Victorians in the OCLC Top 1000

I went looking for Victorians in the list's top 100 spots. In terms of rank, pride of place goes to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland at #9. Charles Dickens occupies the #25 spot with A Christmas Carol, with Robert Louis Stevenson and Treasure Island following closely on his heels in #26. Dickens next pops up on the list with A Tale of Two Cities at #42, followed by Great Expectations at #53, Oliver Twist at #67, and David Copperfield at #71; Stevenson, meanwhile, reappears with Kidnapped (#83). Just behind them: Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (#29) and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (#30). Rudyard Kipling finally pops up with the Jungle Book (#72), no doubt running frantically from Bram Stoker's Dracula (#78). And Anna Sewell sits in #82 with Black Beauty.

Six of these thirteen novels/short story collections could be comfortably classed as children's stories. Except for David Copperfield, they are all relatively short--relative, that is, to the Victorian triple-decker, although a number of them are just short, period. With five novels in the top 100, Dickens clearly runs the Victorian roost.

Where are the other heavy-hitters of Victorian fiction, then? Thomas Hardy first appears with Tess of the D'Urbervilles (#112); George Eliot with Silas Marner--which, I've got to say, is absolutely deadly if you're trying to introduce anyone to Eliot's work (#159); Oscar Wilde with The Picture of Dorian Gray (#172). Poor W. M. Thackeray finally gets his say in with Vanity Fair, which is at #373. But he's doing better than Anthony Trollope, stuck in #500 with Barchester Towers.

Is anybody reading Victorian poetry these days? Lord Tennyson's Idylls of the King squeaks by (#584). Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese appears much further down (#854)--but at least she's on the list, which is more than her husband can say. No Arnold, no Swinburne, no Rossetti (either one).