The novel, in its best form, I regard as one of the most powerful engines of civilization ever invented.
Novels are sweets. All people with healthy literary appetites love them,—almost all women; a vast number of clever, hard-headed men, judges, bishops, chancellors, mathematicians, are notorious novel-readers, as well as young boys and sweet girls, and their kind, tender mothers.
_Robinson Crusoe_, by Daniel Defoe. “‘Robinson Crusoe’ contains (not for boys, but for men) more religion, more philosophy, more psychology, more political economy, more anthropology, than are found in many elaborate treatises on these special subjects.”—F. HARRISON.
_Don Quixote de la Mancha_, by Cervantes. “The work of Cervantes is the greatest in the world after Homer’s Iliad, speaking of it, I mean, as a work of entertainment.”—DR. JOHNSON.
_Gulliver’s Travels_, by Dean Swift. “Not so indispensable, but yet the having him is much to be rejoiced in.”—R. CHAMBERS.
_The Vicar of Wakefield_, by Goldsmith. “The blotting out of the ‘Vicar of Wakefield,’ from most minds, would be more grievous than to know that the island of Borneo had sunk in the sea.”—IBID.
_The Waverley Novels._ If not all, at least the following: Ivanhoe; The Talisman; Kenilworth; The Monastery; The Abbot; Old Mortality; The Antiquary; Guy Mannering; The Bride of Lammermoor; The Heart of Midlothian.
_Dickens’s Novels._ Not all, but the following: David Copperfield; Dombey and Son; Nicholas Nickleby; Old Curiosity Shop; Oliver Twist; and The Pickwick Papers.
_Thackeray’s Novels._ Vanity Fair; Pendennis; The Newcomes; The Virginians; Henry Esmond.
_George Eliot’s Novels._ Adam Bede; The Mill on the Floss; Romola; Middlemarch; Daniel Deronda.
_Telemachus_, by Fénelon. (Hawkesworth’s translation.)
_Tom Jones_, by Fielding. “We read his books as we drink a pure, wholesome, and rough wine, which cheers and fortifies us, and which wants nothing but bouquet.”—H. A. TAINE.
_Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship_, by Goethe. (Carlyle’s translation.)
_Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Novels._ The Scarlet Letter; The Marble Faun; The Blithedale Romance; The House of Seven Gables.
_Hypatia_ and _Alton Locke_, by Charles Kingsley.
_Uncle Tom’s Cabin_, by Mrs. Stowe. “We have seen an American woman write a novel of which a million copies were sold in all languages, and which had one merit, of speaking to the universal heart, and was read with equal interest to three audiences, namely, in the parlor, in the kitchen, and in the nursery of every house.”—EMERSON.