M.J.Ryder's top50 pre-1914 works of literature
As any of you who have had a glance at my profile section will know, I like writing lists. Feeling somewhat bored today, I thought I'd go through my book collection and put all the pre-1914 works of literature I've read into order of my personal preference/enjoyment. Technically, I've read a few more than this, but I didn't really think Confessions of an English Opium Eater counted (it would have been at #51 anyway!). Obviously this list is skewed somewhat by my leaning towards the gothic and the Victorian fin de siècle but I thought it would be an interesting task nonetheless...
| Title | Author | |
| 1 | Dracula | Bram Stoker |
| 2 | The Monk | Matthew Lewis |
| 3 | Frankenstein | Mary Shelley |
| 4 | Oliver Twist | Charles Dickens |
| 5 | The Picture of Dorian Grey | Oscar Wilde |
| 6 | The Island of Dr. Moreau | H.G.Wells |
| 7 | The Beetle | Richard Marsh |
| 8 | The Secret Garden | Francis Hodgson Burnett |
| 9 | Around the World in 80 Days | Jules Verne |
| 10 | The Hound of the Baskervilles | Arthur Conan-Doyle |
| 11 | The War of the Worlds | H.G.Wells |
| 12 | Jane Eyre | Charlotte Brontë |
| 13 | Pride and Prejudice | Jane Austen |
| 14 | Great Expectations | Charles Dickens |
| 15 | The Wind in the Willows | Kenneth Grahame |
| 16 | Treasure Island | R.L.Stevenson |
| 17 | The Lair of the White Worm | Bram Stoker |
| 18 | Journey to the Centre of the Earth | Jules Verne |
| 19 | The strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde | R.L.Stevenson |
| 20 | The Great God Pan | Arthur Machen |
| 21 | Carmilla | J. Sheriden LeFanu |
| 22 | Adam Bede | George Eliot |
| 23 | The Adventures of Shirlock Holmes | Arthur Conan-Doyle |
| 24 | Wuthering Heights | Emily Brontë |
| 25 | The Tennant of Wildfell Hall | Anne Brontë |
| 26 | Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea | Jules Verne |
| 27 | Sense and Sensibility | Jane Austen |
| 28 | She | H.Rider Haggard |
| 29 | Caleb Williams | William Godwin |
| 30 | The Invisible Man | H.G.Wells |
| 31 | The Railway Children | E.Nesbit |
| 32 | The First Men in the Moon | H.G.Wells |
| 33 | The Phantom of the Opera | Gaston Leroux |
| 34 | Crime and Punishment | Feodor Dostoyevski |
| 35 | The Time Machine | H.G.Wells |
| 36 | From the Earth to the Moon | Jules Verne |
| 37 | Alice's Adventures in Wonderland | Lewis Carroll |
| 38 | North and South | Emily Gaskell |
| 39 | The Sleeper Awakes | H.G.Wells |
| 40 | Heart of Darkness | Joseph Conrad |
| 41 | Tristram Shandy | Lawrence Sterne |
| 42 | Les Miserables | Victor Hugo |
| 43 | Tess of D'Urbervilles | Thomas Hardy |
| 44 | The Hunchback of Notre Dame | Victor Hugo |
| 45 | Jude the Obscure | Thomas Hardy |
| 46 | The Castle of Otranto | Horace Walpole |
| 47 | Black Beauty | Anna Sewell |
| 48 | Moby Dick | Herman Melville |
| 49 | Trilby | George Du Maurier |
| 50 | Melmoth the Wanderer | Charles Maturin |
Please note, this list is still something of a work in progress. Looking back over it now, I'm really not sure She is better than The Railway Children. I guess this is the sort of difficulty I should have expected to encounter when making a combined list of children's and non-children's books...