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Title: Dickens' Fur Coat and Charlotte's Unanswered Letters: The Rows and Romances of England's Great Victorian Novelists by Daniel Pool ISBN: 0-06-098435-X Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 June, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.67 (6 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: fun and informative, but ...
Comment: Daniel Pool undoubtedly enjoys his research and his topic, his enthusiasm is evident on every page. Unfortunately, that's the problem. He has too many little tidbits of info that he's got no place for, so he scatters them about without regard as to whether they make sense in the context.
Here's one example. Early in the book, on page 35, he's explaining how Thackeray came to live in Kensington.
"Staffed by a manservant, a cook, and a maid, the house could boast the Kensington Square constructed in the era of Thackeray's beloved Queen Anne just around the corner. The broken-nosed Thackeray (it had happened in a schoolboy fight at the prestigious Charterhouse school) had no wife to share his home."
Now, I'll admit it IS interesting that Thackeray broke his nose in a schoolboy brawl, but does that information really fit into a description of his Kensington home? There are several instances like this, where Pool peppers his prose with juicy tidbits that don't fit with what he's talking about at the time, but don't fit anywhere else either so here you go. It made me spend a lot of time thinking, "why is he telling me this now? Did I miss some reference or something?" It dulled my enjoyment of the book.
Rating: 4
Summary: The pioneers of English fiction.
Comment: Pool's book is a well-paced survey of the industry that produced the greater (well-known) Victorian novels. By "industry" is meant process. He covers the development of publishing houses, writers, lending libraries, serials, trans-atlantic markets, and the innovative way that enterprising book distributors managed to bring their product to the public. It all combines for a fascinating story, and Pool does it well.
It could be said that he focuses on three writers, these being Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, and William Makepeace Thackeray. These three (along with Marian Evans a.k.a. George Eliot) played a vital role in the development of the Victorian novel, and they comprise the bulk of Pool's discussion.
The interaction and intrigues between the main three authors make for National Enquirer-like fodder... with the difference that this stuff is TRUE! Truly, there were "rows and romances" as the subtitle suggests.
The Victorian era was an exciting, but very demanding (downright scary) time to be an author. There were the restraints of format (the serial novel had to be written in self-contained installments; the "triple-decker" had to be able to be neatly split in three), there was the gender prejudice (one ought not to be a woman writer), and there was the ubiquitous spirit of cut-throat competition and jealousy in this burgeoning literary world. Only the strong survived, and only the versatile were recognized at all.
The latter third of the book covers the rise of great writers like Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James.
The author takes a subject having the potential of being dry as crackers and presents it as a sprawling and wonderfully connected story. Good work. Reading this book made me realize that there is a HISTORY to the easy access to good literature we enjoy in our day and age, and made me appreciate those many pioneers who cut the swath to it.
Rating: 4
Summary: A mistitled but informative and fun cultural study
Comment: Let's get this straight right off the bat: Daniel Pool's book is purposefully mistitled to make you think that it would be a sequel of sorts to his extremely useful and popular compendium of facts important to Victorian fiction WHAT CHARLES DICKENS ATE AND JANE AUSTEN KNEW. This book is very different: it reads like a straightforward narrative, and it's an enjoyable, gossipy, and onformative account of the demands of the publishing market in the mid-Victorian world of the novel, and how it created the careers of Dickens, the Brontës, Trollope, Thackeray, George Eliot, etc. The mistitling (undoubtedly to make the book sell better) is thus quite appropriate, in that the novel helpfully etails the ways in which publishing conventions of the time (the rise of Mudie's lending library, the convention of the three-decker) made and shaped literary careers.
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Title: What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: From Fox Hunting to Whist-The Facts of Daily Life in Nineteenth-Century England by Daniel Pool ISBN: 0671882368 Publisher: Touchstone Pub. Date: 21 April, 1994 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: An Elegant Madness: High Society in Regency England by Venetia Murray ISBN: 0140282963 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 28 February, 2000 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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