Books of the 1870s: Free EPUB Editions

The 1870s is the decade in which the long Victorian novel reached its most ambitious form. Middlemarch (1871) and Anna Karenina (1878) both set provincial life against a national background, and both were written by novelists at the height of their powers.

Popular fiction moved just as fast: Verne’s voyages, Hardy’s Wessex, Twain’s Mississippi, Black Beauty’s first-person horse and Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, which ends with a door slamming rather than a wedding. Everything below was first published between 1870 and 1879 and is available on editions.ink in EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB.

Books first published in the 1870s

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
1870	Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea — Jules Verne	104,016	~6 h
1871	Middlemarch — George Eliot	316,280	~18 h
1871	The Odyssey — Homer	119,000	~7 h
1871	Through the Looking-Glass — Lewis Carroll	29,797	~2 h
1872	Andersen’s Fairy Tales — Hans Christian Andersen	54,834	~3 h
1872	Carmilla — Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu	28,083	~2 h
1872	Roughing It — Mark Twain	165,000	~9 h
1873	Around the World in Eighty Days — Jules Verne	63,000	~4 h
1873	Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals — Immanuel Kant	28,987	~2 h
1874	Far from the Madding Crowd — Thomas Hardy	136,000	~8 h
1874	The History of the Peloponnesian War — Thucydides	250,000	~14 h
1876	The Adventures of Tom Sawyer — Mark Twain	70,000	~4 h
1877	Black Beauty — Anna Sewell	63,007	~4 h
1878	Anna Karenina — Leo Tolstoy	349,000	~19 h
1878	The Return of the Native — Thomas Hardy	143,000	~8 h
1879	A Doll’s House — Henrik Ibsen	26,000	~1 h

Questions readers ask

How many books on editions.ink are from the 1870s?

16 titles, about 1,946,004 words, roughly 108 hours of reading.

What should I read first from this decade?

A Doll’s House (1879) is the shortest at about 1.4 hours; Anna Karenina (1878) is the longest at roughly 19.4 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 1860s · Next decade: the 1880s · all decades

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