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Tag: Before 1900

  • Don Quixote

    An impoverished hidalgo from a village in La Mancha spends so many nights reading tales of chivalry that he loses his grip on reality. Renaming himself Don Quixote, he puts on old armour, mounts his bony horse Rocinante, chooses a peasant woman as his idealised lady Dulcinea, and rides out to right wrongs. He recruits a practical, talkative farm labourer, Sancho Panza, as his squire with the promise of an island to govern.

    Their adventures are a string of comic misunderstandings: windmills seen as giants, flocks of sheep as armies, inns as castles. The first part, published in 1605, also includes interpolated stories of love and intrigue. In the second part, published in 1615, the pair meet characters who have read the first book, and a scheming duke and duchess stage elaborate pranks for their amusement.

    Often called the first modern novel, the book parodies romance while exploring the line between illusion and reality, madness and idealism. The partnership of the dreamer and the realist became one of literature's great double acts. Its influence runs through writers from Fielding and Dickens to Borges and Rushdie, and Edith Grossman's translation made it newly lively for English readers.

    Book details

    AuthorMiguel de Cervantes
    First published1605
    Original languageSpanish
    Translated byEdith Grossman
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)940
    SettingLa Mancha and other regions of Spain, early 17th century

    Themes

    • Illusion and reality
    • Idealism
    • Friendship
    • Chivalry
    • Storytelling

    Who should read it

    Readers who enjoy comic adventure and want to read the book often called the foundation of the modern novel.

    If you liked this, try

    • Tristram Shandy
    • Gulliver's Travels
    • The Count of Monte Cristo

  • The Count of Monte Cristo

    In 1815 Edmond Dantes, a nineteen-year-old merchant sailor from Marseille, is about to be made captain and to marry his beloved Mercedes. Envious rivals frame him as a Bonapartist agent, and an ambitious deputy prosecutor buries the case to protect himself, so Dantes is thrown without trial into the island fortress of the Chateau d'If.

    Years of solitary confinement are broken when he meets the Abbe Faria, an elderly prisoner digging an escape tunnel, who educates him in languages, science and history and tells him of a treasure hidden on the island of Monte Cristo. When Dantes finally escapes, he reinvents himself as the fabulously wealthy and mysterious Count of Monte Cristo and enters Parisian high society, where his former enemies have prospered.

    Serialised from 1844 to 1846, the novel is a masterpiece of plotting, full of disguises, poisonings, duels, smuggling and buried secrets. Beyond the adventure, it reflects on justice, vengeance, the limits of human judgement and whether revenge can ever truly satisfy. Unabridged editions run well over a thousand pages, but the pace rarely slackens.

    Book details

    AuthorAlexandre Dumas
    First published1844
    Original languageFrench
    Translated byRobin Buss
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)1276
    SettingMarseille, the Chateau d'If, Rome and Paris, 1815-1839

    Themes

    • Revenge
    • Justice
    • Betrayal
    • Identity
    • Hope

    Who should read it

    Readers who love long, twisting adventure stories built on betrayal, disguise and an elaborate plan for revenge.

    If you liked this, try

    • Les Miserables
    • The Three Musketeers
    • A Tale of Two Cities

  • Les Miserables

    In 1815, Jean Valjean is released after nineteen years in the galleys for stealing bread and trying to escape. Shunned everywhere because of his yellow ex-convict's passport, he is taken in by the Bishop of Digne, whose act of mercy after Valjean betrays him changes the course of his life. Years later, under a new name, he has become a prosperous manufacturer and mayor.

    His path crosses that of Fantine, a young factory worker forced into destitution to support her daughter Cosette, who is being exploited by the innkeepers Thenardier. Inspector Javert, who believes the law is absolute, never stops suspecting the mayor's past. The story follows Cosette's growing up in Paris, her love for the student Marius, and the 1832 June Rebellion at the barricades.

    Hugo fills the novel with digressions on the Battle of Waterloo, convents, Parisian slang and the sewers of Paris. Published in 1862, it is a sweeping indictment of poverty and injustice and a meditation on grace, conscience and the law, later adapted into one of the world's most successful musicals.

    Book details

    AuthorVictor Hugo
    First published1862
    Original languageFrench
    Translated byNorman Denny
    GenreHistorical fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)1463
    SettingFrance, 1815-1832

    Themes

    • Redemption
    • Justice and law
    • Poverty
    • Revolution
    • Love and sacrifice

    Who should read it

    Readers who want a sweeping historical epic about mercy, injustice and the poor of nineteenth-century France.

    If you liked this, try

    • A Tale of Two Cities
    • The Count of Monte Cristo
    • War and Peace

  • The Brothers Karamazov

    Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov is a crude, greedy landowner who neglected his sons from two marriages. The eldest, Dmitri, is a passionate, reckless army officer locked in a dispute with his father over money and over the same woman, Grushenka. Ivan is a brilliant intellectual tormented by doubt about God and suffering. Alyosha, the youngest, is a novice at the local monastery under the elder Zosima. A servant, Smerdyakov, rumoured to be Fyodor's illegitimate son, lurks in the household.

    Rising tension between father and sons builds towards a crime and a trial that grip the town. Along the way the novel contains some of Dostoevsky's most famous passages, including Ivan's prose poem about the Grand Inquisitor confronting Christ in Seville, and Zosima's teachings about responsibility and active love.

    Completed in 1880, months before the author's death, it is a philosophical novel, a family drama and a courtroom thriller at once. It explores faith and doubt, free will, moral responsibility and the relationship between fathers and sons, and has influenced writers and thinkers from Freud to Einstein.

    Book details

    AuthorFyodor Dostoevsky
    First published1880
    Original languageRussian
    Translated byRichard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)796
    SettingSkotoprigonyevsk, a provincial Russian town, 1860s

    Themes

    • Faith and doubt
    • Free will
    • Family conflict
    • Moral responsibility
    • Suffering

    Who should read it

    Readers ready for a demanding but rewarding novel that mixes murder mystery with deep philosophical argument.

    If you liked this, try

    • Crime and Punishment
    • War and Peace
    • The Idiot

  • Moby-Dick

    The narrator, who asks to be called Ishmael, goes to sea to cure his restlessness and signs on to the whaler Pequod out of Nantucket together with Queequeg, a tattooed Polynesian harpooner he befriends in a New Bedford inn. Once at sea, the reclusive Captain Ahab finally appears on deck, his missing leg replaced by one made of whalebone, and reveals the true purpose of the voyage.

    Ahab is consumed by the desire to kill Moby Dick, the great white sperm whale that maimed him, and he binds the crew to his quest. The first mate Starbuck, a cautious Quaker, questions it; the second and third mates and harpooners from around the world follow. As the ship crosses oceans, encounters with other vessels bring news and omens of the whale.

    Melville interrupts the story with chapters on whale anatomy, the history of whaling, the meaning of whiteness and the workings of the ship, alongside soliloquies written like stage drama. A commercial failure in 1851, the book was rediscovered in the twentieth century and is now considered a cornerstone of American literature.

    Book details

    AuthorHerman Melville
    First published1851
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)635
    SettingNantucket and the oceans of the world, 1840s

    Themes

    • Obsession
    • Fate
    • Man versus nature
    • Good and evil
    • Friendship

    Who should read it

    Patient readers who want an ambitious, digressive American epic about obsession and the sea.

    If you liked this, try

    • The Old Man and the Sea
    • Heart of Darkness
    • Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

  • Crime and Punishment

    Rodion Raskolnikov is a former law student living in a cramped garret in the poorest quarter of St Petersburg. Proud, feverish and penniless, he has persuaded himself that extraordinary people have the right to overstep moral law for a higher purpose, and he plans to prove it by killing an old pawnbroker whom he regards as worthless.

    The murder is revealed early, and the novel's suspense lies in what follows: Raskolnikov's mental unravelling, his cat-and-mouse conversations with the shrewd investigating magistrate Porfiry Petrovich, and his relationships with his devoted mother and sister, his loyal friend Razumikhin, and Sonya Marmeladova, a gentle young woman driven into prostitution to feed her family. The sinister Svidrigailov offers a dark mirror of Raskolnikov's ideas.

    Published in instalments in 1866, the novel examines guilt, alienation, poverty and the dangers of rationalist ideologies that place an idea above human life. Its feverish interior perspective made it a forerunner of existentialist fiction and one of the most influential works in world literature.

    Book details

    AuthorFyodor Dostoevsky
    First published1866
    Original languageRussian
    Translated byConstance Garnett
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)551
    SettingSt Petersburg, Russia, 1860s

    Themes

    • Guilt
    • Morality
    • Poverty
    • Alienation
    • Redemption

    Who should read it

    Readers who enjoy intense psychological fiction and big moral questions explored through a gripping story.

    If you liked this, try

    • The Brothers Karamazov
    • The Stranger
    • Notes from Underground

  • Anna Karenina

    Anna Karenina travels to Moscow to patch up the marriage of her brother Stiva Oblonsky, whose infidelity has thrown his household into chaos. At the railway station she meets Count Alexei Vronsky, a dashing officer, and an attraction begins that will upend her marriage to Alexei Karenin, a senior government official, and her position in St Petersburg society.

    Running alongside Anna's story is that of Konstantin Levin, a serious, awkward landowner modelled partly on Tolstoy himself, who loves Stiva's sister-in-law Kitty Shcherbatskaya. Levin's chapters deal with farming, the peasants who work his land, brotherhood, death and a long struggle to find faith and a reason to live.

    Serialised between 1875 and 1877, the novel examines marriage, adultery, hypocrisy, jealousy and the very different rules society applies to men and women. Tolstoy's psychological insight and the realism of his world, from horse races to hayfields, have made it a frequent contender for the title of greatest novel ever written.

    Book details

    AuthorLeo Tolstoy
    First published1878
    Original languageRussian
    Translated byRichard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)864
    SettingMoscow, St Petersburg and the Russian countryside, 1870s

    Themes

    • Adultery
    • Marriage
    • Social hypocrisy
    • Faith
    • Rural life

    Who should read it

    Readers who want a richly detailed psychological novel about love, society and the search for meaning.

    If you liked this, try

    • War and Peace
    • Madame Bovary
    • Crime and Punishment

  • War and Peace

    War and Peace opens in a St Petersburg salon in 1805, where the talk is of Napoleon, and follows several aristocratic families over the following years: the warm, chaotic Rostovs, the proud Bolkonskys and the scheming Kuragins. At its centre are three figures: Pierre Bezukhov, an awkward illegitimate son who unexpectedly inherits a fortune; Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, an ambitious, disillusioned officer; and Natasha Rostova, whose vitality lights up the book.

    Tolstoy alternates between ballrooms, country estates and battlefields, including Austerlitz and Borodino, and the French occupation and burning of Moscow in 1812. Historical figures such as Napoleon and the Russian commander Kutuzov appear beside the fictional characters. Pierre's search for meaning takes him through Freemasonry, a disastrous marriage and captivity.

    Lengthy essays argue that history is shaped by countless individual actions rather than by great men. Huge in cast and scope yet intimate in its psychological detail, the novel is widely regarded as one of the greatest ever written. Readers often worry about its length, but its short chapters and vivid scenes carry the story forward.

    Book details

    AuthorLeo Tolstoy
    First published1869
    Original languageRussian
    Translated byLouise and Aylmer Maude
    GenreHistorical fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)1225
    SettingRussia and Austria, 1805-1820

    Themes

    • War
    • History and free will
    • Love and marriage
    • Meaning of life
    • Russian society

    Who should read it

    Ambitious readers ready for an epic that combines family saga, war story and philosophy of history.

    If you liked this, try

    • Anna Karenina
    • Les Miserables
    • The Brothers Karamazov

  • The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

    This collection gathers the first twelve Sherlock Holmes short stories, originally published in The Strand Magazine in 1891 and 1892. They made Arthur Conan Doyle's consulting detective a sensation and established the format of the detective short story: a visitor arrives at Baker Street with a puzzle, Holmes reads their life from small physical details, and an investigation follows.

    The cases range widely. A king fears exposure by a former lover in A Scandal in Bohemia, which introduces Irene Adler. A pawnbroker is paid to copy out an encyclopaedia in The Red-Headed League. Other stories involve a deadly speckled band in a Surrey manor house, a blue gemstone found in a Christmas goose, a vanished bridegroom and an engineer who loses his thumb.

    Narrated by the loyal Dr John Watson, the stories mix logical deduction with Victorian atmosphere: fog, gaslight, hansom cabs and country houses. Not every case ends with an arrest, and Holmes is sometimes outwitted, which keeps the collection lively. It remains the ideal starting point for new Holmes readers.

    Book details

    AuthorArthur Conan Doyle
    First published1892
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreMystery
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)307
    SettingLondon and the English countryside, 1880s-1890s

    Themes

    • Deduction
    • Justice
    • Friendship
    • Disguise
    • Victorian society

    Who should read it

    Mystery lovers and newcomers to Sherlock Holmes who want short, self-contained cases to read one at a time.

    If you liked this, try

    • The Hound of the Baskervilles
    • The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
    • The Moonstone

  • Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

    Huck Finn, last seen in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, is living uneasily with the Widow Douglas, who wants to civilise him, when his drunken, violent father reappears to claim the money Huck found. Huck fakes his own death to escape and hides on an island in the Mississippi, where he meets Jim, an enslaved man who has run away after learning he is to be sold downriver.

    The two set off on a raft, hoping to reach the free states. Along the river they meet feuding families, a lynch mob, and two swindlers who call themselves the Duke and the King and drag them into scams in riverside towns. Throughout, Huck wrestles with what his society has taught him about right and wrong as his friendship with Jim deepens.

    Told in Huck's vernacular voice, the novel transformed American prose; Hemingway said modern American literature came from it. It is a satire of racism and moral hypocrisy, yet its frequent use of racial slurs and depiction of Jim have made it one of the most debated and challenged books in American schools.

    Book details

    AuthorMark Twain
    First published1884
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)366
    SettingMississippi River valley, 1830s-1840s

    Themes

    • Slavery and freedom
    • Conscience
    • Friendship
    • Hypocrisy
    • Coming of age

    Who should read it

    Readers interested in American literature, satire and the history of race in the United States.

    If you liked this, try

    • The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
    • To Kill a Mockingbird
    • Moby-Dick