9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Engaging and entertaining. Scattershot choice of topics., January 21, 1998
This review is from: Dickens' Fur Coat and Charlotte's Unanswered Letters: The Rows and Romances of England's Great Victorian Novelists (Hardcover)
A very fast read -- a book I haven't wanted to put down. I was tempted to skip class to read it -- and I'm the professor! Pool's other book (What Jane Austen Ate and Dickens Knew) is like a research summary. Although it's good also, and well written, it has less to offer to the nonspecialist than this book, which manages to extract good storytelling from what must be quite fragmentary source materials. For scholarly purposes, Pool's chapters could be better focused; also, in general, he seems vague and scattershot on time period. Writing about Victorian lending libraries, he gives pre-Victorian opinions on them (such as from Jane Austen). If he's going to verge into the Romantic period, there's some good scandalous literary and publishing history therefrom (esp. relating to Byron and Scott) that might fit in this book. I feel its absence.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A mistitled but informative and fun cultural study, April 1, 2001
Let's get this straight right off the bat: Daniel Pool's book is purposefully mistitled to make you think that it would be a sequel of sorts to his extremely useful and popular compendium of facts important to Victorian fiction WHAT CHARLES DICKENS ATE AND JANE AUSTEN KNEW. This book is very different: it reads like a straightforward narrative, and it's an enjoyable, gossipy, and onformative account of the demands of the publishing market in the mid-Victorian world of the novel, and how it created the careers of Dickens, the Brontės, Trollope, Thackeray, George Eliot, etc. The mistitling (undoubtedly to make the book sell better) is thus quite appropriate, in that the novel helpfully etails the ways in which publishing conventions of the time (the rise of Mudie's lending library, the convention of the three-decker) made and shaped literary careers.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The pioneers of English fiction., January 26, 2003
This review is from: Dickens' Fur Coat and Charlotte's Unanswered Letters: The Rows and Romances of England's Great Victorian Novelists (Hardcover)
Pool's book is a well-paced survey of the industry that produced the greater (well-known) Victorian novels. By "industry" is meant process. He covers the development of publishing houses, writers, lending libraries, serials, trans-atlantic markets, and the innovative way that enterprising book distributors managed to bring their product to the public. It all combines for a fascinating story, and Pool does it well.
It could be said that he focuses on three writers, these being Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, and William Makepeace Thackeray. These three (along with Marian Evans a.k.a. George Eliot) played a vital role in the development of the Victorian novel, and they comprise the bulk of Pool's discussion.
The interaction and intrigues between the main three authors make for National Enquirer-like fodder... with the difference that this stuff is TRUE! Truly, there were "rows and romances" as the subtitle suggests.
The Victorian era was an exciting, but very demanding (downright scary) time to be an author. There were the restraints of format (the serial novel had to be written in self-contained installments; the "triple-decker" had to be able to be neatly split in three), there was the gender prejudice (one ought not to be a woman writer), and there was the ubiquitous spirit of cut-throat competition and jealousy in this burgeoning literary world. Only the strong survived, and only the versatile were recognized at all.
The latter third of the book covers the rise of great writers like Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James.
The author takes a subject having the potential of being dry as crackers and presents it as a sprawling and wonderfully connected story. Good work. Reading this book made me realize that there is a HISTORY to the easy access to good literature we enjoy in our day and age, and made me appreciate those many pioneers who cut the swath to it.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
