The Slippery Subject of Best Book Lists

The Guardian recently tested the Pavlovian conditioning of the literary corners of the Internet by releasing a list of the 100 Best Novels compiled from the ten-best lists solicited from 172 novelists, historians, memoirists, and critics. Social media immediately overflowed with predictable reactions: Why novel X? Why not novel Y? Why such lists are pointless. Why such lists are useful. Who decides what’s best, anyway?

“Never has such a list been more needed,” asserts The Guardian, performing the literary equivalent of wrapping oneself in the flag. “Dwindling attention spans, screens, Netflix; whatever we blame, reading for pleasure is a dying pursuit.” Yes, and an arbitrary list of 100 books will fix all that.

There are enough folks broadcasting their views on The Guardian’s list that there’s no need to add mine, except to observe that none of the 100 can be considered neglected from the simple fact that they’re all in print. Instead, publication of the list spurred me to take a little trip into the past, into a few of the lists of best books that have been fodder for publishers, critics, and readers since at least the mid-19th century.

One of the earliest examples comes from a talk that Sir John Lubbock gave at the Working Men’s College in London in 1886. Published the following year in The Pleasures of Life, Lubbock’s list produced the Victorian equivalent to today’s social media posts: angry letters to the editors of the Pall Mall Gazette and other newspapers. “A railway ride through human culture, with ten minutes’ stoppage at all the principal stations, is not what the judicious philosopher and friend will recommend to the British workman or anyone else.” The Atlanta Constitution warned that following a course of reading Sir John’s recommended texts would only produce a prig: “What a snob is in the world of fashion and in society: and it is very difficult to say which of the two is the more disagreeable and unhappy.”

Yet Lubbock’s list might surprise many of today’s readers with its range and relative lack of cultural myopia. Western epic poetry, for example — Homer, Virgil, the Nibelungenlied, Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur — is followed by Eastern epic poetry: the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Shahnameh, and the “Sheking” (the Shijing or The Classic of Poetry, a collection of ancient Chinese poetry. After the classical era, however, Lubbock’s attention is drawn almost exclusively to works in English, and his choices reflect some of the characteristic preferences of his time. Among the few novels on his list are Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield rather than Tristram Shandy or Tom Jones; Edward Bulwer-Lytton rather than Dickens or Jane Austen.

Bulwer-Lytton’s star has fallen so far in the near-140 years since Lubbock’s talk that his work has become synonymous with bad writing, helped by 40-plus years of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which invited entrants “to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels,” inspired by that of Bulwer-Lytton’s 1830 novel, Paul Clifford: “It was a dark and stormy night.” But at the start of the 20th century, Bulwer-Lytton was still seen as one of the great novelists of his time. The shelves of the Mansfield Library at the University of Montana, for example, display not one, not two, but three deluxe sets of his works produced between 1890 and 1910.

I enjoy browsing in the Mansfield Library in part because its collection shows few signs of the culling that’s the necessary evil for most libraries. Every era suffers from some form of cultural myopia, and one of the causes of ours is the inability of library shelf space to keep up with the ever-increasing number of books being published. The fact few if any patrons have borrowed their volumes in decades have led many libraries to discard beautiful collected editions of the works of such once-popular and well-regarded authors as Bulwer-Lytton, Luise Mühlbach, Paul de Kock, Georg Ebers, Pierre Loti, Ouida, and Erckmann-Chatrian.

At the turn of the 20th Century, publishers flooded the market with large and usually cheap sets of the works of authors from Shakespeare and Dickens to … well, all of the above-named and more. Appleton, for example, published an 18-volume edition of the historical romances of Luise Mühlbach, which could be picked up on subscription for $4.00 a volume — or for slightly more than $1 a volume if you were prepared to wait until they were remaindered. (By the early 1910s, booksellers were offering the Luise Mühlbach set for free as enticement to get customers to buy sets of John Lothrop Motley’s The Rise of the Dutch Republic or the collected works of Bret Harte.)

Publishers in America and England were benefitting from the first generation of universal public education, a population with a high level of literacy and enough discretionary income to afford cheap books. And long before Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins came up with the idea of the Great Books curriculum (and its publishing counterpart), a variety of approaches to encouraging autodidacts were organized. One of the most ambitious was the Library of the World’s Best Literature: Ancient and Modern, published by J. A. Hill between 1898 and 1902. Edited by Charles Dudley Warner (mostly remembered now as Mark Twain’s co-author of The Gilded Age) with the assistance of an advisory council of twelve (all men), the library comprises 46 volumes in handsome green buckram bindings with gilt lettering, high-quality paper with deckled edges, and profuse numbers of full-page illustrations. It’s a beautiful work of book printing.

If the set in the Mansfield Library is representative, it’s also a resource that’s gone virtually unused. When I spent an afternoon browsing through it recently, many of the volumes I sampled opened with the crack of a book whose glue has long hardened and never been tested. The circulation slips in the back — you can borrow these books! — were pristine. I suspect I was the first person to spend time with Warner’s Library in decades.

It deserves closer study than I could give it. Thirty-nine of the volumes are devoted to selections from the works of several hundred authors, along with introductory biographical sketches. Warner was able to enlist some illustrious collaborators. Henry James wrote the essay for Nathaniel Hawthorne and Turgenev. William Dean Howells wrote the essay on Leo Tolstoy. The philosopher Josiah Royce the essays on Kant and Spinoza. John Muir the essay on Linnaeus, John Burroughs the one on Thoreau, and Hawthorne’s son Julian the one on Bulwer-Lytton. (Hawthorne calls Bulwer-Lytton “versatile but not deep” and passes a judgment that may explain why the writer is now best known as the butt of a joke: “A sense of humor would have saved Bulwer from almost all his faults, and have endowed him with several valuable virtues into the bargain; but it was not born in him, and with all his diligence he never could beget it.”)

The selection of authors is remarkably diverse. Volume XXI, for example, includes the Kabbalah, the Finnish epic the Kalevala, the Sanskrit poet Kalidasa, Kant, Keats, Thomas à Kempis, Kipling, and Heinrich von Kleist. A number of the non-English authors are represented by selections that constitute the first and only English translations published to date. The Spanish poet Jose de Espronceda has two poems and an essay by Mary J. Serrano; no collection of his work has even been published in English. One of the first names to puzzle me was that of the Danish writer Jens Baggesen — two selections from his book, The Labyrinth. It turns out that the first-ever English translation of The Labyrinth, by Jesper Gulddal, was published just last year as an Oxford World Classic (and based on these selections, it looks fascinating).

The remaining seven volumes of Warner’s library include two volumes of songs, hymns and lyrics, two volumes of a dictionary of authors, two volumes of “Synopses of Noted Books,” and a volume titled, “Guide to Systematic Readings.” This last is reminiscent of Adler and Hutchins’ A Synopticon: An Index to The Great Ideas, a companion volume to the Great Books of the Western World that Adler predicted would “become indispensable in the realm of ideas” (it did not). It offers a series of suggested readings on a wide variety of topics (Africa; Agriculture; Amsterdam), a 24-page section on “Novels of Note and Characters Created by Novelists,” and, finally, “The Warner Library Course in Literature.” This outlines, week by week, a four-year reading program intended to recreate (or substitute for) a four-year college curriculum in literature (or, as it would have been called then, philology).

I spent most of my time leafing through the two volumes of “Synopses of Noted Books,” which contain 100-200 word synopses of over 1,300 books. One reason they make for good browsing is that there appears to be no organizational scheme whatsoever. While it’s true that most of the more recent titles (recent in 1902, that is) appear toward the back, Anna Karenina is just the second entry (after John Fiske’s Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy (1875) and before Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1895)). You never know what will pop up on the next page. Here’s The Book of Mormon; two entries later, Karl Marx’s Capital (“edited by Fred Engels”). Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is followed by … Hermann Agha by William Gifford Palgrave? (It’s “a tale of life in Syria at the close of the eighteenth century.”)

I collected the titles and authors of the most recent titles mentioned in the “Synopses,” all published in 1901:

• The Cavalier by George W. Cable
• The Crisis by Winston Churchill (not that Winston Churchill)
• D’vri and I by Irving Bacheller
• The Eternal City by Hall Caine
• Graustark by George Barr McCutcheon
• The Helmet of Navarre by Bertha Runkle
• The History of Sir Richard Calmady by Lucas Malet
• In the Fog by Richard Harding Davis
• Kim by Rudyard Kipling
• Lazare by Mary Hartwell Catherwood
• The Lives of the Hunted by Ernest Seton Thompson
• The Making of a Marchioness by Frances Hodgson Burnett
• The Man from Glengarry by Ralph Connor
• The Octopus by Frank Norris
• A Portion of Labor by Mary E. Wilkins
• The Real World by Robert Herrick
• The Right of Way by Gilbert Parker
• The Tory Lover by Sarah Orne Jewett
• Truth Dexter by Sidney McCall
• Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington

This list illustrates something that A. Edward Newton observed back in 1928 (just pages after his own list of “One Hundred Good Novels”): “Old Father Time, with his scythe and his whiskers, has seen so many things come and go that he is reluctant to express an opinion as to what is permanent.” Roughly 20% of the above titles are either still in print today and have securely attained classic status or are by authors who have some place in the canon, if primarily for a better-known book (e.g., The Country of the Pointed Firs instead of The Tory Lover in the case of Sarah Orne Jewett). The rest have been forgotten.

If you agree with George Orwell that “Ultimately there is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion,” then you’d say justly forgotten. But who really knows, given that most lack any mention on the web by anyone who’s read them since, well, the invention of the web. Survival is only a test of luck. This site is full of books that didn’t survive for reasons that had nothing to do with literary merit. And a hundred years from now, will any of the books on The Guardian’s list of 100 will be as unfamiliar to the readers of 2126 as The History of Sir Richard Calmady? All signs point to Yes.