The Great Victorian Collection

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The Great Victorian Collection

by
Brian Moore

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

Title:	The Great Victorian Collection
Author:	Brian Moore
Genre:	Novel
Written:	1975
Length:	183 pages
Availability:	The Great Victorian Collection - US
	The Great Victorian Collection - UK
	The Great Victorian Collection - Canada
	Die Große Viktorianische Sammlung - Deutschland

	from: Bookshop.org (US)

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Our Assessment:

B+ : neatly fantastical and intriguingly thought-provoking

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries
Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
The Atlantic Monthly	.	7/1975	Edward Weeks
National Review	.	26/9/1975	D.Keith Mano
The NY Times	A	2/6/1975	C.Lehmann-Haupt
The NY Times Book Rev.	.	29/6/1975	Paul Theroux
Sunday Times	.	19/10/1975	Jill Neville
Time	.	14/7/1975	Stefan Kanfer
The Times	A	16/10/1975	Myrna Blumberg
The Times	.	3/12/1977	Ion Trewin

  Review Consensus:

  Enjoy the audacity of the conceit; most reasonably satisfied with what Moore does with it

  From the Reviews:

"(F)antasies are easier to create than escape from. The joy of this one is the brilliantly described assortment of Victoriana" - Edward Weeks, The Atlantic Monthly

"I'd like to report that Brian Moore is a master stylist. He isn't: no Nolan Ryan high, hard ones, just enough stuff on the ball to get by. (...) Moore is strictly an idea man: he could be the head of some advertising firm, But the idea holds, piques. At least it holds, piques reviewers and writers. (...) The Great Victorian Collection seems tossed off, a frozen martini, but it has been tossed off with marvelous panache." - D.Keith Mano, National Review

"Mr. Moore somehow makes his fantastic opening stand up. Somehow, we never take the time to stop and figure out equations of meaning. So concrete and vivid is Mr. Moore's image that it never really has to explain itself, or its relationship to such things as dreaming, collecting, and the persistence of Victorian attitudes in American life. It is a fable so logical and self‐contained that it defies logic. Without heavy breathing." - Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times

"(A)n extensive romp in the shadowy field sometimes called parapsychology. (...) (T)he novel resembles its subject. The narrative is curious, ornate, problematical, containing only the most blurred suggestion of a meaning. But a writer needs only to present his disturbing vision of the world -- he is under no obligation to explicate it. And this novel is such an intriguing artifact that one is almost content to see it dazzle without wondering further if it is genuine. (...) I certainly enjoyed it until, like Maloney himself, I began to lose sleep wondering what it all meant." - Paul Theroux, The New York Times Book Review

"The plot of Brian Moore's novel is so original and fantastic that it entirely outweighs the characterization -- and indeed the writing, which has a curiously deadpan but highly efficient tone. (...) At first Maloney is overjoyed and overawed by this wild truth that he has made happen; later it entraps and destroys him. The moral is: be careful what you dream because it might crime true." - Jill Neville, Sunday Times

"On its witty veneer the Victorian Collection may be seen as a fable of art at a time when people prefer criticism to novels and autographs to painting. But there is something darker at work here: a claustrophobic sense of a century closing in on possessions, values, souls. It is this aspect that Moore slights. (...) (H)e seems to lose patience with these promising elements, and before 200 pages are out, Maloney hurtles towards an abrupt martyrdom. The blueprint remains; the major work is never constructed." - Stefan Kanfer, Time

"This is decidedly a major novel, one of Brian Moore's best and most poetic. Rejoicing in the recurring expression, responsiveness, power and necessity of human imagination, the book's design and intensity is less formal than in his Catholics and the writing is positively pacific compared to that in his Fergus where the sceptic, detached from all laws of behaviour except those he makes up, belittles himself and any purpose in continuous self-trials, kangaroo courts of the mind. Here the mind is freed, conditionally." - Myrna Blumberg, The Times

"The Great Victorian Collection is an idea out of H. G. Wells: astonishing Victorian artefacts -- art, furniture, even a South Eastern and Chatham locomotive dreamed into existence in a motel parking lot and displayed like some Olympia exhibition. Here is Brian Moore at his best, totally in control of his invention." - Ion Trewin, The Times

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

'The Great Victorian Collection' of the title is something that protagonist Anthony 'Tony' Maloney literally dreams up. A twenty-nine-year-old assistant professor of history at McGill University, he travels to a seminar in San Francisco and then goes to explore Big Sur for a bit. He winds up at a motel in Carmel, and, that night, has a dream -- and wakes to find that dream realized: outside, in the motel parking lot, having appeared what seems like out of thin air, is a huge collection of Victoriana -- "the most fantastic collection of Victoriana in the world. There's nothing like it anywhere" --, objects from the Victorian Age, some familiar, some only known from books and descriptions.
Experts are brought in, and while much that is found here appears to be impossible -- perfect duplicates of objects know to be elsewhere -- it's hard not to consider the objects authentic (pushing the bounds of the term -- one of the things the novel is clearly meant to do). As one of the experts explains about one of the objects:

Yet this tea urn here in Carmel not only resembles the original Nouds urn, it is indistinguishable from the original. It was as though today I became the first man in the world to look on something which has never been seen before: a unique object which has, mysteriously, become a duality.

       The objects are, however, bound to place (the parking lot) and place in (Maloney's) mind: an early experiment finds one of the objects transformed into a toy stamped 'Made in Japan', so Maloney realizes the collection must be handled with a certain amount of care. So also when he leaves its vicinity it is threatened by a very localized rainfall; later he manages to make it farther afield with limited consequences, but he does come to realize that without his presence: "All those strange and wonderful things were becoming damaged. The longer he stayed away, the more they would diminish, like invalids suffering some wasting disease".
       Maloney comes to rely some on the local stringer for The New York Times, Frederick X. Vaterman (who has a variety of issues of his own), and hires Vaterman's shy girlfriend Mary Ann McKelvey as his temporary assistant; a professional agency, Management Incorporated -- "a combination of lawyer, business manager, and personal friend" -- also gets involved in the running of things. Meanwhile, Maloney also has to deal with a meddling mother, his estranged wife, and the threat to his career, as his absence makes for an easy way for the university to oust him from his position. And there are also his feelings for Mary Ann .....
       The collection is a burden, but he doesn't know how to find release; his dream-power also only goes so far. The consortium organized by the management-company meanwhile builds a 'Great Victorian Village' nearby (which ultimately proves to be more of a tourist attraction than the collection itself ...).
       As absurd as it is, the central conceit of the novel is a neat idea, and Moore handles it quite well. Still, much beyond it feels underdeveloped and under-utilized, from the wife Maloney hasn't spoken to in a year to the sexual tension between (heavy-handedly named ?) Vaterman and his would-be girlfriend (along with the mystery father-figure who Vaterman sees following her at every turn). That the collection and its nature -- and Maloney's relationship with it, as it were (his powers over it, such as how it is affected by his absence and actions) -- remains enigmatic does seem fair enough, even if there is ultimately a sense that Moore isn't quite sure what to do with it (the conceit, not the collection itself). Still, leaving questions open -- and Maloney more or less hanging, for most of the time -- is certainly the better choice than forcing explanation and neat resolution on things. (As to Maloney's fate -- well, what else was Moore to do with the poor fellow ?)
       The Great Victorian Collection is enjoyably odd and intriguingly thought-provoking.

- M.A.Orthofer, 12 September 2026

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Links:

The Great Victorian Collection:

Valancourt Books publicity page
Diogenes publicity page

Reviews:

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of Contemporary British fiction at the complete review
See Index of Irish literature
See Index of Canadian literature

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About the Author:

Author Brian Moore was born in Northern Ireland but emigrated to Canada. He lived 1921 to 1999.

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