Announcing Revolution and Ruin

TCWD Book Group: Reading the European 19th Century

In the first volume of Mary Shelley's The Last Man, the characters are deeply engaged with the question of How to Live. It's a time of political tumult and change, with the monarchy toppled and a debate raging of how to replace it. Does one restore the royal line, to return to tradition and a sense of nobility? Or are we to trust "the people," despite all their flaws and the sometimes terrifying way they make their demands? But there are also questions of love, marriage, pleasure, family, duty, art. How to live collectively, but also just how to live a life at all.

Then in volume two, a plague comes and by the end of the novel everyone is dead.

New Planet by Konstantin Yuon

Published twenty years before the 1848 revolutions that would transform Europe and shake the whole world, The Last Man has the whiff of prophecy. Soon the entire continent would be talking, plotting, and fighting over how to organize ourselves, how to govern, who is deserving of rights and resources, and what makes a life worth living. And then power would respond, with force, shutting the revolutions down and killing off so many potential futures. And still today it seems to know things about our contemporary moment of failed revolution, authoritarian pushback, and increasing political and personal instability.

Joseph Henderson and I would like to introduce our upcoming series of monthly podcasts and videos as we read our way through the European 19th century. Starting with The Last Man and working our way through Balzac, Stendahl, Eliot, Huysmans, and others, we'll be looking at how this revolutionary moment reverberates still today.

Along the way, we'll consider how these novelists and the society around them thought through and refracted their own contemporary moments through aesthetic strategies of historical fiction, apocalypse, and realism. We'll also give some suggestions for further reading and thinking with these novels through criticism, narrative history, and other works.

April 2025: Mary Shelley: The Last Man, published 1826

May 2025: Stendhal: The Red and the Black, published 1830

June 2025: George Sand: Indiana, published 1832

July 2025: Honore de Balzac: Lost Illusions, published 1843

August 2025: Wm. Makepeace Thackeray: The Luck of Barry Lyndon, published 1844

September 2025: Charlotte Bronte: Shirley, published 1849

October 2025: Ivan Turgenev: Fathers and Sons, published 1862

November 2025: George Eliot: Felix Holt, The Radical, published 1866

December 2025: Gustave Flaubert: Sentimental Education, published 1869

January 2026: Fyodor Dostoevsky: Demons, published 1870

February 2026: J.K. Huysmans: La-Bas, published 1891

March 2026: Henry James: The Bostonians, published 1886

We hope that you'll read along with us and join us for the discussion. All audio and video will be available to everyone, but bonus materials, discussion groups, and conversations will be for subscribers only.

Joseph Henderson is a freelance writer, editor, and podcast producer with abiding interests in the history of the novel and the endless intersections of politics and the arts. He runs a virtual book club and a couple of small reading groups with friends and colleagues. He currently lives in New Mexico with his wife, their two dogs, and two cats.