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The promise of literature in the coming days: the best hundred Irish books controversy of 1886
In January 1886 Sir John Lubbock, a Liberal MP and scientist, addressed the members of the London Working Men's College on “Books and Reading,” and recommended a list of a “hundred good books.” The Pall Mall Gazette decided to publicise the list, as “the hundred best books,” a small but significant revision which has as its ultimate reference Matthew Arnold's idea that culture can make the “best that has been known and thought in the world current everywhere” (Arnold 113). Though Arnold himself declined to comment on Lubbock's list, the ensuing column on “The Best Hundred Books by the Best Judges” proved to be enduringly popular. It ran for four weeks, and the responses to Lubbock – which ranged greatly in tone, manner and content – were reprinted in a Pall Mall Gazette “Extra” which appeared on 10 March 1886 and sold more than forty thousand copies within the next three weeks. Obviously this debate took place in a context of growing anxiety amongst the intelligentsia about the seemingly endless proliferation of mass produced cheaper books, especially in the area of fiction. In the face of such abundance, it was generally felt that it was important for the “Best Judges” to instruct the newly literate classes on what to read. Indeed, as N. N. Feltes has shown in Literary Capital and the Late Victorian Novel, the response to Lubbock's original list may be read as index of late Victorian ideologies of literary value.
History
School
- The Arts, English and Drama
Department
- English and Drama
Published in
Victorian Literature and CultureVolume
39Issue
2Pages
581 - 592Citation
HUTTON, C., 2011. The promise of literature in the coming days: the best hundred Irish books controversy of 1886. Victorian Literature and Culture, 39 (2), pp. 581 - 592.Publisher
© Cambridge University PressVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2011Notes
Closed access. This article was published in the journal, Victorian Literature and Culture [© Cambridge University Press] and the definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1060150311000155ISSN
1060-1503Publisher version
Language
- en