THE "THREE-DECKER"

Evening Post, Volume CXXIV, Issue 57, 4 September 1937, Page 26

THE "THREE-DECKER"

OLD VICTORIAN NOVELS

Lord Morley, with a characteristic disregard for the distinctions of birth or wealth, once divided the people of England into. those who kept Tennyson on their shelves and those who did not, said "The Times," London, in a recent editorial. It is certainly a more revealing, more fundamental division than the usual Victorian one of carriage people and non-carriage people. After the sheep have thus been divided from the goats the question naturally arises what, in addition to Tennyson, graced the shelves of the sheep. It is safe to say .that bookbuying was seldom more conventional and rigid than it was in the middle of the nineteenth century. No gentleman's house was quite a, gentleman's house unless it had the standard sets of Dickens, Thackeray, Browning, Matthew Arnold, and Macaulay.

Are not these sets today to be found cluttering up the space of every secondhand bookseller What might be called the ephemarae (to use an expressive word from the British Museum Book Catalogue) of Victorian literature were generally borrowed from the circulating libraries. ', One result of this has been that the three-decker novels of those writers, who were hardly successful enough to be ranked with the immortals, can as a rule be bought today only in tattered and shabby condition. ' , -V

-. The flat, unrevealing, unimaginative titles of twentieth-century novels pale into significance before the titles chosen by Victorian authors. , Who,; for example, could pick up without longing to read books called "The Convent and the.Harem" or "Not Wisely, But Too Well," or even, in all its tragic simplicity and three-volume imponderability "Alas!" These novelists were not disturbed by injunctions to keepthe title short and snappy; for was it not the great Charles Reade who wrote "The Course of True Love Never Did Run Smooth"? (What an embarrassing mouthful to have to say in a shop!) Perhaps the height' of simplicity was reached by Miss Agnes Strickland, who, fresh from her triumph over the Queens of England, called her novel "How Will It End?" Could there be anyone so dead to the promptings of curiosity that he could hold in his hand a book called "Never —For Ever" without trying to find out what on earth it was about?

A twentieth-century reader picking up "A Pink Wedding," by R. M. Jcphson, might be pardoned for thinking that it was a moving description of the nuptials of two intellectual Socialists. Who could avoid wanting to know what happened to "Poor Miss Finch" (a governess at a guess) or whether "Lady Adelaide's Oath" is really about a nobleman's foul-mouthed daughter? Some titles like * "Four Studies of Love," "Not Like Other Girls," "The Sister Lawless," or "That Unfortunate Marriage" suggests that there was some justification for the Victorian mother who ruefully said of her daughters, "They are dear good girls, but they do read novels on a Sunday."

The ■ Victorian novel may be said to begin with Miss Emily Eden, recently rescued from oblivion by Mr. John Gore and the present Foreign Secre-' tary, and to, end with the eighties. That all interest in them, is far from dead is implied by the reprinting this year of "Phineas Finn."