Best Books of the Decade: 1850s

Author	Gustave Flaubert
ISBN	0192840398

'Oh, why, dear God, did I marry him?'

Emma Bovary is beautiful and bored, trapped in her marriage to a mediocre doctor and stifled by the banality of provincial life. An ardent devourer of sentimental novels, she longs for passion and seeks escape in fantasies of high romance, in voracious spending...

Author

Charles Dickens

David Copperfield is the story of a young man's adventures on his journey from an unhappy and impoverished childhood to the discovery of his vocation as a successful novelist. Among the gloriously vivid cast of characters he encounters are his tyrannical stepfather, Mr Murdstone; his brilliant,...

Author	Henry David Thoreau
ISBN	0691096120

Originally published in 1854, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, is a vivid account of the time that Henry D. Thoreau lived alone in a secluded cabin at Walden Pond. It is one of the most influential and compelling books in American literature. This new paperback edition-introduced by noted American writer...

Author

Harriet Beecher Stowe

The narrative drive of Stowe's classic novel is often overlooked in the heat of the controversies surrounding its anti-slavery sentiments. In fact, it is a compelling adventure story with richly drawn characters and has earned a place in both literary and American history. Stowe's puritanical religious...

Author

Walt Whitman

Here, in its original and complete form, is the edition of the American masterpiece that inspired Emerson to write his famous words to Whitman: "I greet you at the beginning of a great career..."

As Malcolm Cowley says in his Introduction, the first edition of Leaves of Grass "might be called...

Author	Charles Baudelaire
ISBN	0879234628

After reading Baudelaire, I suddenly find myself wanting to smoke cigarettes and say very cynical things while donning a trendy haircut. Plus, if I didn't read Baudelaire, how could I possibly carry on conversations with pretentious art students?

In all seriousness, though, I wish my French...

Author	Elizabeth Gaskell
ISBN	0141439882

'It is very pleasant dining with a bachelor...I only hope it is not improper; so many pleasant things are!'

A portrait of the residents of an English country town in the mid nineteenth century, Cranford relates the adventures of Miss Matty and Miss Deborah, two middle-aged spinster sisters...

Author	Charles Dickens
ISBN	0141439963

A novel of serendipity, of fortunes won and lost, and of the spectre of imprisonment that hangs over all aspects of Victorian society, Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit is edited with an introduction by Stephen Wall in Penguin Classics.

When Arthur Clennam returns to England after many years...

Author	Adalbert Stifter
ISBN	3906763730

This is one of Stifter's great epic works, a most sensitive account of the formative years in the life of Heinrich, a student of natural sciences, born into a bourgeois environment, but influenced and gently guided by a nobleman, the old Baron von Risach. It is in fact the baron's own reminiscences which...

Author	Nathaniel Hawthorne
ISBN	0393924769

The sins of one generation are visited upon another in a haunted New England mansion until the arrival of a young woman from the country breathes new air into mouldering lives and rooms. Written shortly after The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables re-addresses the theme of human guilt in a style...

Author	Ivan Goncharov
ISBN	1933480092

The novel evolved and expanded from an 1849 short story or sketch entitled "Oblomov's Dream". The novel focuses on the midlife crisis of the main character, Ilya Ilyich Oblomov, an upper middle class son of a member of Russia's nineteenth century landed gentry. Oblomov's distinguishing characteristic...

Author	George Eliot
ISBN	0375759018

Adam Bede, the first novel written by George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans), was published in 1859. It was published pseudonymously, even though Evans was a well-published and highly respected scholar of her time.
The story's plot follows four characters' rural lives in the fictional community...

Author	Eduard Mörike
ISBN	0141023481

Mozart is creative, brilliant and charming. But is he also a thief?

Making his way to Prague for the opening of Don Giovanni, the great composer playfully tries to steal an orange from a Bohemian family's garden. But no sooner has he taken the fruit than he is caught by a furious gardener. Desperate...

Author	Leo Tolstoy
ISBN	0140444688

In the winter of 1854 Tolstoy, then an officer in the Russian army, arranged to be transferred to the besieged town of Sebastopol. Wishing to see at first hand the action of what would become known as the Crimean War, he was spurred on by a fierce patriotism, but also by an equally fierce desire to alert the...

Author

Alfred Tennyson

Alternate cover edition of ISBN10: 0140422536; ISBN13: 9780140422535

Written in the middle of his career, Idylls of the King is Tennyson's longest and most ambitious work. Reflecting his lifelong interest in Arthurian themes, his primary sources were Malory's Morte d'Arthur and the Welsh...

Author

Jacob Grimm

The Grimm brothers were early 19th-century writers best known for their fairy tales coming from Scandinavian, Icelandic and Germanic origins. By 1807 there was a growing interest in German folk tales. The Grimm brothers were academics who invited friends to their home and asked them to relate stories...

Author	Ivan Turgenev
ISBN	0140442243

"Home of the Gentry" is a novel by Ivan Turgenev published in the January 1859 issue of "Sovremennik". It was enthusiastically received by the Russian society and remained his least controversial and most widely-read novel until the end of the 19th century. It was turned into a movie by Andrey Konchalovsky...

Author

John Stuart Mill

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780140432077

Published in 1859, John Stuart Mill's On Liberty presented one of the most eloquent defenses of individual freedom in nineteenth-century social and political philosophy and is today perhaps the most widely-read liberal argument in support...

Author	Charlotte Brontë
ISBN	1582870950

The Professor was the first novel by Charlotte Brontë. It was originally written before Jane Eyre and rejected by many publishing houses, but was eventually published posthumously in 1857. The book is the story of a young man, William Crimsworth. It describes his maturation, his loves and his eventual...

Author	Elizabeth Gaskell
ISBN	0192838059

Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Bronte (1857) is a pioneering biography of one great Victorian woman novelist by another. Gaskell was a friend of Bronte's and, having been invited to write the official life, determined to both tell the truth and honor her friend. This edition collates all...

Author	Alexandre Dumas
ISBN	0140448926

'To have discovered the black tulip, to have seen it for a moment...then to lose it, to lose it forever!'

Cornelius von Baerle, a respectable tulip-grower, lives only to cultivate the elusive black tulip and win a magnificent prize for its creation. But after his powerful godfather is assassinated,...

Author	Peter Mark Roget
ISBN	0140510079

Deux Semillon and a Serve of Monstrachet

Manny and I finally met on middle, if not neutral, ground, France, on my recent sojourn to Le Old World.

He shared with me the secrets of his delight in book-hunting in Paris.

Naturally, he endeavoured to distract me with children's...

Author	Frederick Douglass
ISBN	0140439188

Ex-slave Frederick Douglass's second autobiography-written after ten years of reflection following his legal emancipation in 1846 and his break with his mentor William Lloyd Garrison-catapulted Douglass into the international spotlight as the foremost spokesman for American blacks, both...

Author

George Eliot

My only merit must lie in the faithfulness with which I represent to you the humble experience of an ordinary fellow-mortal.

When Scenes of Clerical Life, George Eliot's first novel, was published anonymously in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in 1857, it was immediately recognized, in...

Author	Nathaniel Hawthorne
ISBN	1406501336

Abjuring the city for a pastoral life, a group of utopians set out to reform a dissipated America. But the group is a powerful mix of competing ambitions and its idealism finds little satisfaction in farmwork. Instead, of changing the world, the members of the Blithedale community individually pursue...

Author	Arthur Schopenhauer
ISBN	0140442278

One of the greatest philosophers of the nineteenth century, Schopenhauer believed that human action is determined not by reason but by 'will' - the blind and irrational desire for physical existence. This selection of his writings on religion, ethics, politics, women and many other themes is taken...

Author	Richard Wagner
ISBN	2070400190

This scarce antiquarian book is included in our special Legacy Reprint Series. In the interest of creating a more extensive selection of rare historical book reprints, we have chosen to reproduce this title even though it may possibly have occasional imperfections such as missing and blurred pages,...

Author	Ivan Turgenev
ISBN	1426450427

RUDIN (1856) by Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818-1883) tells the story of a character typical to Turgenev -- a "superfluous" man, weak of will, brimming with indecisive frustration -- and yet tormented by ideals. Rudin is made impotent by the dissonance of honoring the older generations while at the...

Author	Ivan Turgenev
ISBN	1853993204

راستش فکر نمی کردم این اثر، چنین دلنشین غافلگیرم کند

امروز قرار بود که فقط به یکسری از کارهایم که مثلا از قبل برنامه ریزی کرده بودم برسم ....اما می بینید؟...

Author	Herman Melville
ISBN	1603120262

Included in this Herman Melville collection are six tales that range considerably -- from "The Encantadas" (an allegorical travelogue) to the haunting "Bartleby, the Scrivener." Opening the volume is "The Piazza," a pastoral sketch that frames the collection. "Benito Cereno" -- a subversive satire...

Author

William Wordsworth

This book is the first to present Wordsworth's greatest poem in all three of its separate forms. It reprints, on facing pages, the version of "The Prelude" was was completed in 1805, together with the much-revised work published after the poet's death in 1850. In addition the editors include the two-part...

Author	Harriet E. Wilson
ISBN	0142437778

Our Nig is the tale of a mixed-race girl, Frado, abandoned by her white mother after the death of the child's black father. Frado becomes the servant of the Bellmonts, a lower-middle-class white family in the free North, while slavery is still legal in the South, and suffers numerous abuses in their household....

Author	Mary Seacole
ISBN	0195066723

Mary Seacole was born a free black woman in Jamaica of the early 19th century. In her long and varied life, she was to travel in Central America, Russia and Europe, find work as a inn-keeper and as a doctress during the Crimean War, and become a famed heroine, the author of her own biography, in Britain. As...

Author	Herman Melville
ISBN	1598184083

Herman Melville's "Israel Potter" is the Fictionalised tale of a man who really did fight in the American Revolution -- a man who lived a life of very real adventure. After fighting in the revolution, he went on to be a part of the newly-established United States Navy, ended up serving as a secret courier...

Author	Louisa May Alcott
ISBN	1930142021

Flower Fables by Louisa May Alcott Flower Fables contains wildly imaginative stories that grew out of Alcott's experience as a storyteller to the children of her Concord, Connecticut, neighbors. Through these enticing encounters with fairies, elves, and animals, the author creates a foundation...

Author	Nathaniel Hawthorne
ISBN	0812966058

Mosses from an Old Manse is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s second story collection, first published in 1846 in two volumes and featuring sketches and tales written over a span of more than twenty years, including such classics as “Young Goodman Brown,” “The Birthmark,” and “Rappaccini’s...

Author

George MacDonald

C.S. Lewis said that upon reading this astonishing 19th-century fairy tale he "had crossed a great frontier," and numerous others both before and since have felt similarly.

In MacDonald's fairy tales, both those for children and (like this one) those for adults, the "fairy land" clearly...

Author	Wilkie Collins
ISBN	1843911329

A delightful tale of thwarted ambition and forbidden love, A Rogue’s Life follows the fortunes of an endearing young man. Proffering his own take on picaresque storytelling—and with many a grain of truth for twenty-somethings today—this is Wilkie Collins at his entertaining best. Propelled...

Author	Gottfried Keller
ISBN	3150061725

In Anspielung auf eine Meldung, die Keller in einer Züricher Zeitung las, und natürlich auf Shakespeares Tragödie beginnt die Erzählung:
"Diese Geschichte zu erzählen würde eine müßige Nachahmung sein, wenn sie nicht auf einem wirklichen Vorfall beruhte, zum Beweise, wie tief im...