On New Year’s Day 1839, when she was 19 and had been on the throne for less than two years, Queen Victoria tried to discuss Charles Dickens’s new novel, Oliver Twist, which was still being serialised, with her prime minister, Lord Melbourne. She made little headway with the great grouch. “It’s all among Workhouses and Coffin Makers and Pickpockets,” he declared. “I don’t like that low debasing style.”
It seems, though, that the diminutive monarch who would reign another six decades, most of it in mourning dress, had more of the common touch than her elected representatives—as did her successors. In an interview during the election campaign of 2024, Sir Keir Starmer struggled to name a single novel. Queen Camilla, meanwhile, is a great fiction reader; she has long been a fan of the bonkbuster queen, Jilly Cooper, and led the tributes at her death.
Philip Hensher is an excellent choice for this 700-page commission from Penguin Books. He is professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University and has written 12 novels of his own. “The story of the novel in Britain is a good story,” he writes in his introduction. “It has heroes and heroines, and villains, too. It has quests and adventures, marvellous inventions and hidden treasures.. It discovers secret pathways and gardens, and conceals traps for the unwary. It has magicians, and it has careful, responsible scribes, too. It is a good story.”
Each chapter covers a half-century, starting in the early 18th, when Daniel Defoe imagined his shipwrecked mariner on a desert island. The rise of the novel began at a time when change was possible. “You could, given some luck, become rich, marry who you wanted, discover the world… Or what you wanted could be made impossible, however hard you fought,” Hensher writes.
For the first time, he shows, humanity was living in a world where a hierarchy did not determine life from birth to death, prince or scullery maid. People wanted to read about something new. Literature adapted to new people, new places. And novelists “tried to interest an audience in finding something never written about before, over and over again”.
Hensher bases his study only on books he has read, which number in the hundreds, if not the thousands. Similar studies written by committees of experts are usually collections of siloed pieces, which have little connection to each other. He traces the early novelties and the possibilities they unleashed before 1830, the emerging inventiveness of the later 19th century, the explosion of reading in the first part of the 20th century and the disruptions that spread through the fiction of the postwar era.
In doing so, he shows how different publishing models affected the emergence of a variety of forms, from serialisation to three-volume packaging, all of them affected by developments in copyright law and the emergence of royalties.
Connecting his reading, Hensher traces influences: which is to say, influencers and those touched by them, as well as thematic developments across time. For novel nerds, he is excellent at seeing how new trends emerged, whether in plotting, characterisation or dialogue, such as the advent of first-person writing, reported speech, unreliable narrators, time on the page, filmic jump-cut techniques, the mock autobiographical, as well as the emergence of reviews.
Hensher is excellent at seeing how new trends emerged
Reading every afternoon for 50 years has given him taste and a degree of confidence in his prescriptions. He introduces us—or reintroduces us—to Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Inchbald (who was such an influence on Jane Austen) and the shamefully ignored Ivy Compton-Burnett.
And he has no qualms about doing down those who don’t make the grade: Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, to many the finest novel in the English language, gets half a sentence and isn’t even named (although the title is in the index). James could consider himself fortunate. DM Thomas—whose fashionable novel about the massacre at Babi Yar, The White Hotel, was briefly considered by the Booker Prize judges to be worthy of being a co-winner in 1981 alongside Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children—is, according to Hensher, “patently untalented”.
The cantankerous David Lodge—who wrote to my editor to complain when I reviewed his 2004 novel about Henry James alongside Colm Tóibín’s on the same subject—is just “not up to the task”. Virginia Woolf’s The Waves divides readers; “I frankly admit to detesting it,” Hensher says. “Six characters, no more than voices, embark on monologues.” A seventh is discussed but never speaks.
He sucks in his breath at JRR Tolkien, author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. “There is not much evidence that Tolkien had actually read many novels, though he was keen to denigrate them, and his technique, such as varying his characters’ verbs of speech to no purpose, suggests that he had no interest in acquiring the technique of even a very modestly ambitious novelist.”
“Considering Tolkien was a linguist,” he concludes, “it is surprising how absolutely frightful his manner of writing is.” Ouch.
Hensher stops in 2000. It takes time for a novel’s real power to emerge from the froufrou of marketing and breakfast television. No matter. His survey of the three centuries before that is superb. Buy the books he recommends, but first buy his History of the Novel in Britain. You’ll not find a better one in our lifetime.
