100 Books Like Paul Clifford

An exuberant serial novel by Regency sporting journalist Egan, illustrated by a young George Cruikshank (Dickens’ future artist). In it, three friends (based on the author, Cruikshank, and his younger brother Robert), document their ‘rambles and sprees through the metropolis’. It is a tale of dandies on safari written entirely in ‘flash’ slang, the language of the 19th-century underworld. The book was a publishing sensation, inspiring Dickens’ Pickwick Papers. I was introduced to this by my dear friend the late Professor Roger Sales many years ago, and it has been inspiring me ever since as a novelist and cultural historian. Egan’s style is bawdy and irreverent, until his voice was silenced by Victorian propriety a generation later. Can also be read as early social investigation.  

Published in 1834, this one amplifies Ann Radcliffe's Gothic-ness to eleven. I loved the story because it's fun, wild, gloomy, rogue, and riveting, like a gripping telenovela. 

The plot is all about inheritance, family drama, illegitimate sons, and revenge. It features villains, gypsies, apparitions, corpses, evil priests, murders, curses, and the famous highwayman Dick Turpin and his mare Black Bess. It recounts Turpin's midnight ride through the English countryside as he flees capture, and like it, the entire novel is a wild ride. 

Though a bit antiquated and with "songs" aplenty—which Ainsworth himself lamented had been lost in British literature and tried to resurrect—its gloomy and despairing story captivated me. The book begins at night inside a mausoleum, where the sexton Peter Bradley tells his grandson Luke his family history.

Right off the bat, we have a desecration and a rotting hand; how much more Gothic can this story be?

British author George W. M. Reynolds had no qualms about stealing Sue’s idea and title and writing his own book called The Mysteries of London (1844-1846). I love this novel for its sensationalism, which caused it to be the ultimate Victorian bestseller, even outselling Dickens.

The novel brings together criminals, women forced into prostitution, murderers, crossdressers, and royalty. At the heart of it is the story of the Markham brothers, one good, one evil. We follow their paths as they interact with all the other people in London and become embroiled in conspiracies. One of them even ends up marrying royalty and ruling a small European country. Reynolds’ bold writing style and mastery of multiple plots makes this 2,500-page novel highly readable and shocking even today.

Discovered and first published by W.H. Ainsworth, ‘Ouida’ – named from a childhood mispronunciation of ‘Louise’ – went on to become a prolific and bestselling novelist. Her style was melodramatic, intense, and bodice-ripping, her novels usually set against a society or military background. She wrote forty-five novels, Under Two Flags being the most successful. She remained popular until the early 1890s and, like Ainsworth, was granted a Civil List pension for her services to literature. Also like Ainsworth, she is not much read nowadays. In the novel, the profligate hero fakes his own death to avoid gambling debts and exiles himself to Algeria, joining the Chasseurs d’Afrique, the forerunner of the French Foreign Legion. A long way from the moralising tone of much Victorian fiction, ‘Ouida’ always keeps it racy and swashbuckling. 

This is one of the great literary biographies: impeccably researched, stylishly narrated, refreshingly indifferent to academic convention, and authentically Dickensian in its pungency of atmosphere and solidity of characterisation.

This tells the story, not just of Beckett Street Cemetery, supposedly the oldest municipal cemetery in the UK, but more important of those buried there, both rich and poor (and there are plenty of both). It sits across the road from what was once Leeds Workhouse, and has its share of former inmates from there in unmarked graves. Poignantly, there’s are also many guinea graves, where several are buried on top of each other, names listed on a headstone, all for a guinea (just over a pound). In its tales, this becomes a 19th-century social history of Leeds – there’s even a survivor of the Battle of Waterloo buried there. Not a widely-known book, but it has a wonderful, quiet importance. I have relatives in unmarked, guinea, and regular graves.

Nowhere have I seen Cold Magic categorized as a romance, but as a reader, my experience of the book (and the rest of the trilogy) was definitely centered around the epic love story. But that's what places this book in the "off the beaten path" category for me – it could sit on several different sections in a bookstore or library: science fiction, fantasy, Steampunk, mystery, action/adventure, romance, or all of the above! Books like this are a gourmet feast for the imagination, particularly when they're handled by a masterful writer and builder of worlds like Kate Elliott. If you love discovering new series that will delight and surprise you while entertaining all the different parts of your brain, you will love The Spiritwalker Trilogy.

I find the very word “novella” delicious. Edith Wharton is one of my favorite writers, and this book is near the top of my deliciousness list. How can you resist a book with a killer first line like this: “I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.”

The setting is so important here, too: a bitter Massachusetts winter that reflects the tale’s somber mood. Unlike the characters in Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, the characters here are not of the upper class, but in both books the characters share the internal crisis of whether to honor the moral constraints of their times or follow their aching hearts.

Knowledgeable academic experts often write technical tomes that are as dry as their subjects, But Deane's historical exposition of Britain's Industrial Revolution is fascinating, full of insights, and well-written.

Why Britain first? The answers intrigue and engage. Why did other countries (the United States and Germany) outstrip the British from the mid-nineteenth century?

The Rape of the Rose is an unforgettable novel that details the horrors of the Industrial Revolution in nineteenth-century Britain. Hughes, also a poet of note, portrays the enslavement of children in those “dark Satanic mills” with disturbing precision, offering his youngest characters shreds of dignity, which life has deprived them of so roundly. He also shows men and women maimed and worked to death by owners intent on extracting every last ounce of their labor. A major figure in the novel is a father who flees a mill and joins the Luddite Revolution. I read this book thirty-five years ago and remember it vividly. It presents the underbelly of the Industrial Revolution—and the ample reasons for the rebellions it triggered.