Victorian Novels

The nineteenth century turned the novel into the dominant literary form, and the books on this shelf are the reason: marriage plots that double as social audits, city novels that map a whole society, and family sagas that refuse to end tidily.

Start with: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, Middlemarch by George Eliot or The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. Each page carries chapter summaries, a word count, reading time and the free EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB downloads.

Every page below gives you the full text as a free EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB file, plus the word count, publication history and chapter-by-chapter notes you need before you commit forty hours to Middlemarch.

29 free editions · ~5,612,000 words in total · 1789–1895 · EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB

All 29 Victorian Novels titles

• The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano — Olaudah Equiano (1789), ~86,000 words
• Oliver Twist — Charles Dickens (1838), ~161,000 words
• Jane Eyre — Charlotte Brontë (1847), ~185,000 words
• Wuthering Heights — Emily Brontë (1847), ~116,000 words
• White Nights — Fyodor Dostoevsky (1848), ~119,000 words
• David Copperfield — Charles Dickens (1850), ~357,000 words
• The Scarlet Letter — Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850), ~83,000 words
• Bartleby, the Scrivener — Herman Melville (1853), ~15,000 words
• Bleak House — Charles Dickens (1853), ~351,000 words
• Cranford — Elizabeth Gaskell (1853), ~71,000 words
• Madame Bovary — Gustave Flaubert (1857), ~116,000 words
• A Tale of Two Cities — Charles Dickens (1859), ~136,000 words
• Great Expectations — Charles Dickens (1861), ~184,000 words
• Silas Marner — George Eliot (1861), ~70,000 words
• Fathers and Children — Ivan Turgenev (1862), ~71,000 words
• Les Misérables — Victor Hugo (1862), ~551,000 words
• Crime and Punishment — Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866), ~204,000 words
• The Moonstone — Wilkie Collins (1868), ~197,000 words
• The Idiot — Fyodor Dostoevsky (1869), ~245,000 words
• War and Peace — Leo Tolstoy (1869), ~562,000 words
• Middlemarch — George Eliot (1871), ~316,000 words
• Anna Karenina — Leo Tolstoy (1878), ~349,000 words
• The Brothers Karamazov — Fyodor Dostoevsky (1880), ~349,000 words
• Bel-Ami — Guy de Maupassant (1885), ~108,000 words
• Germinal — Émile Zola (1885), ~177,000 words
• The Mayor of Casterbridge — Thomas Hardy (1886), ~119,000 words
• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court — Mark Twain (1889), ~121,000 words
• Tess of the d’Urbervilles — Thomas Hardy (1891), ~149,000 words
• The Red Badge of Courage — Stephen Crane (1895), ~46,000 words

How to choose your next book

The list runs from the oldest publication date to the newest, not from easiest to hardest. If you are new to the period, start with the earliest; the later books are usually arguing with the earlier ones. If you only want one, pick by time rather than reputation: under 50,000 words is a weekend, 50,000 to 120,000 is two weeks of evenings, and anything above 150,000 wants a reading plan.

Frequently asked questions

Are these editions really free?

Yes. Every title on this page is in the public domain in the United States and most other countries, and the download links go directly to complete EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB files with no account and no paywall.

Where do the texts come from?

The texts are taken from Project Gutenberg and Standard Ebooks, both of which proofread against printed editions. Each book page names its source and notes the edition used.

Which format should I choose?

EPUB for Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play Books and most reading apps; AZW3 for older Kindles that accept sideloaded files; KEPUB for Kobo devices, which render Kobo’s own pagination and reading statistics.

How long will these books take to read?

This shelf totals about 5,612,000 words. At 300 words per minute that is roughly 311.8 hours of reading, and each card shows its own word count.

Can I start with a shorter book?

Yes. Start with the shortest title in the list above: several are under 60,000 words and one or two can be finished in a single evening.

Other shelves on editions.ink

Victorian Novels (29) · Detective & Mystery (22) · Gothic & Horror (23) · Science Fiction (9) · Adventure & Sea (31) · Children's Classics (18) · Philosophy (35) · Poetry & Epics (12) · Modern Classics (20) · Drama (6) · the complete free classic-fiction catalog · word counts and reading times · all authors · series in reading order · books by decade.

Newest additions

Fresh editions are added here automatically, newest first.