Reading list
The best Victorian novels
Victorian novels were the box sets of their day: published in monthly parts, read aloud in families and waited for at the docks. That is why they have cliffhangers, big casts and plots that take a year to resolve, and why they read so well a chapter or two at a time.
23 books, all free to read
This list covers 1837 to 1901, Victoria's reign, and ranks the novels for pleasure first. Every one is free.
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1. Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë
Published in 1847 under a man's name, and the most loved Victorian heroine since.
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2. Wuthering Heights
by Emily Brontë
Published the same year, by her sister, and the strangest great novel of the age.
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3. Great Expectations
by Charles Dickens
Pip's expectations, Miss Havisham's stopped clocks and a convict's secret. Dickens's best-made novel.
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4. Middlemarch
by George Eliot
A provincial town in the 1830s, and the novel many writers call the best in English.
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5. The Woman in White
by Wilkie Collins
The sensation novel that gripped England: a woman in white, a swapped identity, a perfect villain.
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6. Vanity Fair
by William Makepeace Thackeray
Thackeray's panorama of greed and climbing, with Becky Sharp at its centre.
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7. Tess of the d’Urbervilles
by Thomas Hardy
Hardy's tragedy of a farm girl and two men. It caused a scandal and is still devastating.
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8. Bleak House
by Charles Dickens
A lawsuit that swallows lives, a detective, a death by spontaneous combustion. Dickens at full size.
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9. The Moonstone
by Wilkie Collins
The first English detective novel, told by a chorus of witnesses.
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10. The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde
The decadent end of the era: beauty, sin and a portrait in the attic.
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11. The Mill on the Floss
by George Eliot
A brother and sister on a river, and Eliot's most autobiographical book. The ending is famous.
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12. North and South
by Elizabeth Gaskell
A minister's daughter moves to an industrial town and falls out with a mill owner. Gaskell's answer to Austen, with factories.
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13. David Copperfield
by Charles Dickens
Dickens's favourite child, a life told from birth with a gallery of unforgettable people.
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14. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
by Anne Brontë
A woman leaves her drunken husband and lives under a false name. Anne Brontë's bold, overlooked novel.
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15. Far from the Madding Crowd
by Thomas Hardy
A farmer, a soldier and a shepherd court the independent Bathsheba. Hardy's happiest novel, nearly.
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16. Silas Marner
by George Eliot
A miser loses his gold and finds a child. Short, and Eliot at her gentlest.
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17. Oliver Twist
by Charles Dickens
An orphan among thieves in London. Fagin, the Artful Dodger and Dickens's anger.
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18. Lady Audley’s Secret
by M. E. Braddon
A golden-haired bride with a secret past. The sensation novel at its most fun.
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19. The Way We Live Now
by Anthony Trollope
A financier's fraud takes London society with it. Trollope's great satire, uncannily current.
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20. Villette
by Charlotte Brontë
A lonely English teacher in a Belgian school. Charlotte Brontë's most inward novel.
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21. The Mayor of Casterbridge
by Thomas Hardy
A man sells his wife at a fair, becomes mayor and cannot escape it. Hardy at his most gripping.
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22. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
by Robert Louis Stevenson
The respectable Victorian gentleman and his other self, in one short night's read.
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23. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
by Lewis Carroll
The Victorian children's book that grown-ups never stopped reading.
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Read them free
Every book on this list is free in Doomreader: open one and it reads as short posts you scroll, with your place kept and its best pages a tap away. You can listen to any of them free too, read aloud by your device.