"Lists of Best Fiction"
In 1883, the St. Louis Public School Library Bulletin published a collection of "Best Novels" lists, one of them derived from a survey conducted expressly for the Bulletin. As always, the results are suggestive.
The top ten from the Bulletin list:
Even though this was supposed to be an international list, in practice the inter- part seems largely confined to the UK--indeed, the first American novelist doesn't appear until #11. Victor Hugo represents the non-Anglophone world, while George Eliot (referenced here, interestingly enough, as Mrs. Lewes) dominates in numbers, even if she doesn't hold the top spot. In all likelihood, most twenty-first century Victorianists would not identify Romola as one of their great novels of choice, let alone The Newcomes. However, everyone here is, at the very least, what we'd now consider a "canonical" novelist.
As always, though, things become more interesting once we go further down. Here are novels #11-20:
Here's The Vicar of Wakefield, which gives us our first non-nineteenth-century novel (which remained a sentimental favorite well into the Victorian period). We also have our first American, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Notably, Walter Scott is not actually doing all that well with this group of voters, possibly because he was well on his way to becoming a "children's" novelist. Edward Bulwer Lytton crops up for the first time, as do two novels not read now by anyone except professional Victorianists (Dinah Mulock Craik's John Halifax, Gentleman and Charles Kingsley's Hypatia) and one novel not read by...anyone (William Black's Princess of Thule, which seems to have been quite popular with this group).
Going through the list reveals some interesting omissions. Only six novels on the list were published before the nineteenth century (The Vicar, Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, Rasselas, Wilhelm Meister) [edited: I'd missed Goethe]. No Fielding [edited: actually, as is pointed out below, I missed Tom Jones], no Sterne, no Smollett. There's only one novel by Jane Austen anywhere, Pride and Prejudice, ranked #52 (where it's tied with novels by Bulwer Lytton, Kingsley, and Defoe). There's also only one novel by James Fenimore Cooper, Last of the Mohicans (tough American crowd!). The only Bronte sister present is Charlotte (three of her four novels). There are two Jewish novelists, Berthold Auerbach and Grace Aguilar, although Aguilar is represented only by two of her non-denominational novels.
Looking at the other lists, the most glaring difference between early twenty-first century taste and late nineteenth-century taste would have to be the lack of Austen, on the one hand, and the preponderance of Scott, on the other. In terms of surprisingly high-ranking novels, the one that immediately jumps out is Thackeray's The Newcomes, which comes out quite well across all the lists in this selection. The best-performing "disappeared" novelist is William Black.