100 Books Like George Muller

I never knew that the telegraph started as a series of physical towers conveying coded messages by line of sight from one hill to another. It took years for the word telegraph to refer to the system we know so well, relying on electrical lines, the telegraph key, and Morse code.

I love how Standage finds the through line from this 19th-century communications network to the Internet we all take for granted today.

This novel is sometimes described as the Victorian Pride and Prejudice, and it’s true there are many similarities.

Margaret Hale moves with her parents from rural southern England to a northern manufacturing town and experiences profound culture shock. She spars with John Thornton, the wealthy owner of a cotton mill, whose outlook and opinions are very different from her own.

In time their antagonism gives way to mutual understanding, and finally to love. But North and South isn’t only a love story.

There’s the ongoing conflict between the mill workers and the owners, and Margaret’s discoveries about herself as she begins to find ways to help the downtrodden. Gaskell was a minister’s wife in Manchester and interested in social reforms.

In this novel she explores many issues that are still relevant today. The book delves more deeply into the spiritual lives of the characters than does the BBC mini-series… show more.

I really loved the way this book told the story of London across the Victorian era. I often call London my spiritual home, and books about the city always capture my attention. Each chapter covers a separate topic, such as the Middle Class, Buildings, Amusements, etc., with interesting stories for each one.

I love the book as it is the sort I can pick up if I only have a few minutes to read.

The book’s massive length is equivalent to about four modern novels, but it remains a fascinating read—even if I found few of the characters to be truly likable.

Like the Victorians themselves, Trollope’s writing style feels to me both old-fashioned and modern at the same time. To read this work today is to discover many similarities between their “now” (circa 1875) and ours.

Some things never change, including the chase for money and status, the societal traditions and prejudices that can be hard to overcome, and the ways lust and greed can upend just about any of our better human impulses.

I picked this novel for this list because it makes an interesting contrast to North and South, and not just because they deal with different levels of society (working class vs. “genteel”).

In Gaskell’s book, most of the characters are searching for moral high ground as they try to… show more.

This delightful memoir/cookbook of a girl and her sisters growing up near Chicago in the late 1800s gives us a glimpse of what kinds of things a middle-class family ate--there were trendy foods back then, just like we have now!

What’s it like? Just imagine if you took all your favorite 19th-century children's books, mashed them all together, and edited out everything except talking about cake. Oh and maybe keep in a few things about fancy outfits and picnics.

I love this book because nothing more perfectly proves the historian’s adage that the past is a foreign country; they did things differently there. Houghton understands the importance of mid-nineteenth century Great Britain’s cultural, economic, and social ascendancy in determining and understanding American attitudes from work to play, attitudes to class, race, taste in literature, and so on.

The ambition of wealth and power, which in the eighteenth century had destabilized the natural God-given order of things, was now seen as respectable and to be pursued. Weakness and poverty were now a source of shame and weakness. Above all, Houghton shows the importance of hero-worship to the generation coming of age in mid-nineteenth century, a cult of loyalty to a leader could exorcise the antisocial forces of class or individual ambition.

A hero could also act as a constraint on democracy in which the doctrines of liberty and democracy could… show more.

I love a book that makes me laugh. But if I immediately feel guilty or disturbed for laughing, if the story makes me re-examine my values page after page, that is a home run.

This – the first of the Dancers at the End of Time series of books and short stories – had me pondering the boundaries of scientific reality as well as right versus wrong while also being galactically entertained.

The (objectively awful) main characters are time- and space-hopping immortals. Virtually all-powerful, they can change their own appearance and environment at will. When one of them decides to experiment with the concept of Love…everything, and nothing, starts to change.

A vicious, delicious satire of unchecked indulgence that tests the bounds of good taste.

Bly was a brilliant investigative journalist best known in the United States for her exposé of the Women’s Lunatic Asylum based on her feigning of insanity as an undercover patient … until she became even more famous for her circumnavigation of the globe, inspired by Jules Verne’s fictional Around the World in 80 Days. Sponsored and encouraged by Joseph Pulitzer (editor of the tabloid newspaper, The New York World) and written in a witty, breezy style, Bly’s pithily-told tale upends every stereotype of fragile Victorian womanhood; her gutsy candor about her madcap race around what was supposed to be a wholly man’s world still stuns and delights!

While reading this book, I was impressed by the skillful ability of the author to make me sympathize with the characters and begin rooting for them.

Their masterful execution of character development and the way I wanted to jump into the story to help make it one of the most amazing I have ever read and I would highly recommend it to those who are struggling to find a way to overcome sadness.

This is one of the first books that I remember buying for myself in graduate school. Cullwick’s descriptions of her relationship with upper-class Arthur Munby (whom she eventually married) and the photographs of her dressed as a maid-of-all-work, a lady, a “slave,” an agricultural worker, and a valet highlight Victorian power negotiations and performativity.

Cullwick started working as a servant at the age of eight. From her diaries, I learned much about the daily lives of domestic servants: their relationships with employers, the different levels of service and employment networks, and the sheer amount of hard, physical labor that it took to run a Victorian household.