One of the glories of English fiction in the past few decades or so has been a spate of big novels about Victorian England by some of the country’s most imaginative authors. Though none of these books sets out precisely to imitate Victorian originals, Sarah Waters’s masterpiece Fingersmith is a gripping story that begins among the crime-ridden slums of Oliver Twist. The title of Michael Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White quotes Tennyson’s line, “Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white” from his mock-epic, “The Princess,” and the novel enters the milieu of the later Victorians, Trollope, James, Meredith, Hardy, and George Eliot. The American-born Charles Palliser’s Quincunx pays homage to Wilkie Collins’s great books, The Woman in White and The Moonstone. And A. S. Byatt’s Booker Prize-winner, Possession, reimagines and re-energizes the perfervid world of late Victorian poetry.
Her new novel, The Children’s Book, takes us once again to late Victorian England.
Her new novel, The Children’s Book,takes us once again to late Victorian England; and with Byatt as a guide we are in capable hands. Clearly the popular caricature of the Victorians, with their “We are not amused” Queen, their purported horror of sex, their overall stultification, keeps us—trapped as we are in a present-tense ghetto—from appreciating what was a fascinating, complex, and above all, immensely vital age. The South Kensington Museum, which was to become the Victoria and Albert, provides both the starting point and emblem for this novel,
