London
London is the most written-about city in English fiction, and a large part of that record is free to read. Dickens used its courts, inns and river stairs as a working map in Great Expectations; Conan Doyle gave Sherlock Holmes an address in Baker Street that was only partly fictional at the time.
For a reader the useful thing about London is not the walking tour but the archive. The British Library holds the country's legal-deposit collection, and much of the material that explains how these books were printed, reviewed and read is now catalogued online.
A library to check
- The British Library — catalogues and digital collections, open to readers online
Books connected to London
- Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen, 1813. The sharpest opening in English comedy of manners, and still the most readable account of how money shapes a marriage.
- Great Expectations — Charles Dickens, 1861. Dickens at his most controlled: one narrator, one long mistake, no subplot wasted.
- The Time Machine — H. G. Wells, 1895. Short enough for one sitting, and the origin of most time-travel fiction that followed.
- Bleak House — Charles Dickens, 1853. The densest of Dickens's novels, and the one where his anger and his tenderness are most evenly matched.
- Oliver Twist — Charles Dickens, 1838. The fastest way into Dickens's social anger, and a reminder that sentimentality and reform can share a page.
- A Tale of Two Cities — Charles Dickens, 1859. Dickens writing at speed and with unusual restraint, about a city learning how quickly a revolution can eat its own.
- David Copperfield — Charles Dickens, 1850. The warmest and least defensive of the big Dickens novels, with a narrator who admits he was often wrong.
- The Pickwick Papers — Charles Dickens, 1837. Episodic, generous and genuinely funny; the novel that invented the Dickens audience.
- The War of the Worlds — H. G. Wells, 1898. The founding invasion narrative, written with a journalist's eye for what a disaster actually feels like.
- Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde — Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886. Short, controlled and much stranger than the phrase 'Jekyll and Hyde' now suggests.
- Heart of Darkness — Joseph Conrad, 1899. A hundred pages that changed how English fiction writes about certainty and distance.
- Mrs Dalloway — Virginia Woolf, 1925. The best introduction to Woolf: short, social, and technically astonishing without showing off.
- Vanity Fair — William Makepeace Thackeray, 1848. The wittiest novel of the period, and the least sentimental about ambition.
- New Grub Street — George Gissing, 1891. The best novel about writing as a job, and quietly one of the saddest books of the century.
- Pygmalion — Bernard Shaw, 1913. A comedy that is also a blunt argument about accent, money and who gets to be believed.
- The Woman in White — Wilkie Collins, 1859. The first great sensation novel, with a villain worth the wait.
- The Way We Live Now — Anthony Trollope, 1875. A Victorian financial thriller that has aged much better than its author expected.
A note on accuracy
We describe literary connections and public collections, not street addresses, opening hours or ticket prices. Those change and we cannot verify them for every reader. Follow the institution's own site for current visiting information.