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When Marian Evans began writing The Mill on the Floss during the first few months of 1859, the world did not yet know her as the famously cerebral George Eliot. Up until around June of that year, Evans was “in the closet,” as it were, hiding behind a male pseudonym, and private supporters like her agent/lover, George Henry Lewes, and her devoted Scottish publisher, John Blackwood. (Dickens, incidentally, was also an early supporter, and one of the few who knew about Eliot’s true identity early on.) Eliot’s “incognito,” as she called it, was a complicating factor in her rise to fame, for if the public found out that a woman had written her popular books (and even worse, a woman who was living, unmarried, with another married man), would readers boycott her works? Would libraries? Would other publishers? And would the gossip of the literati ruin what was promising to be an extremely lucrative career? These questions plagued Eliot, George Henry Lewes, and the publishing firm of William Blackwood & Sons right up until the 1860 release—and enormous success—of Eliot’s third triumphant novel.

The Mill on the Floss is the story of Maggie Tulliver and her brother Tom, of a family in ruin, of gossip and heartbreak, of sexual impulse, and of a world without real choices for women. Well, that last bit might be heavy-handed and over-simplified, but for Maggie at least, there do not seem to be any “good” choices, and that is what is so heartbreaking about her story. Nearly every choice she makes is met with some sort of condemnation, despite her good intentions, though of course Eliot’s subtlety of language often makes it difficult to interpret intentionality with any real certainty. But we love Maggie and we side with her. She is the classic heroine whom we want to embrace, comfort, and congratulate. Unfortunately, however, the sinister nature of this novel makes it impossible to dole out congratulatory remarks. It is a novel about how making a simple choice between left or right can change the course of one’s life forever. There is something deeply sinister in that, something deeply disturbing. Despite that idea, I do still “love” this book, but I can only do so with a great deal of caution.

Perhaps Eliot’s own anxieties around choice—as strong as the currents of the River Floss itself—made their way into this novel too easily. Whatever the case, Maggie’s fate in the literary marketplace, as well as Eliot’s own coming out, proved anything but tragic. Less than two months after the publication of The Mill on the Floss, Blackwood had sold all 6,000 copies of the initial run, with a plan to print an additional 500 copies before the end of May 1860. “This is highly satisfactory,” he wrote to Eliot with his characteristic grace. (Indeed, two months later, John Blackwood’s brother, William Blackwood, told Lewes that “more than 6,000 copies of a guinea and a half novel sold is a success which I am pretty confident has not been attained since the days of [Sir Walter Scott’s] Waverley Novels.” That was a very big deal, since after Dickens, Scott was the benchmark for superstardom.) By the end of that year, Eliot had received a total of £3,550 for Mill from Blackwood, and in addition to those profits, Lewes’s expert negotiations had brought in even more money from American and European publishers. (Her income for Mill during that first year alone wound up totaling £3,985.) It was not a bad year for a woman who was rejected as scandalous by nearly every social circle in Victorian London, and simultaneously praised as one of the greatest writers of her day.

Photo credit: Gary Simmons

Author: Wilkie Collins
First Published: 1859-60, in All the Year Round

The below is adapted  from an essay I wrote for The Guardian UK online.

Often singled out as the foundation text of “sensation fiction”—a genre distinguished by its electrifying, suspenseful, and sometimes horrific plots, as well as its unsavoury themes of intrigue, jealousy, murder, adultery, and the like—The Woman in White was an immediate sensation in its own right when it began appearing in Dickens’s weekly journal All the Year Round. Margaret Oliphant hailed it as “a new beginning in fiction”, while at the same time Edward Bulwer-Lytton dismissed it as “great trash.” And while Henry James disliked the “ponderosity” of The Woman in White (calling it “a kind of 19th-century version of Clarissa Harlowe”), he acknowledged that the book had “introduced into fiction those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors.”

Despite such drastically mixed reviews, The Woman in White was a mad success with the public, and made no less of a sensation out of its 35-year-old author, Wilkie Collins. In middle-class dining rooms everywhere, discussion turned to the intriguing cast of characters Mr. Collins had invented—mannish, eloquent Marian Halcombe; faithful and angelic Laura Fairlie; sinister, secretive Percival Glyde; and of course Count Fosco, seductive and cunning, with his cockatoo, his canary-birds, and his white mice running over his immense body. Two months in, Dickens was calling the novel “masterly”, and Prince Albert admired it so much that he later sent off copies as gifts.

During its serialisation in All the Year Round (from 26 November 1859 to 25 August 1860), and upon its publication in book form, The Woman in White inspired not only a series of imitators (chief among them Mrs Henry Wood’s East Lynne [1861] and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret [1862]), but also what John Sutherland has described as a “sales mania and a franchise boom.” Manufacturers produced Woman in White perfume, Woman in White cloaks and bonnets, and music-shops displayed Woman in White waltzes and quadrilles. The poet Edward FitzGerald named his herring-lugger “Marian Halcombe”; cats were named Fosco and thought to look more sinister; and Walter became a fashionable name for babies. As Kenneth Robinson, one of Collins’s earliest biographers, pointed out, “even Dickens had not known such incidental publicity.”

Collins’s storytelling talents were utterly mesmerising for Victorian readers—and they are no less captivating for readers today. He was the master of the “cliff-hanger,” and given the 40 or so of them that strategically punctuate The Woman in White, it’s not difficult to see why this Victorian novel continues to thrill us. Our flesh creeps when Anne Catherick places her hand on Walter’s shoulder; our hearts ache when Marian Halcombe falls ill and Count Fosco violates her diary; our blood curdles when Walter Hartright stands next to his beloved’s tombstone, only to look up and find her standing there. The apparitions that Collins conjures are the ghosts that ensured not just his success but his longevity. They are what have kept readers going back for more during the last 150 years, and they bear testament to the value of Collins’s self-professed, “old-fashioned” opinion that “the primary object of a work of fiction should be to tell a story …”

Author: Bram Stoker
First Published: 1897, by Archibald Constable and Co.

“Denn die Todten reiten Schnell” —
(“For the dead travel fast.”)

I love the opening chapter of Dracula—it’s like walking with someone through their own dark dream that they may or may not be remembering correctly. Jonathan Harker is travelling through a grim region in the Carpathian mountains (modern-day Romania), and from the start, you know that something is off about this place. The people are as nervous and superstitious as they come, foisting crucifixes upon the unwary traveller, whose life and soul they feel are in great jeopardy. Their terror becomes our terror, though we don’t yet know what it’s about. It’s the lack-of-knowing, on top of all the strange behavior, that makes the place so frightening.

The chapter takes us slowly through the Carpathians, revealing nothing but more darkness as we follow carriages and packs of wolves toward the looming Castle Dracula. Stoker’s lush writing infuses horror into the very landscape, providing beautiful descriptions that are as seductive as they are eerie and claustrophobic.

As we wound our endless way, and the sun sank lower and lower behind us, the shadows of the evening began to creep round us. This was emphasized by the fact that the snowy mountain-top still held the sunset, and seemed to glow out with a delicate cool pink. Here and there we passed Cszeks and Slovaks, all in picturesque attire, but I noticed that goitre was painfully prevalent. By the roadside were many crosses, and as we swept by, my companions all crossed themselves. Here and there was a peasant man or woman kneeling before a shrine, who did not even turn round as we approached, but seemed in the self-surrender of devotion to have neither eyes nor ears for the outer world. There were many things new to me. For instance, hay-ricks in the trees, and here and there very beautiful masses of weeping birch, their white stems shining like silver through the delicate green of the leaves.

Again, something is just not right here—there are hay-ricks (hay stacks) in the trees, and the people have goitre (a swollen thyroid condition); but it’s a gorgeous, if sinister, place to be held captive, and Jonathan, like us, will soon find himself simultaneously entranced and terrified by vampires.

The rest of the book—the story really—is of course marvellous, though it’s ridiculous that four able-bodied men and a houseful of servants can’t seem to keep a bouquet of garlic in Lucy Westenra’s room, or ensure that her windows remain closed through the night. But despite unlikely and humorous foibles like these, reading the novel Dracula is a hypnotic experience, and there is a reason why this book, with its countless adaptations and offshoots, refuses to “die.”

Author: Charles Dickens
First published: 1849-50, by Bradbury and Evans

WARNING: Plot spoiler

The year before he died, Dickens called this novel “his favorite child.” While it is not exactly mine, I can see why it was his. In David Copperfield, Dickens created some of the most memorable—if not the most memorable—characters in his entire career. Even Virginia Woolf, who had no great deal of admiration for Dickens, admitted that David Copperfield was a novel so memorable and influential, that the story and characters had become part of most peoples’ consciousness from the days before they could even read.

The full banquet of Dickensian characters is present here in fine form, and you cannot help but love them. It’s one of the reasons why David Copperfield, in conjunction with Great Expectations, is sometimes the novel I tell people to read if they’ve never read Dickens before. You meet some of Dickens’s most likable and hilarious characters: Aunt Betsy Trotwood, Clara Pegotty and her brother, Mr. Dick (“Have him measured for a suit of clothes directly”), the “volatile” Miss Mowcher, Mrs. Micawber, and of course, Mr. Wilkins Micawber. You also encounter some of Dickens’s darkest and unlikable creations: Rosa Dartle, Mr. and Mrs. Murdstone, James Steerforth, and the unctuous Uriah Heep and his mother, who hang “like two great bats” over the whole of the Wickfield house.

Dickens has been criticized through the years, and often rightly so, for developing “flat” (as opposed to “round”) characters. These distinctions were first put forth by E.M. Forster in Aspects of the Novel. In that work, Forster uses Mrs. Micawber as the paradigmatic example of what a flat character is:

The really flat character can be expressed in one sentence such as “I never will desert Mr. Micawber.” There is Mrs. Micawber—she says she won’t desert Mr. Micawber, she doesn’t, and there she is.

Touché Mr. Forster! He’s right—and there she is—but we’ll take more of her and her kind any day.

There are also those characters—and certainly moments—in this novel that tend towards the round. Though I find the Victorian “angel of the house” ideology in David Copperfield nauseating at times, I think Dickens treats two scenes in particular with incredible skill and emotional poignancy. The first is the discovery of Emily’s elopement with Steerforth (Chapter 31, “A Greater Loss”), and the second is the death of Dora Copperfield (Chapter 53, “Another Retrospect”). In both of these scenes, which have the potential to become un-retractable train wrecks of sentimentality and melodrama, Dickens renders the emotional turbulence that informs these moments with great respect and tranquillity—almost reservation, as if these tragic occurrences were no less a part of the natural fabric of life than Mr. Micawber’s insolvency. Mr. Pegotty’s heartbreak is palpable; and Dora Copperfield’s apologies are enough to make any reader reflect on lifetimes filled with regret. Here then is the artist toiling away at his craft, proving that this most sentimental and melodramatic of writers was also a supreme journalist who chronicled with exactitude the nuances of the human heart.

Author: Charlotte Brontë (Currer Bell)
First Published: 1847, by Smith, Elder, and Co.

Poor Jane Eyre—the doormat of 19^th-century literature. Everyone walks all over her, and her mistreatment by other characters throughout the novel is both infuriating and disgusting. From the Reeds and Mr. Brocklehurst in childhood, to the Ingrams and even her beloved Mr. Rochester as an adult, the abuse heaped upon the heroine of this book is difficult to endure. I actually need to put the book down at certain times because I can only take so much of Jane’s undeserved punishments at once.

But beyond that horrible aspect of the book—which, I must own up, is as artful as it is disturbing—there is so much to love about Jane Eyre. One of the things I love most about Jane Eyre herself is that she is one of literature’s great readers (even though she often disavows this). At ten years old we know that she has already devoured Bewick’s History of British Birds, Goldsmith’s History of Rome, The Arabian Nights, Gulliver’s Travels, and no doubt countless other unnamed books. Little Jane has read widely and with great feeling, and her reading has made her “passionate.”

And then there is the language—Brontë’s magnificent, dream-like language. Her imagery is as relentless as it is gorgeous, and I think I might be right in saying that her prodigious vocabulary surpasses that of any other Victorian writer (even Dickens). Here are but a few examples:

. . . it was the hebdomadal treat to which we all looked forward from Sabbath to Sabbath. (Chapter 7)

. . . the heavy supper she had eaten produced a soporific effect. (Chapter 10)

. . . she proceeded to arrange the cups, spoons, &c., with assiduous celerity. (Chapter 13)

To so practiced and indefatigable a horseman as Mr. Rochester it would be but a morning’s ride. (Chapter 22)

. . . you watched me, and now and then smiled at me with a simple yet sagacious grace I cannot describe. (Chapter 27)

The water stood in my eyes . . . but I would not be lachrymose . . . (Chapter 37)

And who but Charlotte Brontë could ever describe a wedding dress like this?

It was enough that in yonder closet, opposite my dressing-table, garments said to be [Mrs. Rochester’s] had already displaced my black stuff Lowood frock and straw bonnet: for not to me appertained that suit of wedding raiment; the pearl coloured robe, the vapoury veil pendent from the usurped portmanteau.  I shut the closet to conceal the strange, wraith-like apparel it contained; which, at this evening hour—nine o’clock—gave out certainly a most ghostly shimmer through the shadow of my apartment.

Jane Eyre is a feast of words. And it is no wonder Virginia Woolf said that we read Charlotte Brontë not for her characters, not for her comedy, and not for her philosophic view of life, but simply “for her poetry.”

Author: Charles Dickens
First Published: 1860-61, in All the Year Round

The two questions about Dickens that people most often ask me are “What is your favorite Dickens novel?” and “If I’ve never read a Dickens novel before, which one should I start with?” My answer to both is usually Great Expectations, though that answer tends to differ sometimes, depending on which day you ask me.

Written at the height of Dickens’s creative powers in 1861, Great Expectations contains all of the best in Dickens: hysterical and eccentric characters, painful, moving, and unforgettable episodes, love unspoiled and love unrequited, and most important of all, an incredible story. John Irving, another one of my heroes, has gone so far as to say that Great Expectations “has the most wonderful and perfectly worked-out plot for a novel in the English language.” I think I have to agree with him, though if you pressed me to declare my favorite novel in the English language, Great Expectations might have to duke it out with Middlemarch.

Not only does Great Expectations contain my favorite story by Dickens, but it also contains my favorite paragraph in all of Dickens. Here it is:

That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.

The wisdom and the feeling of these words take my breath away every time I read this passage. Dickens is referring here to the day that Pip meets Estella—the day that forever changes his life and sets his expectations in motion. But take any day from your own life that holds special significance, good or bad, then extract it, and extrapolate on what would have happened for the rest of your life instead. The concept is really mind-boggling.

It is a shame that so many people form a bad opinion about this novel and about Dickens in general when they’re forced to read Great Expectations in high school—a time when people are often too distracted, rightfully, by adolescence to weather the book’s various demands. One of the great joys of Great Expectations though, is being able to rediscover it whenever you want. When you re-read Great Expectations as an adult, it’s a very different experience from plodding through that intimidating 400-pager that your teacher might have assigned to you in high school. And if you wait long enough to let your heart get broken once or twice, I can tell you that Great Expectations will speak to you with a power that no other book can claim.

Author: Charles Dickens
First published: 1852-53, by Bradbury and Evans

WARNING: Plot spoiler

Bleak House is Dickens’s great indictment on the Victorian legal system, but also his critique of a world that refuses to endorse love in anything but its most conventional and socially-acceptable forms. As in all of Dickens’s novels, there are many stories within Bleak House, but my favorite is the harrowing story of Lady Dedlock and her daughter Esther Summerson. Running alongside the ancient and irresolvable case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, the Dedlock/Esther Summerson plot is the story at the very center of the book—the story that gives the stagnant world of Bleak House not only its momentum, but an emotional force unparalleled in Dickens.

Lady Dedlock and Esther are dead to each other in the sense that neither one knows about the others’ true identity. Lady Dedlock (formerly not a lady at all, but the aptly named Honoria Barbary), believes her child to have died at birth, and Esther, ushered away to hide her mother’s disgrace (Lady Dedlock was not married when she had Esther), is never told what happened to her mother. (“I had never worn a black frock, that I could recollect. I had never been shown my mama’s grave.”) They go through life apart, unaware of each others’ existences, longing for each other all the while and suppressing their longing as the culture demands. (Esther grows up haunted by the bitter castigations of her godmother/aunt: “Your mother, Esther, is your disgrace, and you were hers.”)

One of my favorite scenes not just in Bleak House but in all of Dickens, is the reunion scene between Esther and Lady Dedlock. It is so riveting for the momentary joy Esther experiences and the calamity that shatters the moment, rendering the joy immediately tragic. Discovering who her mother is at last, Esther briefly peeks through an open window into her past; but the window slams shut in an instant when Lady Dedlock, the condemned prisoner of a stratified world, announces that she and Esther can never speak to each other again.

“My child, my child!” she said. “For the last time! These kisses for the last time! These arms upon my neck for the last time! We shall meet no more. To hope to do what I seek to do, I must be what I have been so long. Such is my reward and doom. If you hear of Lady Dedlock, brilliant, prosperous, and flattered; think of your wretched mother, conscience-stricken, underneath that mask! Think that the reality is in her suffering, in her useless remorse, in her murdering within her breast the only love and truth of which it is capable! And then forgive her, if you can; and cry to Heaven to forgive her, which it never can!”

Esther’s and Lady Dedlock’s story is a story of repeated deaths and births. Esther is born, but “dies” in childbirth, and the mother “dies” along with her. Esther is haunted by this dead mother throughout her life, until the dead mother comes back to life, only to “murder” herself and her daughter again. They continue apart, dead to each other once more, until their final reunion in chapter 59 of the novel, when Esther discovers Lady Dedlock’s disguised body at the gates of the poor man’s graveyard: “. . . it was my mother, cold and dead.”

The BBC’s 2005 production of Bleak House, starring Gillian Anderson as Lady Dedlock, is one of my favorite literary adaptations of all time. Though the writers did alter many parts of the book (including, sadly, the excision of the greatest chase scene in all of English literature—Bucket’s pursuit of Lady Dedlock through the night), the attention to the mood, lighting, and themes of Dickens’s original could not be more faithful.

Author: Charles Dickens
First published: 1838-39, by Chapman and Hall

Nicholas Nickleby is not my favorite book by Dickens. In fact, it is one of my least favorite books by Dickens. But it is an extremely important book in Dickens’s career because, though he was already quite famous when it was first published in 1839, it was the book that in many ways made him an author.

At the time of Nicholas Nickleby, Dickens was still writing almost exclusively under his pseudonym “Boz.” But with Nickleby, he started putting his real name to his work, and in the front of the first edition of the book his publishers, Chapman and Hall, provided an engraved portrait of the young and handsome author—the antecedent to the modern-day dust jacket photo. Nicholas Nickleby was also the first novel for which Dickens, after much negotiation, came away owning the exclusive copyright.

The story of Nicholas Nickleby is typical early Dickens stuff—a melodramatic hero too perfect and honorable to be believed, a family plagued by ruin, mercenary and lecherous villains, damsels in distress, the bucolic Eden of the countryside contrasted with the stink and soot of London. It is the brother volume to the more familiar Oliver Twist, which Dickens was writing for another publisher (Richard Bentley) at the very same time. It’s no coincidence that the two greatest and most famous Dickens stage adaptations—Lionel Bart’s Oliver! (1960) and David Edgars’s Nicholas Nickleby (1980)—are of these two fast-paced and episodic books from this particular time period.

Nicholas Nickleby is really like two novels. The first half is rambling and quixotic, reaching back to Dickens’s first novel, The Pickwick Papers (1837), and the discursive traditions of the 18th century. The second half is more coherent and dramatic, demonstrating the roots of the elaborate and magnificent plots that Dickens would go on to create in his later novels. My favorite characters in Nicholas Nickleby are probably the Cheerbyle brothers, who appear magically in the middle of the book to save the day, and mark a kind of transition point in the novel. They are not memorable for their language or complexity, but rather for the ridiculous degree of benevolence that they bestow on all who cross their path. (Think Scrooge at the other end of the spectrum.) Their generosity is so absurd and unbelievable that you can’t help but come away from the book laughing, and laughing hard.