He reads the Agricultural Reports, and some other books – The Best Books of 1815

We are looking at an 1815 drawing by Hokusai that I copied from p. 194 of Hokusai by Gian Carlo Calza (1999, English translation 2003).  Calza suggests that the scene depicts the Azumaya bookshop.  The owner is on the right, a delivery boy with a bundle of text on the left, and a customer in the middle, choosing a book.

What book do you think he will buy?  Will it be one of the best Japanese books of 1815?  What were the best Japanese books of 1815?

I have picked up from what I have read about Japanese literary history that the 19th century is not thought of as a good period, a helpful judgment in that it gives me a good excuse to stay ignorant.  I enjoy playing with Best Books posts at the end of each year, but they are mementoes of my ignorance.

How many books from 1815 have I read?  I believe three, or perhaps only two, but I did read those books in particular because a long line of readers have kept them alive.  If not the best, they are the survivors.

In December 1815, Walter Scott would have topped the Best Books lists with his second novel, Guy Mannering.  Well, not Scott, but rather “The Author of Waverley.”  I do not know how high The Author of Pride and Prejudice &c. &c. would have ranked with Emma, but she was becoming pretty well-known by this point.

One of these novels is currently among the most popular in the world, while the other has retreated to graduate school, although Scott Bailey read it last spring and made it sound pretty good, if “very plotty.”  I’ve read seven Scott novels, but not Guy Mannering; what do I know.

The big celebrity bestseller of the year was Lord Byron’s Hebrew Melodies, a collection of song settings of original lyrics published in an expensive edition.  Byron was so popular that he could immediately sell ten thousand copies of even this book.  Current selections of Byron, even fat Penguins and Oxfords, come close to ignoring Hebrew Melodies, but it is the home of “She Walks in Beauty.”

It’s the next year, 1816, when miracles start to happen in English poetry.

I know of two great books in German literature from 1815: E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Devil’s Elixir (or just its first half – I never got this straight), and Part II of the first version of Grimm’s Children’s and Household Tales (Part I is from 1812).

The Hoffmann novel is great fun and a standard classic for German-language readers.  No idea why it has never done much in English.  Too weird?

The Grimm brothers’ book is of the highest importance.  Which book has generated the most additional books, Emma or Grimm’s’ Fairy Tales?  This second volume has “Hans My Hedgehog,” “The Goose Girl,” “The Golden Key” with its unending ending.  I have read the complete Fairy Tales, but not in this early form.  That would be worth doing someday.

So, within the bounds of my ignorance, then: after two hundred years of erosion, three great books left.

The title is borrowed from Emma.

The Best Books of the Year: 1812 - The blight of Life - the demon Thought.

The dying light of the autumnal sunset reminds me that it is the season for Best Books of the Year lists, those jolly collections of well-meaning ephemera.

1812 featured two big, lasting literary events.

The most dramatic was the birth of Byronism with the publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, a Romaunt; and Other Poems.  George Gordon had published a couple of earlier books, but it was Childe Harold that made him an international celebrity (“I awoke one morning and found myself famous”):

What exile from himself can flee?
   To zones, though more and more remote,
Still, still pursues, where'er I be,
   The blight of life – the demon Thought.

Perhaps Byron’s fatalistic attitudinizing has become the poem's greatest legacy, but the poem itself is masterful and the book surrounding the poem would have served to undercut the facile Byronism if the facile Byronists had bothered to read it, with its lengthy footnotes and appendices on Albanian linguistics, classical references, and travel writing trivia:

As a specimen of the Albanian or Arnaout dialect of the Illyric, I here insert two of their most popular choral songs, which are generally chaunted in dancing by men or women indiscriminately.

Childe Harold would surprise people who only know Byron by reputation.

The second event was the publication of the first volume of the first edition of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s Kinder- und Hausmärchen.  Now it is a truism that the original versions of the Fairy Tales, more violent and weird than later redactions, are worth seeking out.  They are.

Funny how both of these landmarks are partial and mutable texts.  Not only are they both incomplete, with more fairy tales and cantos of “Childe Harold” to follow in a few years, but they would both be published in all sorts of configurations.  Almost no one reads the original books – I haven’t.

What else survives from 1812?  Not much, honestly.  Two hundred years is a long time.  Johann David Wyss’s Swiss Family Robinson, the second volume of Goethe’s memoir Poetry and Truth, Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee.  I have only read the Goethe.  How is The Absentee?

I am sure I have read George Crabbe’s Tales, a collection of narrative poems along the lines of his 1810 masterpiece “Peter Grimes,” but heck if I remember it.  My fault or Crabbe’s?  Either way, I can hardly pretend that this is a living book in 2012.

I wonder what I have missed?

John Constable’s 1812 “Autumnal Sunset” is owned by the Victoria and Albert Museum.  To see it, just go to the Prints & Drawings Study Room, room WS and paw through case R, shelf 29, box L.