Prize Novelists and Condensed Novels: Thackeray and Bret Harte

Abstract

This chapter discusses two very entertaining, and mercilessly accurate, satiric guides to Victorian popular fiction. The first of these guides, Thackeray’s ‘Punch’s Prize Novelists’, appeared in the comic weekly Punch in 1847, and included brilliant parodies of Bulwer Lytton, Disraeli, Charles Lever and the ‘silver fork’ novelist Mrs Gore. Twenty years later, the American writer Bret Harte’s comparably witty series called ‘Condensed Novels’ began appearing first in American and then in English journals. They were also collected in volume form (First and Second Series) between 1867 and 1902. Among Bret Harte’s targets are such highly popular writers of the day as Bulwer Lytton (still), Miss Braddon, Mrs Henry Wood, Conan Doyle and Marie Corelli, as well as certain major figures such as Dickens and Charlotte Brontë.