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British Classics
Among the flowered hedgerows of their island countryside and within the smoky, twisting
streets of their cities, the British people have created some of the most memorable literature of the
Western tradition.
Writers like Charles Dickens and Charlotte Bronte have delighted the minds,
warmed the hearts, and frozen the blood of readers in every corner of the world.
The five writers in this series represent the great age of British novelists. Scenes from these
novels have entered the fancies of generations of readers: Miss Havisham, gray and cadaverous in
her wedding dress, watches fat white spiders scatter from the remains of her ancient cake; Jane Eyre
is awakened in the night by shrieks of laughter from the upper floor; by candlelight, Bathsheba
Everdene opens the coffin of her rival; Maggie Tulliver floats carelessly down the river on the idyll
that will ruin her; Emma Woodhouse, trapped in a moving carriage, is forced to listen to Mr. Elton’s
odious proposal.
These five novels are among the best of the best tradition of such tales.
The stories were
written in the years when England, with its early industrial revolution, was ushering the West into the
horror and excitement of the modern age. In such an age of transition, what stories played out in
the liveliest imaginations of the time? Stories about the power of money to create human destiny,
about the crippling social control exercised by family and fellow citizens, and about the age-old
struggle of the private person to find love and a place in the world.
These novelists’ imaginations were shaped in an age when big Victorian families still gathered
around the hearth, the ladies’ fingers busy netting a purse or embroidering a fire screen, to hear a
few chapters of the latest novel read aloud by lamplight.
This context meant that writers had to
provide a variety show in every volume, including something for everyone – something to produce
laughter, tears, shudders, and a social or moral topic for debate.
What does it mean to be a
gentleman, for example, and how has Pip got it wrong? What does Maggie owe to her love for her
brother, and what does she owe to herself? How in the world can Emma have been so blind?
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Emma by Jane Austen (1775-1817)
Emma Woodhouse knows best; after all, she’s “handsome, clever, and rich,” the doyenne of her
small county society. “Oh!” she says. “I always deserve the best treatment, because I never put up
with any other . . . .” She takes a keen interest in the affairs of her neighbors. Her efforts at matchmaking absorb an attention too little occupied by her quiet life with a hypochondriac father. In fact,
her friend Mr. Knightley warns her against meddling: you can invite a neighbor to dinner, says he,
“and help him to the best of the fish and chicken, but leave him to choose his own wife.” When
dashing Frank Churchill comes to town, Emma notices the marked attentions that he pays to herself.
But Frank has a secret, and Emma has more than one unsuspected admirer.
The characters in
Emma’s circle are drawn with good-natured humor: Mr. Woodhouse, sadly advising guests to skip
the dessert and join him in a bowl of gruel; old Miss Bates nattering blithely on – are there two steps
up to the doorway, or is it one?
“Well, I was persuaded there were two.
How very odd!
I was
convinced there were two, and there is but one.” No wonder a young woman like Emma longs to stir
up a little excitement! But in the end she gets something more – and perhaps something better –
than she had bargained for. 446 pp.
Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
The boys down at Warren’s Malthouse have a lot to say about Bathsheba Everdene, the
beautiful new owner of a local farm. “A headstrong maid, that’s what she is,” they say, “and won’t
listen to no advice at all.” But Gabriel Oak doesn’t like to hear them say it. Gabriel may be a bit of a
bumpkin, but he’s also a shrewd shepherd and a man of courage and integrity. When he asks darkeyed Bathsheba to marry him, he takes her refusal in stride – until he loses his flock through some
quick work by an over-enthusiastic young dog and finds himself obliged to go to work as a shepherd
on Bathsheba’s farm.
Two other men find the impetuous Bathsheba disturbing:
Sergeant Troy, a
gambler, a drinker, and a ladies’ man; and William Boldwood, a local landowner whose silent stoicism
hides the passion that drives him. These four characters play out their parts in an English countryside
of gold and green, until what Bathsheba finds in a coffin begins to untangle the threads of their lives.
374 pp.
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
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Poor little Pip – brought up “by hand” by his bony sister Mrs. Joe, who is too often “on the
Ram-page.” In a life comforted only by the affection of the kindly blacksmith Joe, Pip imagines his
parents from names on a tombstone, and is accustomed to eating the parts of the pig “of which the
pig, when alive, had had the least reason to be vain.” But two experiences change his life forever: an
encounter on a lonely marsh with an escaped convict, and an invitation to come to the decaying
mansion of old Miss Havisham to “play” with her beautiful ward Estella. As he grows up, Pip’s life is
full of questions:
whose is the money that’s spent to make Pip “a gentleman”?
dangerous London lawyer
What does the
Jaggers know about Pip’s mysterious benefactor? What dark secret from
the past has caused Miss Havisham to stop all the clocks in the mansion?
These questions are
answered in ways that tear Pip apart, and make him see the people he knows best – Joe, Estella, Miss
Havisham and, most of all, himself – with new eyes. 525 pp.
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855)
When the young Jane Eyre becomes governess at Thornfield, she already has a long experience
of tragedy. Orphaned as a baby, Jane’s life is scarred by her cold-hearted aunt Mrs. Reed and by her
schooling at Lowood Institution, where an epidemic teaches her an early lesson about the fragility of
human life. At Thornfield, however, Jane is happy: teaching little Adele, reveling in the beauty of the
countryside, and musing over the intriguing character of her gruff, unpredictable employer Mr.
Rochester. But strange things happen at Thornfield in the dark of night, and Jane’s feelings for Mr.
Rochester begin to trouble her. Many of the formative scenes of Jane Eyre’s life take place in halflight – the gloomy death-room where her cruel aunt imprisons her; the cold early morning light at
Lowood school, when she rises half-frozen and half-starved from her narrow bed; the fire that flickers
in the dark room where she rescues Mr. Rochester from a burning bed. But Jane herself is a creature
of reason and light, with a strong heart and a firm will, and she proves to be mistress of her fate at
last. 485 pp.
The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans, 1819-1880)
A dark, rough-haired tomboy, Maggie Tulliver tries her mother’s patience, but her turbulent
father has a soft spot in his heart for “the little wench.” Maggie’s strongest love, however, goes to her
careless, self-centered brother Tom, who plays with her when he likes and takes care to punish her
when she offends him. Poor Maggie’s quick and powerful feelings set the tragic pattern of her life,
as her father’s financial ruin gives her rich, cruel aunts power over her family. Her heart is always
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drawing her in untoward directions: to the itinerant gypsies camped near her father’s mill; to brilliant
but crippled Philip Wakem, son of her father’s dire enemy; to a love that leads to betrayal and shame.
Maggie can’t save her reputation, but her uncorrupted heart draws her at last to her earliest home
and her inevitable destiny. 547 pp.
Suggestions for Further Reading
Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. London: Penguin, 1996.
___. Pride and Prejudice. New York: Norton, 1993.
___. Sense and Sensibility (film). Dir. Ang Lee. Perf. Emma Thompson. 1995.
Bronte, Emily, Anne, and Charlotte. Best Poems of the Bronte Sisters. New York: Dover, 1997.
Bronte, Emily. Wuthering Heights. New York: Norton, 1990.
Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. New York: Norton, 1977.
___. David Copperfield (film). Dir. George Cukor. Perf. Freddie Bartholomew, W.C. Fields. 1935.
___. Hard Times. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans). Middlemarch. New York: Norton, 1977.
___. Adam Bede. London: Penguin, 1980.
Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn. Cranford. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Hardy, Thomas. Hardy: Poems. London: Everyman, 1995.
___. Return of the Native. New York: Norton, 1969.