Collection · Curated by Alice
The best books of the 19th century
- 41
- books to download
- 1813–1904
- 91 years apart
- PDF & EPUB
- free, no sign-up
More than any other, the nineteenth century is the century of the novel. It is when the form stopped being a curiosity and became the way a society explained itself to itself — long, serialised, argumentative, and read by everyone.
You can watch it happen in this list. Austen opens it with novels about who may marry whom and what that costs. Dickens turns the novel into journalism with a plot, and publishes it in instalments for readers who could not afford a book. Flaubert spends five years on the sentences of Madame Bovary. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy push the form until it can hold an entire moral system — War and Peace runs to more than 1,700 pages here. And by the end of the century, Wilde and Wells are already breaking it apart into comedy and science fiction.
The forty titles below are in the public domain in the United States and free to download in PDF and EPUB, with reading times and page counts on every card so you know what you are committing to.
Crime and Punishment
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
Frankenstein
Dracula
Les Misérables
Little Women
Anna Karenina
Emma
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
A Christmas Carol
The Brothers Karamazov
The Masque of the Red Death
War and Peace
A Study in Scarlet
The Importance of Being Earnest
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Madame Bovary
The Time Machine
Sylvia's Lovers
Oliver Twist
The Raven
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Notes from Underground
Around the World in Eighty Days
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Villette
The golden bowl
First Love
The Coral Island
Black Beauty
The Red and the Black
Childhood
Boyhood
The Way We Live Now
Dombey and Son
The Charterhouse of Parma
The Way of All Flesh
The Marble Faun