Nineteenth Century Classics

 

  • Agassiz: Studies on Glaciers (1840)

  • Alcott: Little Women

  • Alger: Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York with the Boot-Blacks (1867)

  • Bailey: The Story of a Bad Boy

  • Barrie: The Little Minister

  • Bellamy: Looking Backward, 2000-1898 (1888)

  • Blackmore: Lorna Doone

  • Burnett: Little Lord Fauntleroy

  • Carlyle: On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841)

  • Clausewitz: On War (1832-34)

  • Compte: Course of Positive Philosophy (1830-42)

  • Cooper: The Spy

  • Crane: Red Badge of Courage

  • Dana: Two Years before the Mast

  • Dalton: A New System of Chemical Philosophy (1808-27)

  • Darwin: The Origin of Species (1859)

  • De Forest: Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867)

  • Dewey: School and Society (1899)

  • Dickens: David Copperfield (1849-50)

  • Dickens: Hard Times (1854)

  • Dickens: Nicholas Nickelby (1838-39)

  • Dickens: The Old Curiosity Shop

  • Dickens: Oliver Twist (1837-39)

  • Dickens: Pickwick Papers

  • Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities

  • Dodge: Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates

  • Dogson: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  • Dumas: The Three Musketeers

  • Eggleston: The Hoosier Schoolmaster (1871)

  • Eliot: Silas Marner

  • Emerson: Essays (1841, 1844)

  • Faraday: Experimental Researches in Electricity (1831-39)

  • Fichte: Addresses to the German Nation (1808)

  • Frazer: The Golden Bough (1890; 1911-15)

  • George: Progress and Poverty (1879)

  • Gibbs: On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances (1874-78)

  • Hawthorne: The House of Seven Gables

  • Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter

  • Hegel: The Philosophy of Right (1821)

  • Hemholtz: On the Conservation of Force (1847)

  • Holmes: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

  • Hugo: Les Miserables (1862)

  • Humboldt: Cosmos (1845-62)

  • Ibsen: A Doll’s House (1880)

  • Jackson: Ramona

  • Koch: The Etiology of Tuberculosis (1882)

  • Rice: Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch

  • Kipling: Captains Courageous (1897)

  • Laplace: Celestial Mechanics (1799-1825)

  • Lincoln and Douglas: Political Debates…in the Celebrated Year of 1858, in Illinois (1860)

  • Lister: On the Antiseptic Principle in the Practice of Surgery (1867)

  • Lorenzini: Pinocchio

  • Lyell: Principles of Geology (1830-33)

  • Mahan: The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890)

  • Marx and Engels: The Communist Manifesto (1848, 1885, 1894)

  • Marx: Das Kapital

  • McGuffy: Eclectic Readers (1836-37)

  • Mendell: Experiments in Plant Hybridization (1866)

  • Melville: Moby Dick

  • Mill: On Liberty (1859)

  • Nietzche: Beyond Good and Evil (1886)

  • Owen: A New View of Society, or, Essays on the Formation of the Human Character (1813-14)

  • Pasteur: Treatise on the Fermentation Known as Lactic (1857)

  • Pestalozzi: How Gertrude Teaches Her Children (1801)

  • Proudhon: What is Property? (1840)

  • Pyle: The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood

  • Scott: Ivanhoe

  • Sewell: Black Beauty (1877)

  • Shaw, et al: Fabian Essays on Socialism (1889)

  • Spencer: The Man versus the State (1884)

  • Spyri: Heidi

  • Stevenson: Treasure Island

  • Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)

  • Thoreau: Civil Disobedience

  • Thoreau: Resistance to Civil Government (1849)

  • Tocqueville: Democracy in America (1835-40)

  • Turner: The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893)

  • Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

  • Twain: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

  • Veblen: The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899)

  • Verne: From the Earth to the Moon (1865)

  • Verne: Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea

  • Wallace: Ben Hur

  • Webster: An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828)

  • Whitman: Democratic Vistas (1871)

  • Whitman: Leaves of Grass

  • Wister: The Virginian

  • Wyss:   Swiss Family Robinson

Sources:

 

Downs, Robert B. (1983). Books that Changed the World: revised edition. New York: Mentor.

Downs, Robert B. (1961) Molders of the Modern Mind. New York: Barnes & Noble.

Montgomery, Elizabeth Rider. (1946) The Story behind Great Books. New York: Dodd Mead & Company.