The Canon: Map** Writers and Their Works

Abstract

The title of this chapter names two incommensurate bodies: nineteenth-century fiction and the canon. The first is unwieldy, almost monstrous, in its proportions; an estimated 60,000 novels were published between 1855 and 1890 alone (Maunder, 2005, p. 20). Such figures, moreover, do not take into account the explosion of serialized fiction within the growing number of popular periodicals launched during the same period. Within such publications, as Margaret Oliphant suggests, “There are stories to begin with, stories to end with, and stories in the middle” (1858, p. 204). Such was the growth in the production of popular fiction that a critic writing for Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine could declare, without irony, that the “‘age of iron,’ the ‘age of steam,’ and all the various epithets by which that period of time in which we live is distinguished at every progressive step, seem about to retire before the newer one of the ‘age of cheap literature’” (Anon., 1852, p. 118). Resisting, for the moment, the urge to qualify and question, we may simply state that the canon is, in contrast, a much more select and circumscribed body consisting of a mere handful of works. Out of the thousands of published nineteenth-century authors, Francis O’Gorman’s recent – fairly standard – list of the “acknowledged great names of Victorian fiction” includes only nine: Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope (2002, p. 2).

Every week beholds a new irruption of emigrants into the sunny land of fiction, sadly disturbing the old balance of power, and introducing a fearful confusion of names and habits. Within a few years, all the proprieties of the domain have been violated by the intrusion of hordes of ruffians, pickpockets, and vagabonds. Sir Charles Grandison finds himself face to face with Jack Sheppard, and no scorn sparkling in the eyes of Di Vernon can abash the impudence of Mr. Richard Turpin. The swagger of vulgar villainy, the lisp of genteel imbecility, and the free and easy manner of Wap**, are now quite the rage in the Elysian fields of romance.

(Whipple, 1848, p. 354)