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Masterpieces of the masters of fiction

Chapter 2: PREFACE
By William Dudley Foulke
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About This Book

An essayistic survey in which the author revisits roughly forty canonical prose works, choosing one representative story from each and reading them in rapid succession to form a comparative perspective. He explains selection criteria—excluding living authors and verse fiction—arranges entries chronologically, and gives concise critical sketches that summarize plots, note thematic features and stylistic qualities, and weigh merits and faults. Prefatory remarks outline the method and purpose, while each chapter offers a compact appreciation intended to show how time affects initial impressions.

PREFACE

A short time ago I determined that instead of taking up any new works of fiction I would go over the masterpieces which I had read long since and see what changes time had made in my impressions of them. To do this I chose some forty of the most distinguished authors and decided to select one story from each,—the best one, if I could make up my mind which that was—at all events, one which stood in the first rank of his productions. I determined to read these in succession, one after another, in the shortest time possible, and thus get a comprehensive notion of the whole. Of course under such conditions exhaustive criticism would be out of the question, but I thought that the general perspective and the comparative merits and faults of each work would appear more vividly in this manner than in any other way.

The productions of living authors were discarded, as well as all fiction in verse.

Arranged chronologically, the selections I made were as follows:

1535 Rabelais “Gargantua”
1605-1615 Cervantes “Don Quixote”
1715-1735 Le Sage “Gil Blas”
1719 Defoe “Robinson Crusoe”
1726 Swift “Gulliver’s Travels”
1733 Prévost “Manon Lescaut”
1749 Fielding “Tom Jones”
1759 Johnson “Rasselas”
1759 Voltaire “Candide”
1759-1767 Sterne “Tristram Shandy”
1766 Goldsmith “The Vicar of Wakefield”
1774 Goethe “The Sorrows of Young Werther”
1787 Saint Pierre “Paul and Virginia”
1807 Chateaubriand “Atala”
1813 Austen “Pride and Prejudice”
1813 Fouqué “Undine”
1814 Chamisso “Peter Schlemihl”
1820 Irving “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”
1820 Scott “Ivanhoe”
1827 Manzoni “The Betrothed”
1835 Balzac “Eugenie Grandet”
1841 Gogol “Dead Souls”
1845 Dumas “The Three Guardsmen”
1847 Brontë “Jane Eyre”
1847 Merimée “Carmen”
1850 Dickens “David Copperfield”
1850 Hawthorne “The Scarlet Letter”
1852 Thackeray “Henry Esmond”
1852 Stowe “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”
1853 Gaskell “Cranford”
1856 Auerbach “Barfüssele”
1857 Von Scheffel “Ekkehard”
1857 Feuillet “The Romance of a Poor Young Man”
1857 Flaubert “Madame Bovary”
1859 Meredith “The Ordeal of Richard Feverel”
1861 Reade “The Cloister and the Hearth”
1862 Hugo “Les Misérables”
1863 Eliot “Romola”
1866 Dostoyevsky “Crime and Punishment”
1868 Turgenieff “Smoke”
1869 Blackmore “Lorna Doone”
1878 Tolstoi “Anna Karenina”
1883 Stevenson “Treasure Island”

I think I see many picking out here and there a name, and hear them saying, “What a bad selection! Wilkie Collins ought to be in the list rather than Charles Reade; ‘Vanity Fair’ ought to be in the place of ‘Henry Esmond,’ ‘Waverly’ in the place of ‘Ivanhoe’,” etc., etc. But if we except two or three names like Manzoni and Gogol, who are not yet estimated at their full value by English and American readers, I think common opinion will justify, in a general way, my catalogue of authors, and I feel sure that the works chosen, if not the masterpieces, are at least fairly typical of each.