Disheveled Victorian Bookshelves Quiz

Answer: Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens (1812-1870), wrote a great deal about social problems, but he didn't just write, he acted on them. In Victorian England women had few options for supporting themselves, and prostitution was common but severely punished. With the backing of heiress Angela Coutts, Dickens helped create "Urania House" where former sex-workers could learning reading and writing (and housekeeping). Dickens personally interviewed and selected candidates from workhouses and prisons, and over 100 women graduated from Urania House to better lives.

'Our Mutual Friend' (1864-65) is the last novel completed by Charles Dickens (1812-1870) and one of his more sophisticated works, with a complicated plot and relentless irony. The novel shares with the semi-autobiographical 'David Copperfield' (1850) and the somewhat Horatio Alger-like 'Great Expectations' (1861) the problem of money and the necessity of finding purpose. And it shares with all of his other novels social concerns about poverty, inequality, disease, and want. Dickens enjoyed popularity in his life and even wider appreciation in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Answer: Wilkie Collins

Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) had the good fortune to be a mentor of Charles Dickens, with whom he shared a concern for social issues that comprised the themes of many of his works. While Collins is best known for innovating the detective novel with 'The Moonstone' (1868), his first novel dealing with a mystery was 'The Woman in White' (1859), though it was less about "whodunnit" than which character would solve the mystery. Both novels were called "sensation novels" at the time, and both share an unusual narrative structure in that they have different narrators at different points in the novel.

Answer: Elizabeth Gaskell

For the longest time, 'Cranford' (1853) was the most-remembered work by the early Victorian Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865). Much work became obscured only to be revived in the 1950s and later with a better appreciation of the complexity and subversiveness of her writing. 'North and South' (1854) was one of the very first industrial novels describing the conflict between bosses/owners and workers. Through the early 20th century, the book was subjected to a lot of criticism which can only be characterized as sexist; e.g. women could not "understand industrial problems", would "know too little about the cotton industry", and had no "right to add to the confusion by writing about it".

'Cousin Phillis' (1864), which deals with adolescence and awakening, is considered Gaskell's masterpiece of the novella. Her last full-length novel was 'Wives and Daughters', published as a serial in 1864-66. She died in 1865 before it was complete, and it had to be finished by editor and journalist Frederick Greenwood.

Answer: Samuel Butler

Samuel Butler (1835-1902) satrirized Victorian society in his utopian novel 'Erewhon: or Over the Range' (1872). It is notable for being one of the first novels to explore artificial intelligence, which Butler was inspired to consider after he read Charles Darwin's 'On the Origin of Species' (1859). Butler was also a scholar who wrote essays on Christianity, evolution, and Italian art, and his translations the 'Iliad' and the 'Odyssey' are still used in the 21st century.

In 'The Authoress of the Odyssey' (1897), he theorized that the Homeric poem was actually written by a Sicilian maiden! He further attacked Victorian hypocrisy in his novel 'The Way of All Flesh' (1903), published posthumously.

Answer: R.D. Blackmore

The historical romance 'Lorna Doone' (1869) was written by R.D. Blackmore, a member of the Romantic literary movement and often called the last Victorian. Set in the 17th century during a time of political strife, the novel centers on the struggles of star-crossed lovers Lorna Doone and John Ridd, who come from inimical families (not unlike Romeo and Juliet). Blackmore modeled 'Lorna Doone' after the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott.

He had trouble finding a publisher for his most famous work at first, but it has never been out of print.

His other romances like 'Alice Lorraine: a tale of the South Downs' (1875), set in Sussex and Spain during the Napoleonic Wars, and 'Kit and Kitty: a story of west Middlesex' (1890), a trilogy set in Sunbury-on-Thames, never achieved the same kind of fame or critical acclaim as 'Lorna Doone'.

Answer: Anne Brontė

Governess, poet, novelist, Anne Brontė (1820-1849) is somewhat overshadowed by her sisters Charlotte ('Jane Eyre') and Emily ('Wuthering Heights'), though when they were children she was the most precocious. Though she wrote poems as well, Anne is best known for two novels. 'Agnes Grey' (1847), written under the pseudonym Acton Bell, is a bildungsroman of a governess, and something of a spiritual autobiography. 'The Tenant of Wildfell Hall' is an epistolary novel that depicts marital strife and feminine independence, and as such it is regarded as one of the earlier feminist novels.

The youngest of the Brontė siblings, Anne died of tuberculosis at only 29.

Answer: Rudyard Kipling

Joseph Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was born with the first name Joseph in India during the British Raj, and many of his works are set either partially or entirely in North Africa or India. His first novel, 'The Light That Failed' (1891) is about an artist who loses his sight and his childhood sweetheart, and it was inspired by a failed relationship with one Florence Garrard, whom he had considered his fiancée, though evidently she did not. 'Captains Courageous' (1897), Kipling's only novel set in North America, concerns a spoiled rich kid whom a Portuguese fisherman saves from drowning. 'Kim', set in the was first serialized in 1900-01, is set between the Second and Third Anglo-Afghan Wars (viz. in the 1890s) and paints a vivid

The late Victorian and Nobel Prize-winner was also an innovator of the short story. His first collection of short stories, 'Quartette' (1885), written with his mother, father, and sister, was published when he was not yet twenty. Kipling was also a prolific poet, and a great many poems of his were believed to be lost, but U.S. scholar Thomas Pinney unearthed over 50 unpublished poems, which were ultimately published in 2013.

Answer: Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley, daughter of philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft and wife of poet Percy Shelley, is perhaps most famous for writing the first proper science fiction novel, 'Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus' in 1818. 'The Last Man' (1826) is also a pioneering work of science fiction as one of first apocalyptic dystopian novels, about a global pandemic that ravages the Earth (with eerie prescience to the early 21st century). It was dismissed in its time and relegated to obscurity until it was rediscovered the 1960s.

'Falkner' is remarkable in that it is the only novel of Shelley's in which the heroine survives and thrives. It was regarded as a "mere" romance in its time, but 20th- and 21st-century critics have observed a subtext about power and politics. Shelley herself believed it to be one of her best.

Answer: Henry James

Henry James (1842-1916), who was born in New York City and died in London, had both British and American citizenship. His horror novella 'The Turn of the Screw' (1898), about a governess, ghosts, and ghoulish children, appeared originally as a serial in Collier's Weekly through the first four months of 1898.

Influenced by George Eliot's pioneering narrative style, Henry James also kept narration to a minimum in 'The Portrait of a Lady' (1881), which explores freedom and constraint by centering on Isabel Archer, an young, opinionated American woman seeking success in England.

It remains one of his most popular novels. As many writers did following the harsh realities nineteenth-century war, he moved away from Romanticism to Realism, and he furthered the development of Eliot's subgenre of psychological realism.

Answer: George Eliot

George Eliot (1819-1880), born Mary Ann Evans on the estate where her father worked as agent, worked for a time as a translator before turning to fiction. It is because of her translations of controversial works such as David Friedrich Strauss's 'Das Leben Jesu' ('The Life of Jesus') that she chose a pen-name, so not entirely because of prejudice against women writers. Having said that, Eliot was not a fan of Victorian lady novelists on the whole, who she thought wrote cliched and improbable fancies, but she made exceptions for the Brontė sisters and Elizabeth Gaskell, among others.

Jane Ciabattari reported for BBC Culture in 2015 that in a poll of critics outside the UK, 'Middlemarch' was ranked the best British novel of all time. Sam Sacks of the 'Wall Street Journal' called 'Middlemarch' "the greatest social and psychological novel ever written in English." Fintan O'Toole of 'The Irish Times' declared, "Eliot's ability to move from beautifully etched emotional detail to the epic sweep of social change is still breathtaking".