Six Set Books: Candide to A Doll’s House

What the Nineteenth Century Learned to Do

The six set works run from 1759 to 1925 and, read in order, show the novel and the play acquiring their modern instruments.

**Voltaire, Candide (1759).** A philosophical tale rather than a novel: characters are positions, catastrophes arrive at absurd speed, and the target is Leibniz's claim that this is the best of all possible worlds. Pangloss keeps the doctrine intact through earthquake, war, disease and execution, and his imperviousness is the joke. The ending — il faut cultiver notre jardin, we must cultivate our garden — refuses both optimism and despair in favour of work.

**Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774).** Epistolary, and almost entirely one-sided: we get Werther's letters and not his correspondents' replies, which seals us inside a consciousness we can see is distorting. It caused a documented wave of imitative behaviour across Europe, the first recorded instance of a book being blamed for its readers' actions.

**Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1857). The technical landmark. Flaubert perfects free indirect discourse**: third-person narration that takes on a character's language and judgements without quotation marks or attribution. The reader is inside Emma's evaluations and outside them at once, and the irony needs no narrator to point it out. Flaubert was prosecuted for obscenity and acquitted.

**Dostoevsky, The Gambler (1866).** Written under contract in twenty-six days to pay gambling debts, the author's situation and his subject are the same. Its interest is the psychology of compulsion: the gambler does not want to win, he wants the state of playing, and Dostoevsky renders that from inside.

**Kafka, The Trial (written 1914–15, published 1925).** Unfinished, and published posthumously against Kafka's instructions by Max Brod. Only the first and last chapters have certain positions; the middle chapters were left in a disputed order, which is more appropriate to the book than any settled arrangement would be. Josef K. is arrested without being told the charge, and the horror is procedural rather than violent.

**Ibsen, A Doll's House (1879).** Three acts. Nora discovers her marriage is a performance and walks out, and the door slamming at the final curtain was described as the sound heard around the world. Ibsen was pressured into writing an alternative ending in which she stays; he called it a barbaric outrage and it is not performed.

Common pitfall: reading free indirect discourse as the narrator's own opinion. When Madame Bovary calls something beautiful in Emma's vocabulary, the narrator is reporting her judgement, not sharing it, missing this makes the novel sentimental rather than devastating.