The best Victorian novels written in an extremely weird style

This book has become so familiar to us through cartoons and movies that we often forget how very weird it is as a piece of writing. The book begins when Alice, bored of her sister’s company, notices a white rabbit muttering to itself “Oh dear! Oh dear!”, and starts to become curious—not, mind you, because talking rabbits are impossible, but only because they are so very intriguing.

The rest of the book shares this bemused tone: Alice will be subjected to all sorts of indignities, including a near-beheading, but as a “good” Victorian girl, she will generally accept the bizarre reality that is presented to her. Carroll’s mastery of language is key to this effect. Nearly every character sounds sensible, turning well-formed logical sentences, but they never make much actual sense, and their speeches are riddled with so many puns, double meanings, and other linguistic tricks that one can never take anything at face value.

A wonderful parody of the arbitrariness of linguistic (and other) systems, Carroll’s classic is the most verbally inventive fiction of its period. 

The first time I read this book, I was baffled. In the second chapter, we get introduced to the main character by being told that “he has a leg”—the “leg of the born cavalier,” a “burning leg,” the “leg that smiles, that winks, is obsequious to you, yet perforce of beauty self-satisfied.”

Clearly, this is no ordinary leg, but Meredith is no ordinary novelist. Skeptics claim that Meredith’s style is arch, theatrical, self-indulgent, and pompous—not unlike the central character of this book, a clueless narcissist named Willoughby who seeks to dominate everyone around him.

But I have since come to appreciate how Meredith draws on the full resources of the language to undercut anything (or anyone) that he deems insincere and artificial, blending the intensity of poetry with the exuberance of prose to create a style both versatile and original.  

Walter Pater’s only novel is not just weird for its style but also for its plot, which traces the development of a young man as he experiments with the various philosophies and religious sects of second-century Rome. But content and style go hand in hand, for, as Pater writes, “That preoccupation of the dilettante with what might seem mere details of form, after all, did but serve the purpose of bringing to the surface, sincerely and in their integrity, certain strong personal intuitions, a certain vision of apprehension of things as really being, with important results, thus, rather than thus.”

Language, in other words, is how we feel our way through the world, and the novel brilliantly captures the experience of being a young person for whom syntax and vocabulary constitute a way of life. When it was first published, many were repulsed by Pater’s convoluted syntax and rarefied tone, dismissing it as a professor’s novel. But this book reveals, with every exquisitely turned phrase, how language lies at the heart of our self-construction. 

Today, Thackeray is best remembered for Vanity Fair, but many of his fellow writers—including Anthony Trollope and later Virginia Woolf—thought Henry Esmond was his best book. The story itself can be hard to appreciate, delving into the intricacies of eighteenth-century politics. George Eliot called it “the most uncomfortable book you can imagine” because the hero ends up marrying his mother (figure).

The real charm of the book lies in its style, which is a painstaking pastiche of English in the age of Queen Anne. Thackeray insisted that the first edition be published using an eighteenth-century font to ensure the illusion was complete. Peppered with appearances by real historical figures (such as the poet Jonathan Swift), Henry Esmond set a new standard for the historical novel in English and paved the way for the parodies of later periods. 

When I first came across this story by William Morris, I didn’t think it was Victorian at all. The language and tone are archaically medieval, as are the plot points involving daggers and dwarves. And yet Morris was very much a nineteenth-century writer insofar as he shared that period’s interest in foreign times and places, including the historical past.

While Thackeray liked the eighteenth century, Morris was obsessed with the Middle Ages, and this book represents an attempt to adapt the style and spirit of chivalric romances to the form of the modern novel. The resulting work, by turns dreamy and gripping, set the template for future novels of “fantasy” (such as The Lord of the Rings), and still provides a fascinating way of escaping to—and from—the nineteenth century.