

There’s one more candidate for Book of the Year, although it’s not quite literature, and it was not actually published until 1863.  Francisco Goya began his Disasters of War etchings, a response to the horrors of the Peninsular War, in 1810.  A relevant example, “Against the Common Good,” is above.  I’ve said this before, but I’m amazed anyone was able to create anything during this period of destruction.  The work of Kleist, Crabbe, Goya – what extraordinary things to come from such a terrible time.

* My Kleist dates comes from the chronological tables in Robertson, J. G., A History of German Literature, Sixth Edition, ed. Dorothy Reich (1970), William Blackwood: Edinburgh, p. 693.

Best Books of the Year - 1818

1818 was one of the greatest literary years of the 19th century. It saw the publication of two Jane Austen novels, Persuasion and, sadly, Northanger Abbey (sad, of course, because it was only published as a result of Austen's death). Walter Scott published The Heart of Midlothian, one of his best books. Mary Shelley published Frankenstein, a novel so rich in ideas that I forgive its infelicities. Finally, Thomas Love Peacock wrote Nightmare Abbey, which is not what it sounds like.

Meanwhile, Byron, Keats, and P. Shelley were all in peak form. Byron published the Venetian adultery comedy Beppo, not a favorite of mine but enjoyable for its light touch. Keats published the long, mythical Endymion, very far from a favorite. For P. Shelley, it was a highly productive year, but for most of us only one poem will really matter: "Ozymandias."

It's funny how central Percy Shelley is here. Besides his wife's book, Byron and Keats and Peacock were close friends, and Shelley is even the central character of Nightmare Abbey, a tiny little novel-like thing that should be read more:

"When Scythrop [that's Shelley] grew up, he was sent, as usual, to a public school, where a little learning was painfully beaten into him, and from thence to the university, where it was carefully taken out of him; and he was sent home like a well-threshed ear of corn, with nothing in his head: having finished his education to the high satisfaction of the master and fellows of his college, who had, in testimony of their approbation, presented him with a silver fish-slice, on which his name figured at the head of a laudatory inscription in some semi-barbarous dialect of Anglo-Saxonized Latin." (Ch. 1)

So that's five novels with some life today. Two (Persuasion and Frankenstein) are among the best of the century. Two, by coincidence, are Gothic parodies with "Abbey" in the title; one of these is sadly neglected. And major work by three great poets. This did not happen most years. Note that if magazines back then published "Best Books of the Year" lists, the only one I'm sure would make the lists is Walter Scott's.

This has all been awfully British. What else was going on? In America and pre-Romantic France I will go ahead and say, confidently, nothing. In the German principalities, there was quite a lot, although Goethe and E. T. A. Hoffmann seem to be between books this year. Either one may have been, and probably was, publishing in journals. Giacomo Leopardi was writing his Cantos and essays at this time, I am sure, but I have never sorted out his confusing chronology.

Still, there aren't that many years in the 19th century which contain five still-read novels from all of Europe, so I don't fell too bad about ending my researches here.

Nevertheless, I put an engraving of Francisco Goya's 1818 The Giant up top, just to make the year a little less British.