OTHER NOVELISTS
1. Maria Edgeworth (1767–1849). This novelist was born in County Longford, Ireland. Her life is largely the catalogue of her books, which are numerous, varied, and in quality very unequal. Her best novels deal with Irish life. They were warmly praised by Scott, who declared that they gave him ideas for his own stories. Castle Rackrent (1800) is successful in its dealing with Irish characters; Lenora (1806) shows a good deal of power; Tales of Fashionable Life (1809) contains much of her best work, including The Absentee, which is commonly considered her masterpiece. Other works are Patronage (1814), Harrington (1817), and Ormand (1817). Her type of fiction is lively and agreeable, except when she indulges in a shallow kind of moralizing. In her day her popularity ran a close second to Scott’s, but now only a slight flicker survives.
2. John Galt (1779–1839) was born in Ayrshire, and there he passed the early years of his life, afterward removing to Greenock. He studied for the Bar, but delicate health drove him abroad. After much traveling he settled in Scotland, and produced a large amount of literary work. He engaged unsuccessfully in business transactions, then took once more to writing novels and to journalism. He died at Greenock, where his career had commenced.
The best of his novels are The Ayrshire Legatees (1820), in the form of a letter-series, containing much amusing Scottish narrative; The Annals of the Parish (1821), his masterpiece, which is the record of a fictitious country minister, doing in prose very much what Crabbe had done in verse; The Entail (1821); and The Provost (1822). Galt had a vigorous style and abundant imagination, with a great deal of humor and sympathetic observation. He is too haphazard and uneven to be a great novelist, though he has value as a painter of Scottish manners.
3. William Harrison Ainsworth (1805–82) was an early imitator of Scott. He wrote a great number of novels, which cover many periods of English history. The first was Sir John Chiverton (1825), but he scored his great success with the Dick Turpin romance Rookwood (1834). A few of the many others were Jack Sheppard (1839), an immense success, The Tower of London (1840), Old St. Paul’s (1841), Windsor Castle (1843), The Star Chamber (1854), The Constable of the Tower (1861), and Preston Fight (1875). Ainsworth possesses little of Scott’s genius, for his handling of history is crude and heavy, and consists of throwing in large, undigested lumps of history. He is feeble in his treatment of his characters, but when he is in the right vein he can give the reader a vigorous narrative and a fair quality of description.
4. George P. R. James (1801–60) was another follower of the method of Scott, and he was responsible for a hundred and eighty-nine volumes, chiefly novels. He was born in London; traveled abroad; settled down to novel-writing; on the strength of some serious historical work was appointed Historiographer Royal; entered the consular service; and died at Venice.
Richelieu (1828), which bears a strong resemblance to Quentin Durward, was his earliest, and is by many considered to be his best, novel. Others include Darnley (1830), De l’Orme (1830), The Gipsy (1835), and Lady Montague’s Page (1858). As was almost inevitable with such mass-production, he makes his novels on a stock pattern. He is fond of florid pageantry, and can be rather ingeniously mysterious in his plots. He has little power in dealing with his characters, and no imaginative grasp of history. In style he is undistinguished, but fluent and clear.
5. Charles Lever (1806–72). Lever was born in Dublin, was educated at Trinity College and Göttingen, and became a physician. The success of his novels caused him to desert his profession, and in the course of time (1842) he became editor of The Dublin University Magazine, which had published his first stories. In his latter years he lived abroad, was appointed consul in Sardinia (1858), and after some other changes died when consul at Trieste.
Harry Lorrequer (1839), his first novel, made a great hit. It is a novel of the picaresque type, dealing with the adventures of the hare-brained but lovable hero. Charles O’Malley (1841) is of the same species, and others are Jack Hinton (1842) and Tom Burke of Ours (1844). The scenes of these novels are pitched in Ireland; there is little plot, what there is consisting of the scrapes of the heroes; the humor is rough-and-tumble, though agreeably lively; and the heroes, who are all much the same, are amiable fellows, with a propensity for falling into trouble and falling out of it. A later class of Lever’s novels was more of the historical cast, and includes The O’Donovan (1845) and The Knight of Gwynne (1847). Others dealt with the Continent, and include The Dodd Family Abroad (1854) and The Fortunes of Glencore (1857). These latter are more stable and serious, and as novels are better than the earlier groups.
6. Frederick Marryat (1792–1848) followed the Smollett tradition of writing sea-stories. He was born in London, entered the Navy at an early age (1806), and saw some fighting just before the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars. He saw further service in different parts of the world, rose to be a captain, and spent much of his later life writing the novels that have given him his place in literature.
His earliest novel was The Naval Officer (1829), a loose and disconnected narrative, which was followed by The King’s Own (1830), a much more able piece of work. From this point he continued to produce fiction at a great rate. The best of his stories are Jacob Faithful (1834), Peter Simple (1834), Japhet in Search of a Father (1836), Mr. Midshipman Easy (1836), and Masterman Ready (1841). All his best books deal with the sea, and have much of its breeziness. Marryat has a considerable gift for plain narrative, and his humor, though it is often coarse, is entertaining. His characters are of the stock types, but they are lively and suit his purpose, which is to produce a good yarn.
7. Michael Scott (1789–1835) was another novelist whose favorite theme was the sea. Scott was not a sailor like Marryat, but a merchant, first in Jamaica and then in his native city of Glasgow. His two tales, Tom Cringle’s Log (1829) and The Cruise of the Midge (1834), were published in Blackwood’s Magazine. They have attempts at fine writing which Marryat did not aspire to, and are none the better for it, for Scott seldom succeeds in being impressive. His actual nautical details lack the intimacy and freshness of Marryat’s. He was, however, a gifted story-teller, and his tales are rarely dull.
8. Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81), Lord Beaconsfield, was a Londoner of Jewish race, and after many struggles and failures rose to be leader of the Tory party in Parliament and Prime Minister. His political career does not concern us here.
He began his literary career as a novelist. Vivian Grey (1826) soon set the fashionable world talking of its author. It dealt with fashionable society, it was brilliant and witty, and it had an easy arrogance that amused, incensed, and attracted at the same time. The general effect of cutting sarcasm was varied, but not improved, by passages of florid description and sentimental moralizing. His next effort was The Voyage of Captain Popanilla (1829), a modern Gulliver’s Travels. The wit is very incisive, and the satire, though it lacks the solid weight of Swift’s, is sure and keen. Disraeli wrote a good number of other novels, the most notable of which were Contarini Fleming (1831), Henrietta Temple (1837), Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847). These last books, written when experience of public affairs had added depth to his vision and edge to his satire, are polished and powerful novels dealing with the politics of his day. At times they are too brilliant, for the continual crackle of epigram dazzles and wearies, and his tawdry taste leads him to overload his ornamental passages. Disraeli also carried further the idea of Captain Popanilla by writing Alroy (1832), Ixion in Heaven (1833), and The Infernal Marriage, which are half allegorical, half supernatural, but wholly satirical romances. In style the prose is inflated, but the later novels sometimes have flashes of real passion and insight.
9. Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1805–73) was the son of General Bulwer. On the death of his mother he succeeded to her estate and took the name of Lytton, later becoming Lord Lytton. He was at first educated privately, and then at Cambridge, where he won a prize for English verse. He had a long and successful career both as a literary man and as a politician. He entered Parliament, was created in turn a baronet and a peer, and for a time held Cabinet rank.
His earliest efforts in literature were rather feeble imitations of the Byronic manner. His first novel was Falkland (1827), which was published anonymously, and then came Pelham (1828). These are pictures of current society, and are immature in their affectation of wit and cynicism. They contain some clever things, but they lack the real merit of the early novels of Disraeli. Another of the same kind was Devereux (1829). Paul Clifford (1830) changed the scene to the haunts of vice and crime, but was not at all convincing. Lytton now took to writing historical novels, the best of which were The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), Rienzi (1835), and Harold (1848). They are rather garish, but clever and attractive, and they had great popularity. He did not neglect the domestic novel, writing The Caxtons (1849) and My Novel (1853); and the terror and supernatural species were ably represented by A Strange Story (1862) and The Coming Race (1871). Lytton is never first-rate, but he is astonishingly versatile, and, considering the speed of his production, his books are of a high quality. His plays, such as Richelieu (1839) and Money (1840), had great success.