Ten classics to start with
If you have not read any nineteenth-century fiction since school, this is the order we would suggest. The list is arranged roughly by how easy each book is to get into, not by importance, and every title here can be read free and in full online.
The list
- Great Expectations — Charles Dickens, 1861. Dickens at his most controlled: one narrator, one long mistake, no subplot wasted.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - 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.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes — Arthur Conan Doyle, 1892. Twelve self-contained puzzles; the best possible introduction to detective fiction.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - The Time Machine — H. G. Wells, 1895. Short enough for one sitting, and the origin of most time-travel fiction that followed.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - Jane Eyre — Charlotte Brontë, 1847. The first great English novel narrated by a woman with no fortune and no intention of apologising for it.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - Frankenstein — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 1818. Short, structurally clever, and far more interested in abandonment than in electricity.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - Treasure Island — Robert Louis Stevenson, 1883. The template for every treasure map since, told by a narrator who is allowed to be scared.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - The Picture of Dorian Gray — Oscar Wilde, 1890. Aphorisms on one page and a genuinely disturbing moral structure on the next.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - Moby-Dick — Herman Melville, 1851. A novel that refuses to stay a novel: part adventure, part encyclopedia, part sermon.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - Walden — Henry David Thoreau, 1854. Part account book, part experiment in attention, still argued with 170 years later.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon
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