Customer Reviews

Dickens' Fur Coat and Charlotte's Unanswered Letters: The Rows and Romances of England's Great Victorian Novelists

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I must admit that the title of this book instantly drew my curiosity. As a fan of many Victorian novelists, I was curious what so-called secrets and mysteries Daniel Pool would uncover. "Dickens' Fur Coat and Charlotte's Unanswered Letters" may not be an appropriate title since Pool covers much more ground than just these two authors; he examines the rise of the novel in England during the nineteenth century with great care and thoroughness.

While Pool does focus a great amount of time on the writings of Dickens and Charlotte Bronte (and briefly on her sisters) this book is not just a mere examination of authors. Mixed in with the mini-biography, and gossip-page fodder scandals these authors created, is the detailed explanation of the popularity of the novel. Pool iterates the progress novels made from three-decker behemoths to readily available cheap one-volume novels. Another way that the popularity of novels expanded in England was due to serialization; the publishing of novels in installments in literary magazines made these stories available to a wider audience in an age when novels could only be accorded as a luxury to the richest society members.

Throughout the course of the book, readers are treated to mini-biographical sketches of writers such as Trollope, Thackerary, Hardy, Henry James, and George Eliot. These sketches are intermingled with almost too much information at times and the book is supplemented with numerous pictures. At times it seems as if Pool is trying to cram too much information into too little space; and sometimes it seems as if the same information is being repeated with no overall plan as to the direction of his writing. However, "Dickens' Fur Coat and Charlotte's Unanswered Letters" is a delightful read for any fan of Victorian novelists, or novels and the rise of literature in general.

This is a fun book to read. It is not too serious, not too cluttered, and has no footnotes. It wets one's appetite to go to that bookshelf and dust off the classics of times past. And that I shall do without fail. Cudos to Elissa Altman, a kindred spirit.

Daniel Pool undoubtedly enjoys his research and his topic, his enthusiasm is evident on every page. Unfortunately, that's the problem. He has too many little tidbits of info that he's got no place for, so he scatters them about without regard as to whether they make sense in the context.

Here's one example. Early in the book, on page 35, he's explaining how Thackeray came to live in Kensington.
"Staffed by a manservant, a cook, and a maid, the house could boast the Kensington Square constructed in the era of Thackeray's beloved Queen Anne just around the corner. The broken-nosed Thackeray (it had happened in a schoolboy fight at the prestigious Charterhouse school) had no wife to share his home."
Now, I'll admit it IS interesting that Thackeray broke his nose in a schoolboy brawl, but does that information really fit into a description of his Kensington home? There are several instances like this, where Pool peppers his prose with juicy tidbits that don't fit with what he's talking about at the time, but don't fit anywhere else either so here you go. It made me spend a lot of time thinking, "why is he telling me this now? Did I miss some reference or something?" It dulled my enjoyment of the book.

This book was very informative, but there was not enough information about the less well known authors and almost too much about Dickens and Bronte.