The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time, According to 750,000 Readers in the UK (2003)

In the eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry, the read­ers of Europe went mad for epis­to­lary nov­els. France had, to name the most sen­sa­tion­al exam­ples, Mon­tesquieu’s Let­tres per­sanes, Rousseau’s Julie, and Lac­los’ Les Liaisons dan­gereuses; Ger­many, Goethe’s Die Lei­den des jun­gen Werther and Hölder­lin’s Hype­r­i­on. The Eng­lish proved espe­cial­ly insa­tiable when it came to long-form sto­ries com­posed entire­ly out of let­ters: soon after its pub­li­ca­tion in 1740, Samuel Richard­son’s Pamela — by some reck­on­ings, the first real Eng­lish nov­el — grew into an all-encom­pass­ing cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non, which Richard­son him­self out­did eight years lat­er with Claris­sa. Alas, when the BBC sur­veyed the pub­lic two and three-quar­ter cen­turies lat­er to deter­mine the most beloved nov­el in the U.K., nei­ther of those books even made the top 100.

With the pos­si­ble excep­tions of Bram Stok­er’s Drac­u­la (#104) and Mary Shel­ley’s Franken­stein (#171) — two works of nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry hor­ror that make use of a vari­ety of tex­tu­al forms, let­ters includ­ed — the rank­ings pro­duced by “The Big Read” includ­ed prac­ti­cal­ly no epis­to­lary nov­els. (Nor did eigh­teenth-cen­tu­ry works of any oth­er kind make the cut.) What hap­pened to the lit­er­ary genre that had once caused such a nation­al craze? For one thing, Jane Austen hap­pened: nov­els like Pride and Prej­u­dice, Emma, and Per­sua­sion revealed just how rich a sto­ry could become when its nar­ra­tion breaks away from the pen of any char­ac­ter in par­tic­u­lar, gain­ing the abil­i­ty to know more about them than they know about them­selves. Not for noth­ing did all three of those books per­form well on The Big Read the bet­ter part of 200 years after they came out; Pride and Prej­u­dice even came in at num­ber two.

The top spot was tak­en by J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings tril­o­gy: an under­stand­able out­come, giv­en not just its ambi­tion but also its mas­sive and endur­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty and influ­ence. Still, one does won­der if Peter Jack­son’s block­buster film adap­ta­tions, released in the years lead­ing up to the poll, might have had some­thing to do with it. Sim­i­lar sus­pi­cions adhere to the likes of Cap­tain Corel­li’s Man­dolin (#19), Amer­i­can Psy­cho (#185), The Beach (#103), and Brid­get Jones’s Diary (#75), all of which pro­vid­ed the basis for major motion pic­tures around the turn of the mil­len­ni­um. Umber­to Eco’s The Name of the Rose, one of a scat­ter­ing of trans­lat­ed nov­els to make the list, also got the Hol­ly­wood treat­ment, but it’s worth remem­ber­ing that the book itself sold so well that its Eng­lish trans­la­tor could use his roy­al­ties to build an addi­tion to his Tus­can vil­la called the “Eco Cham­ber.”

Apart from Austen, the oth­er nov­el­ists with mul­ti­ple books on The Big Read­’s top 100 include Stephen King, who also has three; Thomas Hardy, with four; and Charles Dick­ens, with sev­en. Those are, in any case, some of the nov­el­ists for adults. The abid­ing British appre­ci­a­tion for chil­dren’s lit­er­a­ture shows in the high rank­ings of Roald Dahl, who secured a great many votes with even less­er works like The Twits and Dan­ny, the Cham­pi­on of the World; J. K. Rowl­ing, who would have ben­e­fit­ed from the height of Har­ry Pot­ter mania in any case; and the pro­lif­ic Dame Jacque­line Wil­son, whose four­teen nov­els on the list place her sec­ond only to Sir Ter­ry Pratch­et­t’s fif­teen. It could be that his com­ic-fan­ta­sy sen­si­bil­i­ty, sat­u­rat­ed with both the out­landish and the mun­dane, res­onat­ed unique­ly with the British psy­che. Or, as Pratch­ett him­self says in the BBC’s Big Read tele­vi­sion broad­cast, “it could just be that I’m quite pop­u­lar.”

In total, more than 750,000 read­ers par­tic­i­pat­ed in the Big Read poll. Find read­ers’ top 100 books below:

Relat­ed con­tent:

800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices

The 10 Great­est Books Ever, Accord­ing to 125 Top Authors (Down­load Them for Free)

The New York Times Presents the 100 Best Books of the 21st Cen­tu­ry, Select­ed by 503 Nov­el­ists, Poets & Crit­ics

29 Lists of Rec­om­mend­ed Books Cre­at­ed by Well-Known Authors, Artists & Thinkers: Jorge Luis Borges, Pat­ti Smith, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, David Bowie & More

The 100 Best Nov­els: A Lit­er­ary Crit­ic Cre­ates a List in 1898

David Bowie’s Top 100 Books

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.