The Victorian Novel
Published in monthly installments to readers who'd wait a month for the next cliffhanger, the Victorian novel had to be popular entertainment and serious moral argument at once. Seven books run from Dickens's orphaned bildungsroman through George Eliot's summit of provincial life to Hardy's tragic rupture of the whole century's confidence.
David CopperfieldCharles Dickens · 1850
Lvl 5768ppDickens's own thinly disguised childhood (orphaned, exploited, and finally rescued by his own persistence): the gentlest, most autobiographical door into his whole body of work.
Jane EyreCharlotte Brontë · 1847
Lvl 4512ppBrontë gives a plain, poor governess an interior life equal to any hero's, answerable to no one but her own conscience: the Gothic's furniture put to a new, defiant use.
The MoonstoneWilkie Collins · 1868
Lvl 4480ppWilkie Collins's stolen diamond and multiple unreliable witnesses invent detective fiction's whole toolkit a generation before anyone named the genre.
The Mill on the FlossGeorge Eliot · 1860
Lvl 5544ppGeorge Eliot's headstrong Maggie Tulliver is punished by a whole community's small-mindedness: a warm-up for the wider social canvas she's about to attempt.
Bleak HouseCharles Dickens · 1853
Lvl 71088ppDickens's sprawling indictment of the Chancery courts makes the city itself a character and social reform a plot engine: the triple-decker at its most ambitious.
MiddlemarchGeorge Eliot · 1872
Lvl 6880ppThe movement's summit: Eliot treats a provincial town's ordinary choices with the gravity other ages reserved for kings, English fiction's deepest moral intelligence.
Tess of the d'UrbervillesThomas Hardy · 1891
Lvl 4512ppThe capstone: Hardy punishes a good woman with a universe that was never fair to begin with, Victorian confidence curdling into something close to despair, right at the century's end.