Satire: Twelve Comic Classics That Bite

Satire is the oldest way of saying something dangerous and getting away with it, and almost no manner of it is missing here: a knight who believes every chivalry book he has read (Don Quixote, 1605), a traveller who reports the customs of horses (Gulliver, 1726), a proposal to eat children argued in the calm voice of political economy (Swift, 1729).

Two things stay constant across three centuries. The target is human self-regard, and the form is borrowed from something respectable — a travel book, a sermon, a parliamentary speech, a biography. The twelve titles below run from 1605 to 1905 and add up to 2.1 million words, so the pages carry counts and reading times and you can choose how much of it you want.

Every satire on this shelf

Twelve titles, oldest first. Numbers are for the text on this site.

YearTitleAuthorFormWordsReading time
1605Don QuixoteMiguel de Cervantes SaavedraNovel423,62424 h
1726Gulliver’s TravelsJonathan SwiftNovel104,0006 h
1729A Modest ProposalJonathan SwiftPamphlet3,4671 h
1749The History of Tom Jones, a FoundlingHenry FieldingNovel338,94619 h
1759CandideVoltaireNovel38,7382 h
1819Don JuanLord ByronEpic poem130,0007 h
1842Dead SoulsNikolai GogolNovel141,0008 h
1848Vanity FairWilliam Makepeace ThackerayNovel301,00017 h
1853Bleak HouseCharles DickensNovel351,22620 h
1889A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s CourtMark TwainNovel121,0337 h
1895The Importance of Being EarnestOscar WildePlay21,3491 h
1905The House of MirthEdith WhartonNovel129,0367 h

How this list was made

A title is listed when its book page records Satire among its genres. That is an editorial call rather than an automatic dump of everything funny: it brings in Cervantes and Swift and leaves out comic novels whose aim is closer to entertainment.

Years are the first-publication dates on the book pages. Word counts are for the editions here, so a different translation would move them by a few percent, and reading times use the 300 words a minute used everywhere else on the site.

Questions readers ask

Is satire the same as comedy?
No. Comedy wants a laugh and satire wants a change. The authors here are all funny, but each is aimed at a habit, an institution or a policy, and the joke is the delivery mechanism.
Which satire is easiest to start with?
A Modest Proposal, at under 5,000 words: eight pages, one voice, and the shock still lands. Gulliver’s Travels is the next step and is longer than people remember.
Why does the list stop at 1905?
Twentieth-century satire is mostly periodical and still under copyright, so the public-domain shelf thins out. Titles are added as texts enter the public domain.

Part of the complete catalogue and the themed reading lists. Nearby shelves: Historical Fiction · Short Stories · Romance · Memoir & Autobiography · Coming of Age · authors A–Z · word counts and reading times.