Gifford’s name has cropped up a few times here and, as he has never sent in his legal team to sue the socks off me, here he is again. He has drawn my attention to a poll conducted by Hatchards to pick the best novel of the past 200 years.
Hatchards, founded in 1797 by John Hatchard is London’s oldest bookseller. At some point in its longish life Hatchards seems to have lost its apostrophe. Maybe it went to their new shop at St. Pancras, took the train to Paris and now resides at Place de L’Etoile?
I believe the voting system for a popular TV programme, Strictly Come Dancing, is famously opaque and Hatchards similarly had an esoteric set of rules to select their winner. A panel whittled down 100 titles to a short list of six and the winner was decided by customers’ votes and sales of the titles. The six are Muriel Spark’s, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: Anthony Powell’s, A Question of Upbringing; Christopher Isherwood’s, Goodbye to Berlin; PD James’, Original Sin; Joseph Roth’s, The Radetsky March; and Anthony Trollope’s, The Warden – the only 19th century entry.
I find it a surprising selection. Gifford comments on the absence of The Leopard and P G Wodehouse. I missed D H Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Leo Tolstoy, Jane Austen, Proust and William Thackeray. I do not mourn the absence of Henry James, Thomas Mann or James Joyce.
The winner, by the way, is The Warden, the first novel in The Chronicles of Barsetshire series, published in 1855. I think this says much about the taste of customers at Hatchards. It is now owned by Waterstones, with another apostophe that has gone AWOL, but Hatchards retains its identity as an old and serious bookseller for the discerning bookworm.