Over the past years I've posted some quizzes I've written for an online trivia league I play in. These quizzes have a format of 12 questions each, but naturally I typically write at least 15 questions before figuring out which work best. This year I outdid myself, and wrote 18 questions (with the help of Michael Moorcock, who made a few suggestions, one of which is in the list below.)
The theme was Victorian Fiction, originally intended to be concerning any fiction written during Queen Victoria's reign (1837-1901). After running the questions by a number of volunteer testers, I decided that it was best to restrict it to fiction written by actual subjects of Queen Victoria -- that is to say, anyone from the British Empire during her reign (in the end I included writers from England, Scotland, Ireland, and India -- abashedly, I realized I don't really know many writers from Canada or Australia or other British colonies from that period. (I read a Canadian SF novel from 1896 while writing the quiz, but that novel was so obscure I suspect I am one of maybe a dozen people alive who have read it, and in fact I alerted both the Science Fiction Encyclopedia and the ISFDB to its existence.))
I'll post the answers in a few days. Give your guesses in the comments if you feel like it.
So, here are the questions:
1. By the 1890s, English morés seemed to shift away from the traditionally stuffy image of Victorians (exaggerated as that image may be). The writer who represented that shift most directly might be the Irishman Oscar Wilde, author of plays such as Lady Windermere's Fan, poems such as "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" and "The Sphinx", and what short novel, which might fancifully be read as allegorizing the decadence that could be seen as lying beneath the decorative exterior of the art of the "Naughty '90s"?
2. Charles Dickens' first several novels were published under a pseudonym and several of them, as well as some later works, were illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne, who chose the pseudonym "Phiz" to correspond with Dickens' pseudonym. Give Dickens' one-syllable pseudonym.
3. Elizabeth Gaskell is loved for her novels Cranford, Wives and Daughters, and a novel that was serialized in Charles Dickens' magazine Household Words right after Dickens' own Hard Times. Both Gaskell's and Dickens' books are considered "industrial novels", and both were set in Manchester (Gaskell's home, though Gaskell renamed the city Milton.) Name this book, which had a BBC adaptation in 2004, and the title of which refers to the protagonist's split time between London (and a nearby village), and her new home in Milton.
4. Anthony Trollope, author of the Barsetshire and Palliser novels among many others, was famous for his prolificity. But despite the many novels (and often very long novels!) he wrote, he was also a very energetic worker in another area, part of the civil service of the United Kingdom. For which part of the civil service did Trollope work?
5. George Eliot was a bête noire for many high school students in my time who were forced to read Silas Marner, though these days she is (deservedly) a golden girl for her novel Middlemarch. (I say Middlemarch is transcendent, and Silas Marner is a fine short novel.) Those novels, and much of the rest of her work, were set in the 18th and 19th centuries in provincial England. But Eliot went far afield -- to Italy in the 15th Century -- for which novel published in 1863? (This novel's title is also the first name of an actress who appeared in an adaptation of Eliot's novel Daniel Deronda as well as several other period pieces.)
6. Three English sisters published novels in the 1840s that are still regarded as classics today. Their first books were published under a common surname, Bell. Their brother Branwell published some poetry but no novels. Name any one of the three pseudonymous first names the sisters used, each of which had a first letter matching the author's real first name.
7. Stanley Kubrick's 1974 film Barry Lyndon is adapted from a novel by William Makepeace Thackeray, who also wrote Henry Esmond (my personal favorite), The Rose and the Ring, and, most famously, a novel which takes its title from John Bunyan's decidedly non-Victorian allegory The Pilgrim's Progress. Give the title of that novel.
8. The now common practice of titling novels with quotes from poems doesn't appear to have begun until the Victorian Era (though there may be earlier examples.) Dickens' The Cricket on the Hearth (1845) takes its title from Milton's "Il Penseroso", and Rhoda Broughton's Red as the Rose is She, from 1870, uses a quote from Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner". Just four years later, Thomas Hardy had his first major success with which novel titled after a line from Thomas Grey's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"?
9. "The Jewel in the Crown" of the British Empire was India. Needless to say, the record of the British Empire in India is highly checkered. There was a writer who was technically a subject of Queen Victoria, born in Calcutta (now Kolkata), educated in India and England, who wrote major plays such as Risarjan (or Sacrifice), from 1890, poetry such as the collection Gitanjali, novels including 1901's Nastanirh (later filmed as Charulata by Satyajit Ray), and numerous short stories such as "Atottju" ("The Runaway"). In 1913 he became the first non-European to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Who was this polymath?
10. Some of the Victorian novelists were also poets, though only a couple achieved significant reputations. But one major poet produced an epic poem, Aurora Leigh, that the author called a "novel in verse", and which was called by the influential critic John Ruskin "the greatest long poem of the nineteenth century". Please give the first and last name of this poet, who was married to another major Victorian poet.
11. I loved Robert Louis Stevenson's novels as a child, such as Kidnapped, Treasure Island, The Black Arrow and Catriona, and I continue to enjoy such books as The New Arabian Nights as an adult. Stevenson traveled widely in his brief life -- he lived at times in his birthplace of Scotland, in England, in France, and in the United States (home of his wife Fanny.) He spent his last few years in what South Seas island group?
12. One of the best and most prolific Victorian woman authors was Margaret Oliphant, who wrote over 90 novels between 1849 and her death in 1897. Perhaps her best work (at least in your smith's eyes) is which 1883 novel in which the title woman crosses horns with her older cousin, as both eventually forsake marriage and instead work to maintain the family's bank in place of their feckless male connections? The title character shares a name with the tragic main character of a colorfully titled major American novel published during Victoria's reign. (First name only.)
Here are two questions that didn't make the final cut, the first because the writer was not a subject of Queen Victoria, and the second because the testers thought the question very hard, and I couldn't figure out how to supply any particularly good hints.
13. Leo Tolstoy published the bulk of his work during Victoria's reign, though he was of course not one of her subjects. But he did, for example, admire both Dickens and Trollope, and indeed Anna Karenina is shown reading a novel that seems clearly to be by Trollope on the fateful train journey at which she meets Vronsky (that cad!) and also witnesses what tragic foreshadowing incident?
14. "Sensation novels" were very popular in England in the second half of the 19th century, showing scandalous doings behind the facades of seemingly ordinary families. Wilkie Collins was one of the first such novelists, and Rhoda Broughton a later example, but what woman, an actress in her teens, made a fortune in that genre, most notably with Lady Audley's Secret.
And here are the other questions I cut:
15. Herman Melville is undoubtedly best known for Moby-Dick, but I love the last novel he published in his lifetime, which sold so poorly it ended not just his career but bankrupted his publisher. I'm sure you can tell me its title.
16. One of the most popular French novelists of the Victorian era was Alexandre Dumas, author of such enduring classics as The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. Dumas' son, also named Alexandre, was also a successful writer. He is best known today for a novel that was the source material for a great opera by Verdi. Give either the title of the novel (in French or English), or of Verdi's opera that was based on it.
17. Queen Victoria died in 1901, and there are of course writers whose career encompassed both her reign and those of her successors. One of the greatest published his most famous novel in the year of Victoria's death. This writer's stories published in Victoria's reign were often set in India, where he lived in early adulthood, though an important book of stories for children seems to be set in Africa. Just who was this man?
And this was Michael Moorcock's suggestion:
18. This author of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel and The Egoist was also a well-respected poet, who wrote the lyric that inspired one of Ralph Vaughan Williams' most popular orchestral pieces, The Lark Ascending.
