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All tagged Victorian England
While many have certainly heard of Dickens’ other history (A Tale of Two Cities), few know his first. Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of ‘Eighty was originally published in installments throughout 1841 and it fictionalizes the very real Gordon Riots of 1780.
Desperate Remedies (1871) was Thomas Hardy’s first published novel. Written chronologically by date, from 1835 to the 1860s, the chapter title move the reader through “The Events of Thirty Years,” “The Events of a Fortnight,” “The Events of Eight Days” and so on. With every passing hour, day, week, year, Desperate Remedies leads its reader through the coming-of-age events in young Cytherea Graye’s life.
Thomas Hardy is famous for his later novels like Tess of the d’Urbevilles and Far From the Madding Crowd, but this winter I decided to pick up one of his early works, A Pair of Blue Eyes (originally published in 1873) and I did not regret it. A Pair of Blue Eyes was Hardy’s third novel (published serially) and the first he published under his own name.
Diane Setterfield’s Once Upon a River: A Novel came out in 2018, but as I began to float through its pages, it felt very Victorian in style. Appropriate for its nineteenth-century setting, Setterfield populates her lyrical narrative with characters who embody archetypal roles: good or evil, liminal or privileged, young or old. Also, like Dickens or Hardy, Setterfield’s novel unravels slowly as she introduces various characters whom the story eventually brings together—like tributaries of the river Thames—and it took me a while to get into the flow of the story.
