The 100 Best Novels, 1898 style

In comments, Arthur pointed me to Michael Caines' reprint of Clement K. Shorter's list of 100 best novels, circa 1898.  Some reflections:

• To modern eyes, the most startling omission from the seventeenth century would be all of Aphra Behn.  And Bunyan's The Holy War? Not The Pilgrim's Progress? (Perhaps he just assumed everyone would have absorbed PP by osmosis.)  
• By contrast, I suspect most of us would find his eighteenth-century selections pretty unexceptionable, the glaring absence of Tristram Shandy aside.  Clara Reeve's The Old English Baron (yes, I've read it) is really the only novel that has dropped out, although not out of academic consciousness--it's the sort of book one needs to read, as opposed to needs to assign to hapless undergraduates.   And I'm guessing most of us would send students to Humphry Clinker instead of Roderick Random.  Once again, I note that it takes about a century before we can tell if a work will succeed over the long haul.
• Of course, it's when we hit the nineteenth century that we see the century principle in action.  Several of the novels have survived on syllabi and in academic discourse: Jane Porter's The Scottish Chiefs, for example, is an important precursor to Scott's historical fiction (as Scott acknowledged); similarly, it is not entirely unlikely for an undergrad or grad to encounter, say, the Edgeworth, Lady Morgan, Sand, or Ferrier novels listed here.   Marryat still has a vogue among fans of sea-faring adventures.  But many of these entries qualify as "material to read for doctoral dissertations and/or highly-specialized monographs" (e.g., the entries for G. P. R. James and Ainsworth).  And, of course, some probably aren't even that (e.g., Crowe, Whyte-Melville).  I mean...Valerius? Was he joking?
• Americanists will note the presence of Hawthorne and Stowe but the absence of Twain and Melville.
• It's odd that Reuben Sachs is on the list, but not Eliot's Daniel Deronda (the novel to which it responds). Silas Marner was popular at one point, lest we forget (as it's rather easy to do...).  Grace Aguilar's The Vale of Cedars is, historically speaking, a more interesting choice: Aguilar was the 19th c.'s most famous Jewish novelist among Christian readers, but this is a more uncompromisingly "Jewish" novel than some of her other well-known works. 
• Speaking of Aguilar, there's a fair amount of religious fiction on the list, of varying stripes: the evangelical Cummins and Warner, the High Church Sewell, the sort of High Church-y (but eirenic) Charles, the Catholic Kavanagh, the Dissenter William Hale White, etc.  Shorter's religious aesthetic appears to be lower-case catholic.
• Anne Manning was still a "minor classic" by the standards of the Everyman's Library in the early 20th c., then vanished abruptly. 
• I count about thirty-odd women on the list.  
• Bulwer-Lytton is there, which should remind us all that he used to be considered an important novelist, not the inspiration for a bad writing contest.  (As John Sutherland has pointed out on more than one occasion.  No Bulwer-Lytton, no Victorian novel as we know it, really.)  If you walk through the Chicago Cultural Center, you'll see Bulwer-Lytton enshrined in a mosaic as one of the world's great novelists, while Walter Scott hangs out with the poets instead.  
• From Shorter's POV, the 1840s seem to have been the glory years of the nineteenth-century novel.
• I imagine that most of us would not immediately send Scott-newbies to Kenilworth.  
• Some of Shorter's readers might have blinked at Ruth as the representative Gaskell.  
• The average Victorianist, if they've read any Meredith, will have read The Egoist or The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (or Modern Love, if you want to count that as a novel), not Rhoda Fleming.