I’m not sure if Dombey and Son is considered early Dickens. I think it’s the earliest of his books that I like pretty much unreservedly. The early books—Pickwick, Oliver, NickNick, Curiosity Shop aren’t that great, although I am fond of NickNick largely because it was the magnificent David Edgar RSC production (as televised on PBS) that gave me a taste for Dickens. I haven’t read Barnaby Rudge, and Chuzzlewit is only fairly good. And then comes Dombey.
After Dombey, there’s Copperfield, which I don’t really like, Bleak House, which I adore, Hard Times, of which I am very fond, Little Dorrit, which is a thing of beauty, and A Tale of Two Cities, which everyone likes. That’s a four-novel peak, by the way, that is absolutely outstanding. And I suspect from Dombey to Great Expectations (the next book after Two Cities, it’s as good a seven-book VORN as anybody’s. It’s hard to compare across eras, of course, but looking at dominance over his contemporaries, you see why people put him in the inner circle.
I would argue, though, that the decline phase begins with Expectations, which starts extremely well but bogs down toward the end. After that, it’s Our Mutual Friend, which I haven’t read and the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood.
Now, I don’t know if people consider Dombey to be the start of the dominant peak, or if they consider it the end of the early period. There are some problems with the book, most notably the authorial harping on the details of the theme of pride, rather than saving the authorial punch until we are weakened by the shown events. On the other hand, there’s a fantastic female character, one with some actual character, and that lifts this book well out of the ordinary. Either way, it’s worth reading. You know, if you like Dickens.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
Reliable VORN data would be a revolutionary advance in criticism of the novel. The challenge, of course, lies in defining replacement level. Should it be an “all-time” value, or should it be calculated year by year based on the average performance of the N-worst publishing novelists in a given year, or should it be based on the performance of “freely available talent?” Since FAT novelists are generally not getting published, it’s hard to measure the difference in quality between them and the worst regulars. One might use self-published novels as a baseline, but that might be an unreliable baseline since extraneous factors like independent wealth and degree of personal vanity may determine who self-publishes and who just keeps their completed novels in a desk drawer. It’s an interesting problem.
VORN?
Voice-Over Reliable Narrator?
Vardibidian’s Old Rented Newt?
Verifiable Online Respectable Nuptials?
Value On Returned Novels?
“Value Over Replacement Novelist.”
Modeled (both brilliantly and hilariously) on
“VORP,” which is “Value Over Replacement Player. The number of runs contributed beyond what a replacement-level player at the same position would contribute if given the same percentage of team plate appearances. VORP scores do not consider the quality of a player’s defense.”
–glossary of terms at Baseball Prospectus, http://www.baseballprospectus.com/glossary/
As Chris says, VORN is the Value Over Replacement Novelist. Many of the members of the Society for Analyzing Big Novels (SABN) have been promoting the idea that a novel should be compared, not to the average novel of its era, but to a replacement-value novel, that is, an easily obtainable novel that was not considered quite good enough to read.
Sadly, we really lack good data from the 19th century. There are plenty of anecdotes, but it’s hard to nail down anything specific before, say, Carnegie’s work at the tail end of the century. After that, we can look at very detailed information, including page-by-page data for more than half a century of novels, but for these pioneers, we often are left with just a sense that the Big Names must have been Great, just because we’ve heard of them.
VORN also attempts to take context into account, which is controversial with some researchers, particularly when attempting to apply the methods to these early novelists. For instance, many people feel that in the 19th Century, it was easier for a novel to really dominate the field, because the level of competition was not as great (partially, of course, because of the publisher’s artificially reducing the field due to prejudices we hope we have outgrown). On the other hand, a talented writer now has many other outlets for his work—movies, television, advertising, blogging, etc. To some extent, the SABN-heads attempt, through metrics such as VORN, PRAR (Press Runs above Replacement), OPS (Orality Plus Structure, a metric that adds a measure of storytelling with a measure of sophistication), and the extremely controversial Publisher Abuse Points system, to raise literary criticism above the level of barroom bullshitting.
Thanks,
-V.
A lofty goal. Let me know how it works out for you. I’ll be in the bar with a shovel 😉
peace
Matt