1899 100 Best Novels

Allan Massie,

“The Problem of Predicting What Will Last”

Booksonline, with Amazon.co.uk (An Electronic Telegraph Publication)
4 January 2000

Each week for the past two years The Daily Telegraph’s literary editor has asked a contributor to name and describe his or her “Book of the Century”. . . . [cut — DT.] The full selection invites comparison with a list drawn up by The Telegraph a century ago; we print both here.

The comparison cannot, however, be exact. All the books chosen in 1899 were fiction — the paper offered its readers the “100 Best Novels in the World”, selected by the editor “with the assistance of Sir Edwin Arnold, K. C. I. E, H. D. Traill, D. C. L, and W. L. Courtney, LL. D.”

The modern list includes poetry, plays, history, diaries, philosophy, economics, memoirs, biography and travel writing. It is certainly eclectic, ranging from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, selected by David Sylvester, to The Wind in the Willows, chosen by John Bayley, and Down with Skool, Wendy Cope’s Book of the Century.

The 1899 list, on offer at the time in a cloth-bound edition at nine guineas the lot (easy terms available), is homogeneous, as the modern one is not, not only because it consists entirely of works of fiction but also because the selection was made by a small group. And since they were picking the 100 Best Novels, they were able to include books that nobody might name as a single “Book of the Century” but which many might put in their top 20 or so.

The difference in criteria between the two lists is instructive. That we today have asked our contributors to make personal choices may reflect our less deferential society. We are less willing than the Telegraph editor was in 1899 to deliver “ex cathedra” decrees and offer a list of “best books” that is not only prescriptive but splendid in its self-assurance. That said, one should bear in mind that the 1899 list was offered as a commercial proposition; ours is not.

W. H. AinsworthThe Tower of London Old St Paul’s Windsor Castle Jane Austin Pride & Prejudice Sense & Sensibility Honoré de Balzac Pere Goriot J. M. Barrie A Window in Thrums W. Besant and J . Rice The Golden Butterfly Rolf Boldrewood Robbery Under Arms M. E. Braddon Lady Audley’s Secret Charlotte Bronte Jane Eyre Shirley Hall Caine The Deemster Henry Cockton Valentine Vox Wilkie Collins The Woman in White The Moonstone J. Fenimore Cooper The Last of the Mohicans The Pathfinder The Prairie F. Marion Crawford Mr Isaacs Charles Dickens Martin Chuzzlewit Nicholas Nickleby The Old Curiosity Shop Dombey and Son Oliver Twist Conan Doyle The Firm of Girdlestone Alexandre Dumas The Three Musketeers Twenty Years After The Count of Monte Cristo George Eliot Scenes of Clerical Life Henry Fielding Tom Jones Joseph Andrews Mrs Gaskell Mary Barton

James GrantThe Aide de Camp The Romance of War Bret Harte Gabriel Conroy N. Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter The House of the Seven Gables O. W. Holmes Elsie Venner Anthony Hope The Prisoner of Zenda Thomas Hughes Tom Brown’s Schooldays Victor Hugo Les Misérables Toilers of the Sea Notre Dame Charles Kingsley Two Years Ago Alton Locke Hypatia Henry Kingsley The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn Rudyard Kipling Soldiers Three George Lawrence Guy Livingstone Charles Lever Harry Lorrequer Charles O’Malley E. Lynn Linton The Atonement of Leam Dundas Samuel Lover Handy Andy Rory O’More Lord Lytton Last of the Barons Night and Morning Rienzi The Caxtons Captain Marryat The King’s Own Peter Simple Jacob Faithful Midshipman Easy George Meredith Diana of the Crossways D. M. Muloch John Halifax, Gentleman Ouida Under Two Flags Charles Reade It is Never Too Late to Mend Peg Woffington and Christie Johnstone Hard Cash

Capt Mayne ReidThe Headless Horseman Amelie Rives Virginia of Virginia Olive Schreiner The Story of an African Farm Michael Scott Tom Cringle’s Log Cruise of the Midge H. Sienkiewicz Quo Vadis? Sir Walter Scott Rob Roy The Bride of Lammermoor Old Mortality Kenilworth Guy Mannering Woodstock The Talisman Frank E. Smedley Frank Fairlegh Tobias Smollett Roderick Random Peregrine Pickle Mrs F. A. Steel On the Face of the Waters Laurence Sterne The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman H. B. Stowe Uncle Tom’s Cabin R. S. Surtees Soapey Sponge’s Sporting Tour Eugene Sue The Wandering Jew W. M. Thackeray The History of Henry Esmond The Newcomes The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon Count L. Tolstoy Anna Karenina Anthony Trollope Orley Farm Mrs H. Ward Robert Elsmere D. C. L. Warren S. £10,000 a Year E. Wetherell The Wide, Wide World G. J. Whyte-Melville Market Harborough Inside the Bar Mrs Henry Wood East Lynne