In May 1940, Professor Walter Murdoch (of the University of Western Australia) wrote three articles in The ABC Weekly arguing that, with £5, you could give yourself “a liberal education in so far as books can give it”. It takes three articles for him to list and justify his selections which are grouped under categories: Fiction, History, Philosophy, Poetry and Drama, Biography, and Sociology. For brevity’s same, I’m just going to list the fiction here:

• David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens
• Vanity fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray
• The ordeal of Richard Feverel, by George Meredith
• Rob Roy, by Walter Scott
• Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson
• The three musketeers, Alexandre Dumas
• War and peace, by Leo Tolstoy
• The pilgrim’s progress, by John Bunyan
• Gulliver’s travels, Jonathan Swift
• Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe

Notice anything strange? There are no women writers, and there are no Australian writers. In fact they are all British and European writers. Signs of the times I suppose!

But wait, he has a supplementary list for “the judicious bargain-hunter” who is able to extend his/her fiver by buying second hand. The fiction in this supplementary list comprises:

• Pendennis and The Newcomes, by William Makepeace Thackerary
• Old mortality and The heart of Midlothian, by Walter Scott
• Les miserables, by Victor Hugo
• Crime and punishment, by Fyodor Dostoievsky
• Pride and prejudice, by Jane Austen
• Barchester Towers, by Anthony Trollope

Aha, a woman at last – and the right one too! As for references to Australia, there are none in the main lists, but the supplementary list includes Ernest Scott’s Short history of Australia.

Anyhow, while a modern compilation of books suited to a liberal education might be quite different to this, it is nonetheless interesting to see that most of the books he lists are still well-regarded today. It is also interesting to hear his criteria for choosing – he says he is not going to focus solely on “hoary old classics”:

People say that it’s only after a writer has been dead a number  of years that we can tell whether he is a great or a small man; and the same with books – you have to see it from a distance before you can say whether it’s a good book or not.

Do you really believe that? Do you really believe that men who are trying to climb Mount Everest don’t really know it’s a high mountain: they have to get away and look at it from a distance to get a sense of its real size? I don’t believe a word of it.

So, the books I am going to name for your consideration are not all classics, in the sense of being old. On the other hand, they’re not books conspicuous as bestsellers at the moment…

The Mount Everest analogy seems a bit odd really, and none of the novels listed were published after 1900, but I applaud his thinking. We should indeed be able to say now what a good book is – even if we can’t second guess which ones will last into the future. Has anyone read Pendennis or The ordeal of Richard Feverel?