Victorian times
Victoria, Albert and some of their children
from englishmonarchs.co.uk
Queen Victoria dominated much of the century: she reigned from 1837 to 1901. Her death was a shock for the British who had known her for several generations, and was the occasion of all kinds of ceremonies and memorials which were dutifully followed by everybody except young George Bernard Shaw, who complained that the exhibition of her body was perfectly unhygienic.
The period corresponds to the expansion of Europeans all over the world. The interior of Africa was conquered. The British empire secured maritime roads to India (a British colony since 1857) both via South Africa and South America and the Falkland islands. When the Suez canal was opened in 1869, ships went directly from the Mediterranean to the Gulf of Suez. The British secured their influence over Cyprus, Aden, Somalia and Hong Kong. You can find a beautiful animated map of all this on this site: it is worth spending a minute there, on the-map-as-history.com, specially if you are a teacher or a student. British migrants went in large numbers to the US, Canada, Australia. There is no wonder that the century was prolix in adventures and travel stories.
Queen Victoria was sentimental and obstinate, and had been raised like Cinderella: her mother's lover insisted that she should be kept ignorant, so that she would need his "advice" later on. She certainly became a smart queen: for instance, she said that when she was with Prime Minister Gladstone, she felt that he was very intelligent, but when she was with Prime Minister Disraeli, he made her feel that she was intelligent! With over 500 biographies, I don't know what is good to read...what about a fresh American look with Walter L. Arnstein?
The invention of psychology
A large number of authors got interested in describing what is going on in the mind of their heroes: not just what they do, but what they think; it is the enduring quality of romanticism even for authors which are social conservatives (remember how you liked Jane Austen?)
Stendhal is one of the first authors to tell us what the hero thinks. I found The Red and the Black (1830) fascinating: this is supposed to be a love story, but the male hero thinks mainly in terms of conquest: imposing his will. Another French author, Flaubert, gave a name (bovarysm) to what is now suburban despair (Madame Bovary, 1857). It is not my preferred story, because my level of interest for that kind of drama is low, so I would recommend a novella describing the emotional world of a maid: A Simple Heart. It is a quick read, gives you access to a very influential writer, and will let you enjoy later the delightful Flaubert's Parrot of Julian Barnes.
Masters of Despair
The second half of the 19th century sees the emergence of major writers of despair: Dostoyevsky in Russia, and Henry James in Britain. Everything they write is beautiful, so it is hard to know where to start. For Dostoyevsky, start with The Idiot, because all the modern literature about despair and the absurdity of life stemmed from it. In the book, good people (generous, understanding, real Christians like the hero) are bound to be victims of the bad (such as greedy, materialists, snobs and liars all influenced by the "modern European ideas"). And even if they are perfectly good, whatever they try will turn deadly. The theme is embedded in powerful descriptions of the emotions of the various characters. This lack of hope will have repercussions in literature down to the Vietnam war, so you better be acquainted with The Idiot. You got to be prepared to a Russian art of writing: do not expect a "story", expect an attempt to describe a whole society. Americans and Europeans are used to logical and efficient book structures: they go downtown taking the highroad, Russians authors go downtown by taking the small roads and stop at each decaying construction on the way. It is the way it is, do not come to me and complain about digressions: it is not digressions, it is a different art form.
Henry James, an American-British author has by comparison an iron hand when conducting his novels. What Maisie knew is the first attempt I know of to describe the world as seen by a child and probably the first to consider the consequences of divorce on small children. Maisie is a very small child manipulated and lied to by all the adults. She becomes a teenager attempting to seduce her father-in-law. Henry James wrote shortly after this a much more mysterious, ghostly story which became my favorite opera. Listen to the children voices responding to the voice of temptation (Peter Pears) in The turn of the screw and wonder with me if the secret symbol of the story is not after all, about an initiation to homosexuality.
The Immigrants
Not everybody had a good life in London and debated between pride and prejudice. So, we should make a place for immigrants at the end of the 19th century, with a beautiful Norwegian novel about immigrants in South Dakota: Giants in the Earth: A Saga of the Prairie by Ole Edvart Rolvaag (the book was written in 1924, but is set in the 1870s).
A serious history book about the Irish famine, which was the cause for a large immigration to the States in the second half of the 19th century: The Great Irish Potato Famine by James Donnelly
James Nagel, a professor of American literature, has published a short list of good books on immigration here, on PBS.
The invention of Mystery books
The first mysteries were written in Victorian times, and you will find them on my mystery page.
If you like mysteries which take place in Victorian times, you are in luck. There are plenty of good modern authors who do that. Try Anne Perry (British author b. 1938). The author committed a horrific murder when she was 16, probably confusing reality and fiction, and is represented in the movie Heavenly Creatures. From the little she says about the crime nowadays as an old woman, she comes out as more defensive than sorry. But I still have to see a murderer who wonders what the victim might have done or might have become. This being said, and to be fair, I do not feel anything wrong in her novels. I felt it (deviance) strongly with other authors like ex-MP Jeffrey Archer or the notorious John Dean and never bought any of their books again. Perry is an excellent and prolific writer who pays attention to details and lets you believe in her characters. I think that the first in the Pitt detective series is The Cater Street Hangman (1979). There is also a series with an amnesic detective, William Monk, starting with The Face of a Stranger
The Robin Paige Victorian Mysteries are written by a couple of Texan writers, with an American heroin living in Great Britain. I promised myself to read one, the series starts with Death at Bishop's Keep.
Do not miss crime stories in Victorian New York! You will come to see Theodore Roosevelt when he was a police commissioner in The Alienist by Caleb Carr. Alienists was the term used for the first psychologists. If you like history, it is very entertaining, if you don't, read something else. I was delighted with all the details coming in the book, for instance the birth of fingerprinting.
There is a long and excellent list called Murder by the gaslight here compiled by the libraries of Lincoln, Nebraska.
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