Five Best: Novels Set in the 18th Century

By Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)

1. “Kidnapped" bears reading both as a child and as an adult. The fictional adventures of a teenage David Balfour, told in the first person and based on historical events, are marked both by striking description—“The inn at Kinlochaline was the most beggarly vile place that ever pigs were styed in, full of smoke, vermin, and silent Highlanders"—and colorful dialect—“Ye have a fine, hang-dog, rag-and-tatter, clappermaclaw kind of a look to ye, as if ye had stolen the coat from a potato-bogle." (A potato-bogle being the local term for a scarecrow.) Most memorable to a young reader is the encounter with an adult character of true complexity. David’s companion in flight and redemption is Alan Breck Stewart, a pox-scarred, half-heroic, half-ridiculous Highland clansman—drawn from life—alternately scary and a blast to hang with. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote the book more than a century after the Jacobite rising, after it was safe in Britain to attach some romance to the Highlanders’ rebellion and culture.

Northwest Passage

By Kenneth Roberts (1937)

2. This is another fictional account of real-life events told by a relative innocent: a young artist named Langdon Towne, who joins Robert Rogers (of Rogers’ Rangers fame) in 1759 in his bloody, punitive raid on the Indian village of St. Francis, located on the St. Lawrence River. “Northwest Passage" is frank about the brutality of the mission and unflinching about the consequences in its aftermath. Starvation, madness, cannibalism and death all mount up during the desperate flight home. “Anything, I eventually learned, is preferable to war," muses Langdon, “but that knowledge is something every man must learn for himself—usually at considerable expense." Originally a journalist whose friend and neighbor Booth Tarkington helped guide him through his early novels, Kenneth Roberts was a researcher who found inspiration in the historical record rather than popular folklore. Time and political sensitivity have contributed to his present obscurity, but Roberts remains a pillar of American historical fiction.

A Tale of Two Cities

By Charles Dickens (1859)

3. “Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away." Thus Charles Dickens characterizes Sydney Carton, a cynical, alcoholic lawyer who knows he has wasted his life. This was my first literary encounter with what we later would call an antihero. “A Tale of Two Cities" is crammed with convoluted plot and circumstance and many reversals of fortune. It features an understandably revengeful arch-villainess, Madame Defarge, who has forever branded knitting a sinister activity. The book is notable in capturing the power of historical upheaval to overwhelm the hopes of mere mortals: “Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death;—the last, much the easiest to bestow, O Guillotine!"

Mason & Dixon

By Thomas Pynchon (1997)

4. Leave it to Thomas Pynchon to make something startling from the stumbling misadventures of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, the ill-matched pair of astronomer-surveyors who travel together to witness the Transit of Venus in the heavens, and later to establish a boundary line between American colonies. The narrative, delivered as an entertainment by the loquacious Rev. Wicks Cherrycoke, flies off in countless interesting and unexpected directions. The reverend is no mere servant to the official story: “History is hir’d, or coerc’d, only in Interests that must ever prove base. She is too innocent, to be left within the reach of anyone in Power,—who need but touch her, and all her Credit is in the instant vanish’d, as if it had never been. She needs rather to be tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev’ry Radius, Masters of Disguise to provide her the Costume, Toilette, and Bearing, and Speech nimble enough to keep her beyond the Desires, or even the Curiosity, of Government."

Mutiny on the Bounty

By Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall (1932)

5. The co-authors, both veterans of the Lafayette Escadrille flying corps in World War I, made the narrator of their history-based adventure a young man in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is easy for the reader to take the side of the principled, intelligent Fletcher Christian in his lengthy confrontation with the despotic Lt. William Bligh. But the authors take care to paint such a detailed picture of British naval culture that one shares young Roger Byam’s horror when Fletcher and the majority of the crew take over the ship. Along with the 1935 film adaptation starring Clark Gable and Charles Laughton, the novel occupied one of the preferred genres of my youth: Adults Messing Everything Up. It taps into both the very American distrust of absolute authority and our adolescent dreams of tropical paradise.