This content originally appeared on Open Culture and was authored by Colin Marshall
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:
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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.
This content originally appeared on Open Culture and was authored by Colin Marshall
Colin Marshall | Sciencx (2025-10-20T14:57:11+00:00) The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time, According to 750,000 Readers in the UK (2003). Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/10/20/the-100-greatest-novels-of-all-time-according-to-750000-readers-in-the-uk-2003/
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