Forty British novels, 1814 to 1925

40 books · original English texts · free to read online

The list

1. Bleak House — Charles Dickens, 1853. The densest of Dickens's novels, and the one where his anger and his tenderness are most evenly matched.
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2. Oliver Twist — Charles Dickens, 1838. The fastest way into Dickens's social anger, and a reminder that sentimentality and reform can share a page.
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3. 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.
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4. David Copperfield — Charles Dickens, 1850. The warmest and least defensive of the big Dickens novels, with a narrator who admits he was often wrong.
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5. The Pickwick Papers — Charles Dickens, 1837. Episodic, generous and genuinely funny; the novel that invented the Dickens audience.
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6. Vanity Fair — William Makepeace Thackeray, 1848. The wittiest novel of the period, and the least sentimental about ambition.
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7. New Grub Street — George Gissing, 1891. The best novel about writing as a job, and quietly one of the saddest books of the century.
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8. The Way We Live Now — Anthony Trollope, 1875. A Victorian financial thriller that has aged much better than its author expected.
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9. The Woman in White — Wilkie Collins, 1859. The first great sensation novel, with a villain worth the wait.
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10. 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.
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11. 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.
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12. Mrs Dalloway — Virginia Woolf, 1925. The best introduction to Woolf: short, social, and technically astonishing without showing off.
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13. Heart of Darkness — Joseph Conrad, 1899. A hundred pages that changed how English fiction writes about certainty and distance.
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14. Jude the Obscure — Thomas Hardy, 1895. Hardy's most direct attack on class and education, and his last novel.
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15. The Longest Journey — E. M. Forster, 1907. Forster's most personal novel, and the one that shows what he was arguing with for the rest of his life.
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16. Northanger Abbey — Jane Austen, 1817. Austen's funniest novel, and the best-tempered parody in English.
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17. Persuasion — Jane Austen, 1817. Austen writing about regret rather than courtship, with the most grown-up heroine she created.
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18. The Expedition of Humphry Clinker — Tobias Smollett, 1771. An epistolary road novel that is rude, energetic and unexpectedly modern about class.
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19. Mary Barton — Elizabeth Gaskell, 1848. The first industrial novel in English, written from inside the streets it describes.
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20. North and South — Elizabeth Gaskell, 1855. The best-balanced novel about the industrial dispute, with a heroine who has to learn what she is looking at.
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21. Hard Times — Charles Dickens, 1854. Dickens compressed into a fable, and the sharpest Victorian attack on education as accountancy.
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22. Jane Eyre — Charlotte Brontë, 1847. The first great English novel narrated by a woman with no fortune and no intention of apologising for it.
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23. Wuthering Heights — Emily Brontë, 1847. The most structurally ambitious of the Brontë novels, and the least sentimental.
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24. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall — Anne Brontë, 1848. The most clear-eyed Brontë novel, and the one that wears least well with romantic readings.
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25. Shirley — Charlotte Brontë, 1849. The Brontë novel about work and money rather than romance, and the better for it.
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26. Agnes Grey — Anne Brontë, 1847. Quiet, short and truthful; the best account we have of Victorian governessing from the inside.
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27. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes — Arthur Conan Doyle, 1892. Twelve self-contained puzzles; the best possible introduction to detective fiction.
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28. Treasure Island — Robert Louis Stevenson, 1883. The template for every treasure map since, told by a narrator who is allowed to be scared.
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29. Kidnapped — Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886. A historical adventure with real politics underneath, and one of the best friendships in fiction.
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30. Waverley — Walter Scott, 1814. The novel that invented historical fiction, and still the clearest account of how a rising felt to the people in it.
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31. Rob Roy — Walter Scott, 1817. Scott at his most entertaining, with a heroine who runs circles around the hero.
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32. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner — James Hogg, 1824. A Scottish Gothic masterpiece about certainty, and the most unsettling novel in this list.
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33. The Picture of Dorian Gray — Oscar Wilde, 1890. Aphorisms on one page and a genuinely disturbing moral structure on the next.
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34. Dracula — Bram Stoker, 1897. The founding vampire novel, and a surprisingly clever piece of documentary storytelling.
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35. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man — James Joyce, 1916. A portrait of an artist as a young egotist, written with extraordinary control of style.
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36. Ulysses — James Joyce, 1922. The novel that changed what fiction could do, and much funnier than its reputation.
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37. Gulliver's Travels — Jonathan Swift, 1726. The cruellest and most inventive satire in English, and still the best argument against complacency.
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38. Middlemarch — George Eliot, 1871. The fullest account of ordinary life in English fiction, and the wisest novel of the century.
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39. Tess of the d'Urbervilles — Thomas Hardy, 1891. Hardy's most argued-about novel, and the one that makes the case against Victorian sexual morality most forcefully.
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40. The Moonstone — Wilkie Collins, 1868. The first great detective novel, and still one of the best-plotted books in the genre.
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