I've been an avid reader across many genres since I learned to read as a child and have wandered into all sorts of categories to find literature I love. Fantasy became my first love, but that didn't mean I had to abandon everything else. I like finding great books that don't make the big publisher lists with their generic output. Since the rise of indie publishing, I've developed a habit of sampling anything that sounds like it might be interesting and have found some amazing and very original stories!
Most Fantasy readers enjoy an occasional change and Historical Fiction is a popular companion genre, especially when it's set in England. Whether you love Classics or your experience of Dickens is limited to seeing the musical, Oliver!, the Artful Dodger is a fascinating character and this book follows him into adult life when he returns to Turn of the Century Victorian England. It's an easy read which is historically accurate but doesn't get bogged down in teaching history. A fast-moving adventure with humour and dastardly villains with a flavour that only this era can produce.
Overall it's a fun story with much of that 'different world' quality that Fantasy readers so love.
Jack Dawkins, once known as the Artful Dodger in the streets of London, was sent to Australia on a prison ship when he was little more than a boy. Now he has returned to find that London has changed while the boy has turned into a man.
With few prospects provided by his criminal past and having developed mannerisms that allow him to move amongst a higher strata of society, Jack turns his back on the streets that would have primed him as a successor to the murderer, Bill Sikes, and quickly remodels…
I’m fascinated by the Victorians – and I’ve spent most of my career trying to understand them – because they’re so like us and so unlike us in many ways. They’re familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. I’m a historian of science, and I’m passionate about trying to understand why we think about the world – and about science – the way we do. I think it started with the Victorians, so understanding them really matters and getting it right rather than repeating the same old stories. I hope these books will help you put the Victorians in their place the way they helped me.
What I really admire about this book is the way it brings to life bits of the Victorian past that are easily overlooked, even though lots of them are still there all around us. The Victorians were in love with their engineers and their monumental works: bridges, buildings, railways, steamships. They were their future.
I like the way Rolt takes us on a deep dive into the world the engineers built and draws pen portraits of the men themselves: larger than life, ambitious, brash. Think of that famous photo of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, chomping his cigar and a stovepipe hat on his head. That was them.
L T C Rolt was an engineer and pioneer of industrial history; in this book he combined these two passions to give us a fascinating account of the men who 'made' Britain. From Brunel to Telford, he takes us on a journey from the first railway tracks being laid down to bridges spanning hitherto unimagined lengths, through to the 'invention' and mastery of the gas and electricity, which we take for granted today. The Victorians were at the forefront of modern technology in their time, but often came to see it as a blight on their landscape and struggled to…
A good puzzle will draw me in every time, and I’ve always loved mysteries. When I was a kid, Trixie Belden was my favorite sleuth. In junior high, I tried my hand at writing a few mystery stories. I also discovered logic puzzles about this time. In a mystery, you have to locate the clues and put them together in a logical manner to solve the riddle. Now I’m the author of 100 published books. Many of them are mysteries, and most of the ones that aren’t have elements of mystery within the story.
I love historical mysteries, and this series set in nineteenth-century San Francisco delivers the goods. I really like the main character, Annie Fuller. She’s been left on her own, and she excels at her ventures as a boardinghouse owner and a financial advisor. When she learns she has sleuthing talents as well, there’s no stopping her. In this book, she goes undercover as a housemaid to solve a mystery.
It's the summer of 1879, and Annie Fuller, a young San Francisco widow, is in trouble. Annie's husband squandered her fortune before committing suicide five years earlier, and one of his creditors is now threatening to take the boardinghouse she owns to pay off a debt. Annie Fuller also has a secret. She supplements her income by giving domestic and business advice as Madam Sibyl, one of San Francisco's most exclusive clairvoyants, and one of Madam Sibyl's clients, Matthew Voss, has died. The police believe his death was suicide brought upon by bankruptcy, but Annie believes Voss has been murdered…
I write books about feisty girls who follow their dreams and don’t let fear stand in their way. Growing up in London I was an extremely shy child with a full-blown fantasy life, but at eighteen decided it was time to channel my inner “feisty girl”, take charge of my destiny, and travel to America to pursue my dream of becoming a writer. Now, many years later I am the proud author of five middle-grade novels, and the mother of four amazing children who are all off following their own dreams. When I’m not writing books about feisty girls, I’m reading other people's. Here are some of my favorites.
Okay, this is an old-fashioned book with some old-fashioned views, but it was my childhood favorite, so I had to include it! Orphaned Maria is sent to live with a distant relative at Moonacre Manor, but all is not as perfect as it seems, and it isn’t long before Maria discovers a world of hidden secrets and ancient feuds. It can’t have been easy growing up a feisty girl in Victorian England, but Maria Merryweather manages it, and I love that about her. She is stubborn, brave, and inquisitive, refusing to let anything dampen her spirit. As well as a passion for life Maria also has a passion for good food, (like me) so eat a snack while you read this because the descriptions will make you hungry! A perfect balance of mystery, magic, and teatime treats.
'The Little White Horse was my favourite childhood book. I absolutely adored it. It had a cracking plot. It was scary and romantic in parts and had a feisty heroine.' - JK Rowling - The Bookseller
Winner of the Carnegie Medal in 1946 and J.K. Rowling's favourite childhood book. This bestselling favourite fantasy classic is 'one of the most of the most magical stories in the world.' - The Independent. This is the story of a thirteen-year-old orphan, a Moon Princess, and a mysterious white horse.
Maria Merryweather, a plain London orphan, is sent to Moonacre Manor to live with…
John Staddon is James B. Duke Professor of Psychology, and Professor of Biology emeritus. He got his PhD at Harvard and has an honorary doctorate from the Université Charles de Gaulle, Lille 3, France. His research is on the evolution and mechanisms of learning in humans and animals, the history and philosophy of psychology and biology, and the social-policy implications of science. He's the author of over 200 research papers and five books including Adaptive Behavior and Learning,The New Behaviorism: Foundations of behavioral science, 3rd edition, Unlucky Strike: Private health and the science, law and politics of smoking, 2nd edition and Science in an age of unreason.
Any list of books about science must have something about Darwin. The book to read is The Origin. But that’s obvious. I don’t need to go into it. So here is a Darwin book that is less obvious.
Most scientists will never have heard of it; it’s literary history, not science. I learned of it by accident, in a talk given by an economic historian. This is a fascinating book by a literary historian from which I learned much about Darwin. Gillian Beer recognizes that Darwin was a great writer. She traces similarities between his rhetorical style and the strategies of some other iconic Victorian writers, such as George Eliot (Middlemarch) and Samuel Butler (The way of all flesh).
She also discusses scientific writers of the era such as George Lewis and Herbert Spencer. There are many revealing long quotations. I learned much from the…
Gillian Beer's classic Darwin's Plots, one of the most influential works of literary criticism and cultural history of the last quarter century, is here reissued in an updated edition to coincide with the anniversary of Darwin's birth and of the publication of The Origin of Species. Its focus on how writers, including George Eliot, Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hardy, responded to Darwin's discoveries and to his innovations in scientific language continues to open up new approaches to Darwin's thought and to its effects in the culture of his contemporaries. This third edition includes an important new essay that investigates Darwin's…
Short stories suit the speed of modern society. I began writing them as a child and began to get them published in magazines. My first collection of stories in 2009 got quite a lot of press in the UK and two more collections followed. Initially, they were darkly-themed backfiring scenarios for the anti-hero and I redressed the balance in Out on Top. We all deserve some good Karma!
This is often overlooked by readers of Dickens. I think the term “sketches” is important here at a point where Dickens was still experimenting with his art and particularly his characters which were always going to be his greatest strength. Sketches by Boz is a collection of fascinatingly detailed insights into London life intertwined in episodes (or scenes) as Dickens terms it through a richly caricatured study of a set of interesting lives of the working classes, in a way that only Dickens has ever been able to do. The “sketches” had, prior to this, been serialized in weekly installments (the soap operas of the day). Dickens had experienced sufficient highs and lows of social mobility in his own life to fully qualify his portrayals. "The Tuggses at Ramsgate" is perhaps for me the most memorable but the whole volume is bursting with energetic individuality and character. I have…
Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was an English short story writer, dramatist, essayist, and the most popular novelist to come from the Victorian era. He created some of the most iconic characters and stories in English literature, including Mr. Pickwick from "The Pickwick Papers", Ebenezer Scrooge from "A Christmas Carol", David Copperfield, and Pip from "Great Expectations", to name a few. Dickens' began by writing serials for magazines, and from 1833-1836 he used the pseudonym Boz, taken from a childhood nickname for his younger brother. "Sketches by Boz" contains 56 stories and, like most of Dickens' work, vividly portrayed the lives of…
I was named after my father’s aunt, who moved from Canada to Switzerland in the 1920s to join a travelling church. Family lore remembers she rode a bicycle in the mountains and when she was dying, her sisters sent her maple leaves in the mail to remind her where she started. As a child, I was fascinated by this mysterious other Katie. Why did my father choose her name for me? Would I be like her? Did I get to choose? As a novelist, I love choosing names. Their power is subtle but strong, and when a writer gives a character more than one name, new layers emerge and stories bloom.
Like Alias Grace, Falling Creatures is a reimagining of a famous Victorian murder, this time set in Cornwall on Bodmin Moor. In 1844, Charlotte Dymond was a pretty, domestic servant, working on a farm on the edge of the moor, and her murder was the news sensation of the day. Stansfield’s central character, the fictional Shilly, shares Charlotte’s name and work and, after her death, plays a significant role in revealing what happened, working alongside the enigmatic detective, Mr. Williams. Stansfield plays skillfully with names and shifts in identity throughout this novel, and I was compelled by the strange balance she creates between early scientific reasoning and the lasting folk traditions of supernatural awareness. Falling Creatures is the first in Stansfield’s Cornish Mysteries series.
Cornwall, 1844. On a lonely moorland farm not far from Jamaica Inn, farmhand Shilly finds love in the arms of Charlotte Dymond. But Charlotte has many secrets, possessing powers that cause both good and ill. When she's found on the moor with her throat cut, Shilly is determined to find out who is responsible, and so is the stranger calling himself Mr Williams who asks for Shilly's help. Mr Williams has secrets too, and Shilly is thrown into the bewildering new world of modern detection.
I became fascinated by the Victorian period when I started tracing my family tree in my teens. I wanted to find out more about my ancestors’ lives, and social history quickly became my passion. At weekends, I would visit stately homes and country houses, and I was always more interested in the kitchens and servants’ quarters below the stairs than the grand rooms upstairs. Oral history is one of the most under-valued sources, but it really brings history to life. This list features some of the most detailed memoirs and diaries by domestic servants who wrote about their working lives. Hope you enjoy them!
William Tayler worked as a footman in London for the wealthy widow Mrs. Prinsep and her unmarried daughter. He kept a diary for the year 1837 "as I am a wretched bad writer [and] many of my friends have advised me to practice more…" On Sundays, he usually went to see his wife and children who were lodged nearby, although he never mentions her or them by name.
As it focuses on just one year, the diary only provides a snapshot of William’s working life. However, it gives an illuminating insight into the life of a male servant for the gentry, including details of what William did in his spare time and how the wealthy entertained. Research has shown that he later became a butler.
Before you read William’s Journal, it is necessary to sketch in his background as briefly as possible. He came from the hamlet of Grafton, which is situated in the south-west corner of Oxfordshire, not far from Faringdon in Berkshire. Its seven grey Cotswold stone farmhouses are linked together by a brook and in the old days you could walk from one house to another along the brookside. These farmhouses sit like old ladies facing the sun and are all on the north side of the brook. In front of them lies all that is left of Grafton Common. If you…
I’m fascinated by the Victorians – and I’ve spent most of my career trying to understand them – because they’re so like us and so unlike us in many ways. They’re familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. I’m a historian of science, and I’m passionate about trying to understand why we think about the world – and about science – the way we do. I think it started with the Victorians, so understanding them really matters and getting it right rather than repeating the same old stories. I hope these books will help you put the Victorians in their place the way they helped me.
This is it. The original Victorian expose. I love the way Lytton Strachey takes his parents’ generation and pokes fun at their heroes. This is the first attempt to burst the Victorians’ bubble, and I think it’s brilliant. More than that, I don’t really think you can understand anything that’s been written about them since without starting here.
Strachey picks on four Victorian greats – Florence Nightingale included – and strips them naked. Not so great after all, he concludes. It’s the original tell-all biography.
Eminent Victorians marked an epoch in the art of biography; it also helped to crack the old myths of high Victorianism and to usher in a new spirit by which chauvinism, hypocrisy and the stiff upper lip were debunked. In it Strachey cleverly exposes the self-seeking ambitions of Cardinal Manning and the manipulative, neurotic Florence Nightingale; and in his essays on Dr Arnold and General Gordon his quarries are not only his subjects but also the public-school system and the whole structure of nineteenth-century liberal values.
As a former writer for Londonist and a non-Londoner by birth, I have come to love the capital with all the passion of the converted–not least my adopted home patch of Peckham in the South East of the city. In recent years, the city has seen great improvement in walking routes, and since the lockdown, I have enjoyed having a good old nosey on foot around so many different neighborhoods. It is all totally fascinating. I truly believe that if you’re tired of London, you must be tired of life. Also, the more I travel, the more I realize that there is nowhere on earth as tolerant and neighborly.
A cracking and gripping (mostly) Victorian crime drama (although it does admittedly span the Atlantic and several centuries), its creepy tones and vivid storytelling offer one of the best portrayals of the British capital a couple of hundred years ago.
It is all too easy to look at old city streets superficially and to forget that every bit of our metropolis has a history.
In the east end of Regency London, two families lie butchered. Residents of the notorious Ratcliffe Highway, the victims bear the mark of unprecedented brutality.
Panic sweeps the country as its public cries for justice. But these murders stem from an older horror, its source a sea voyage two centuries old. In a ship owned by Queen Elizabeth herself, a young man embarks on England's first venture into a new trade: human souls.
As a nation's sins ripen and bloom, to be harvested in a bloody frenzy on the twisted streets of Regency Wapping, an English Monster is born.
