Victorian
The novel becomes the great machine for describing a whole society: serialised, cheap, and read by everyone. Britain is simultaneously an empire, an industrial power and a country losing its faith, and its writers feel all three at once.
✦The serialised novel
✦Social conscience and reform
✦The dramatic monologue
✦Nonsense and fantasy treated as serious play
Charles Dickens
He put the city, the child and the institution into the novel and made them inseparable.
Charlotte Brontë
She gave the first-person novel an interior voice that refuses to be flattered.
Lewis Carroll
He showed that language can be taken apart for pleasure, and that children make better philosophers than adults.
Edgar Allan Poe
He invented the detective story and the modern short story of effect, and made grief a formal problem.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
He made Victorian doubt sound like music, and gave public occasions their language.
Robert Browning
He perfected the dramatic monologue: a character revealed by what he does not notice.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
She brought a woman's voice and a political conscience to Victorian love poetry.
Matthew Arnold
He named the Victorian crisis of faith, and made criticism a profession.
Herman Melville
He wrote the strangest great novel in English, and made obsession a subject of epic.
Mark Twain
He put American vernacular speech at the centre of literature, and never cleaned it up.
Emily Dickinson
She made the dash, the slant rhyme and the riddle into a complete poetic grammar.
Emily Brontë
She wrote the most violent love story in English fiction and refused to judge either party in it.
George Eliot
She invented the psychological novel in English: characters judged by their inner lives, not their outcomes.
Bram Stoker
Dracula turned folklore into a modern information problem: the horror is in the paperwork.
Oscar Wilde
He made wit a moral instrument — every brilliant line in his work has a cost attached.
Alexandre Dumas
He turned revenge into a plot machine so efficient that every thriller since borrows from it.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
He put ideas on trial as characters, and let the winners lose.
Leo Tolstoy
He made the novel large enough to argue with history itself.
Thomas Hardy
He wrote the English countryside as a system humans cannot bargain with.
William Makepeace Thackeray
He wrote the century's coldest novel and made it the most enjoyable.
Robert Louis Stevenson
He showed that modern horror could be a story about a respectable professional.
Joseph Conrad
He made the unreliable narrator a moral instrument rather than a trick.
Arthur Conan Doyle
He invented the detective as a thinking machine and the case file as a genre.
Henry James
He turned ambiguity into a structural principle: the reader must decide what happened.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
She wrote the shortest great American story about medicine as a form of control.
Sheridan Le Fanu
He put the vampire in the bedroom and left the reader unsure who invited it.
Edgar Allan Poe
He designed terror as an engineering problem: every effect calculated from the first sentence.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
He made shame the founding American subject.
Jabberwocky
Lewis Carroll · 1871
A poem made almost entirely of invented words — and you still follow it.
A Tale of Two Cities — Opening
Charles Dickens · 1859
The most famous opening sentence in fiction, and what it's actually doing.
The Gettysburg Address
Abraham Lincoln · 1863
272 words that quietly rewrote what a country is for.
Jane Eyre — Opening
Charlotte Brontë · 1847
A plain, poor governess who says exactly what she thinks.
Great Expectations — Opening
Charles Dickens · 1861
A marsh, a small boy, and the most atmospheric opening in English fiction.
The Raven
Edgar Allan Poe · 1845
The poem engineered, beat by beat, to get inside your head.
Dover Beach
Matthew Arnold · 1867
A honeymoon poem that ends on a battlefield.
Ulysses
Alfred, Lord Tennyson · 1842
An old hero refusing the only thing left to him: rest.
My Last Duchess
Robert Browning · 1842
A monologue in which the speaker condemns himself while being perfectly polite.
How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43)
Elizabeth Barrett Browning · 1850
A love sonnet that measures itself against everything, including death.
Moby-Dick — Opening
Herman Melville · 1851
Three words that turn a narrator into an invitation.
Huckleberry Finn — Opening
Mark Twain · 1884
A boy explaining himself in a grammar that is the whole novel.
Because I could not stop for Death
Emily Dickinson · c. 1863
Death as a courteous driver, and eternity as a roof.
Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë · 1847
Two houses, one moor, and a love that refuses to stay buried.
Middlemarch
George Eliot · 1871
A whole town, and every private ambition quietly measured against what it costs.
Dracula
Bram Stoker · 1897
Letters, diaries and telegrams closing in on one undead count.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde · 1890
A portrait ages so that its subject does not.
The Count of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas · 1844
A man returns from prison with a fortune and a list.
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1880
Three brothers, one murdered father, and the question of whether anything is permitted.
Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1866
A student commits a murder to prove a theory, then has to live inside it.
War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy · 1869
Five families, one invasion, and history refusing to be anyone's plan.
Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy · 1878
One affair, one marriage, and a society that grants forgiveness unevenly.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy · 1891
A country girl destroyed by other people's definitions of purity.
Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray · 1848
A fair with no heroes, and one woman determined to win at it.
Little Women
Louisa May Alcott · 1868
Four sisters growing up while the money runs out.
Far from the Madding Crowd
Thomas Hardy · 1874
A woman inherits a farm and three very different kinds of love.
Villette
Charlotte Brontë · 1853
A plain, brilliant, furious woman makes a life on her own terms.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Arthur Conan Doyle · 1892
Twelve cases, one method: observe, then reason backwards.
The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne · 1850
A letter of shame becomes the only honest thing in the town.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Mark Twain · 1876
A boy, a fence, a treasure, and a town that can be fooled.
Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad · 1899
A river journey inward, told by a man on a boat on the Thames.
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson · 1886
A respectable doctor invents a way to stop being himself.
The Turn of the Screw
Henry James · 1898
A governess, two children, and two figures nobody else admits to seeing.
The Yellow Wallpaper
Charlotte Perkins Gilman · 1892
A woman is prescribed rest in a room and starts reading the wallpaper.
Carmilla
Sheridan Le Fanu · 1872
A guest stays at a lonely house and grows tired, and pale, and affectionate.