Books of the 1840s: Free EPUB Editions

The 1840s is the decade of the serial novel, the family saga and the first great American slave narrative. Dickens, Dumas and the Brontës all wrote books long enough to be read aloud over months, and the cheap part-issue made them available to readers who could never have bought a three-decker.

There are also surprises here: Melville’s first book, a South Seas travel narrative; Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in a Victorian translation; and Dostoevsky’s White Nights. Everything below was first published between 1840 and 1849 and is available on editions.ink in EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB.

Books first published in the 1840s

Ordered by year of first publication. The list is generated from the book pages, so new releases land here automatically.

Year	Title	Words	Reading time
1841	Essays: First and Second Series — Ralph Waldo Emerson	133,000	~7 h
1842	Dead Souls — Nikolai Gogol	141,000	~8 h
1843	A Christmas Carol — Charles Dickens	29,000	~2 h
1844	The Count of Monte Cristo — Alexandre Dumas	466,000	~26 h
1844	The Three Musketeers — Alexandre Dumas	226,061	~13 h
1845	Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass — Frederick Douglass	41,000	~2 h
1845	Twenty Years After — Alexandre Dumas	242,155	~13 h
1846	Typee — Herman Melville	101,000	~6 h
1847	Jane Eyre — Charlotte Brontë	185,000	~10 h
1847	Wuthering Heights — Emily Brontë	116,000	~6 h
1848	The Communist Manifesto — Karl Marx	14,000	~1 h
1848	The Tenant of Wildfell Hall — Anne Brontë	164,000	~9 h
1848	Vanity Fair — William Makepeace Thackeray	301,000	~17 h
1848	White Nights — Fyodor Dostoevsky	118,526	~7 h

Questions readers ask

How many books on editions.ink are from the 1840s?

14 titles, about 2,277,742 words, roughly 127 hours of reading.

What should I read first from this decade?

A Christmas Carol (1843) is the shortest at about 1.6 hours; The Count of Monte Cristo (1844) is the longest at roughly 25.9 hours.

How are the dates chosen?

By first publication of the work in book form; the book pages give the exact edition and source used.

Can I read these on a Kindle or Kobo?

Yes: EPUB for most readers, AZW3 for older Kindles and KEPUB for Kobo devices, all direct downloads.

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Part of the complete list of books by decade, with the word count and reading time table and the author index.