The Victorian novel is the form that made the novel the dominant literary genre: serial publication, three-volume lending libraries, and a reading public that grew with the railways and the circulating library. This collection gathers twenty novels published in Britain and Ireland between 1847 and 1897, from Jane Eyre to Dracula.
Books in this collection
- A Christmas Carol — Charles Dickens, 1843 · ~28,500 words · ~1.6 hours
- A Tale of Two Cities — Charles Dickens, 1859 · ~135,000 words · ~7.5 hours
- David Copperfield — Charles Dickens, 1850 · ~358,000 words · ~19.9 hours
- Great Expectations — Charles Dickens, 1861 · ~183,000 words · ~10.2 hours
- Middlemarch — George Eliot, 1871 · ~316,000 words · ~17.6 hours
- Silas Marner — George Eliot, 1861 · ~72,000 words · ~4.0 hours
- Jane Eyre — Charlotte Brontë, 1847 · ~185,000 words · ~10.3 hours
- Wuthering Heights — Emily Brontë, 1847 · ~115,000 words · ~6.4 hours
- The Woman in White — Wilkie Collins, 1860 · ~245,000 words · ~13.6 hours
- The Moonstone — Wilkie Collins, 1868 · ~196,000 words · ~10.9 hours
- The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde — Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886 · ~25,500 words · ~1.4 hours
- Treasure Island — Robert Louis Stevenson, 1883 · ~67,000 words · ~3.7 hours
- The Picture of Dorian Gray — Oscar Wilde, 1890 · ~78,000 words · ~4.3 hours
- Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — Lewis Carroll, 1865 · ~27,000 words · ~1.5 hours
- Dracula — Bram Stoker, 1897 · ~160,000 words · ~8.9 hours
- A Study in Scarlet — Arthur Conan Doyle, 1887
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes — Arthur Conan Doyle, 1892 · ~105,000 words · ~5.8 hours
- The Jungle Book — Rudyard Kipling, 1894 · ~52,000 words · ~2.9 hours
- Tess of the d’Urbervilles — Thomas Hardy, 1891 · ~150,000 words · ~8.3 hours
- The Mayor of Casterbridge — Thomas Hardy, 1886 · ~138,000 words · ~7.7 hours
How to choose
Start with Great Expectations or Jane Eyre if you want plot; Middlemarch if you want the fullest picture of provincial life; The Woman in White or The Moonstone if you want the sensation novel that detective fiction grew out of. Save David Copperfield and Bleak House-length books for a holiday.
The shorter end of the shelf — A Christmas Carol, Jekyll and Hyde, Alice — can be read in an evening and are the best entry points for anyone new to the period.