The Quintessential Victorian Novel

Bleak House is hard to beat.
A runner up might be Eliot's Middlemarch, for the all the reasons you credit Bleak House, but falling short of #1 for its lack of the playfulness Dickens brings.

What do you mean he captures the period? That's when he lived, you twat! He was writing about, and satirising, the present day! He wasn't thinking about US! It's a tribute to his ability that he is still read, but all Chaz wanted was to get his resentment out and earn a buck.

Oh, how nice! My first flame war on this board.

I will refrain, though.

If an author is simply interested in making a buck, he would write nice comfortable prose, wouldn't he? Dickens did not do that. He write satirically about the inhumane institutions of his period -- it must have been painful for his audience, from time to time -- and he contributed a shit-load of money to support reform projects (but he also satiricised those projects in Bleak House).

His resentment was motivated by genuine compassion for the poor; and his buck was earned from the reading public (the relatively well-off), so he wasn't taking advantage of anyone.

That he lived in the period he captured is relevant, but not that does not automatically ensure that we will be able to experience the period. Will future generations be able to learn about the 20th century by reading Stephen King, for example?

That he wasn't thinking about us is wholly irrelevant.

Yeah, Dickens, but I loved EF Benson's 'An Autumn Sowing', cause it had a well crafted metaphor for the class struggle that I can't be bothered to go into here. Class struggle, I mean middle class vs upper class, cause that would be the quintessential literary problem of the period

Hmm... Hadn't heard of that before. Thanks; title noted. If the problem of the period is the class struggle, then what about Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South?

A Victorian novel written quite recently that I enjoyed was Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White. Lots of class struggle.

I find it very difficult to argue against Dickens as THE Victorian author.

However, I would add Thomas Hardy too. Although he wrote about a distinct part of England, the subtext in all his novels is change. How the mechanisation of agriculture affected the rural economy and ended in displacement. If the message wasn't bleak enough, rapes, murders and pretty damsels falling into weirs add to that sense of gloom.

But, all said, Dickens and Victoriana go hand in hand.

It isn't Middlemarch, I don't think. That's like the classic Russian Novel.

Maybe not for a nomination, but if i may, i'd suggest Wilkie Collins whom i have recently discovered (a friend of dickens, btw). I tend to think that in all his overconstructed plots and incredibly tense sensuality, there is in his work (especially Armadale and No Name) more about the Victorian period than meets the eyes of those critics (the most part, to be honest) who dismiss his novels as being simply "misteries"