Books of the 1860s: Free EPUB Editions

The 1860s is the great decade of the multi-plot novel: Les Misérables, War and Peace, Our Mutual Friend and The Moonstone all appeared within nine years, and each of them runs to hundreds of thousands of words.

It is also the decade when detective fiction, children’s fantasy and Russian psychological fiction took their modern shapes: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865, Crime and Punishment in 1866 and The Moonstone in 1868, usually called the first detective novel. Everything below was first published between 1860 and 1869 and is available on editions.ink in EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB.

Books first published in the 1860s

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
1860	The Woman in White — Wilkie Collins	247,000	~14 h
1861	Great Expectations — Charles Dickens	184,000	~10 h
1861	Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl — Harriet Jacobs	81,000	~5 h
1861	Silas Marner — George Eliot	70,000	~4 h
1862	Fathers and Children — Ivan Turgenev	71,000	~4 h
1862	Les Misérables — Victor Hugo	551,000	~31 h
1863	Utilitarianism — John Stuart Mill	30,600	~2 h
1864	A Journey to the Centre of the Earth — Jules Verne	88,854	~5 h
1864	Notes from the Underground — Fyodor Dostoevsky	44,161	~2 h
1865	Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — Lewis Carroll	27,000	~2 h
1865	Our Mutual Friend — Charles Dickens	324,000	~18 h
1866	Crime and Punishment — Fyodor Dostoevsky	204,000	~11 h
1868	Little Women — Louisa May Alcott	201,000	~11 h
1868	The Moonstone — Wilkie Collins	197,000	~11 h
1869	The Idiot — Fyodor Dostoevsky	244,604	~14 h
1869	The Innocents Abroad — Mark Twain	193,000	~11 h
1869	War and Peace — Leo Tolstoy	562,000	~31 h

Questions readers ask

How many books on editions.ink are from the 1860s?

17 titles, about 3,320,219 words, roughly 184 hours of reading.

What should I read first from this decade?

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) is the shortest at about 1.5 hours; War and Peace (1869) is the longest at roughly 31.2 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.

Previous decade: the 1850s · Next decade: the 1870s · all decades

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