Browse by time · decade
1840s
1840 – 1849
Showing 240 works across all media from the 1840s
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
The Communist Manifesto · 1848
Wuthering Heights
1847 · 353 pages
Heathcliff, a foundling on a Yorkshire farm, spends his life destroying two families over the girl he loves. The poet Rossetti called it a fiend of a book, its action laid in hell.
★ 8.8
Jane Eyre
1847 · 284 pages
English fiction found its first fierce female voice in Jane, plain and poor and conceding nothing. She survives a brutal charity school, becomes a governess, and loves an employer with a secret.
★ 8.8
The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.
The Communist Manifesto · 1848
Democracy in America
1840 · 722 pages
No foreigner has ever read America this well. Touring the young republic in 1831, Tocqueville found equality rather than liberty the engine of the place, and warned that majority opinion smothers free minds.
★ 8.6
Nocturnes
1846
Chopin rarely played in public, preferring drawing rooms of a few dozen people. The left hand keeps steady time while the right pulls freely against it.
★ 8.3
The Slave Ship
1840 · Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), Boston
Turner took the Zong case, where a slaver threw its human cargo overboard for the insurance money, and set it under his most beautiful sunset.
★ 8.2
Dead Souls
1842 · 432 pages
Traveling the Russian provinces, a charming stranger buys serfs who have died but still count on the tax rolls. Gogol's landowners are grotesque and hilarious, and then the laughter turns on you.
★ 8.1
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
1845 · 176 pages
Born into slavery, Douglass taught himself to read in secret, fought the slave-breaker he was hired out to, and escaped. Naming his owners in print at twenty-seven forced him out of the country.
★ 7.4
The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the Communist Manifesto
1844 · 243 pages
You work a machine you do not own, making something you never see again, and it hollows you out. Marx calls this alienation, and the Manifesto makes it a demand for revolution.
★ 7.3
Fur Traders Descending the Missouri
1845 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
A trapper and his son drift downriver at first light with a chained animal at the prow, the water so still it doubles them.
★ 7.2
Vanity Fair
1848 · 951 pages
Becky Sharp leaves school with no money and claws her way through English society while her friend Amelia wastes her love on a worthless man. Thackeray spares nobody, and Becky is magnificent company.
★ 7.2
The Portable Edgar Allan Poe
1849 · 628 pages
Poe invented the detective story and perfected the tale of terror. His narrators wall people up alive, hear a heart beating under the floorboards, and watch a house split apart.
★ 7.2
Cousin Bette
1846 · 490 pages
Passed over by her rich relations, a poor spinster sets out to ruin them, helped by a wife who bankrupts men for a living. Balzac makes envy a protagonist and never looks away.
★ 7.1
A Christmas Carol
1843 · 116 pages
Scrooge hates Christmas until his dead business partner turns up wrapped in chains and three spirits walk him through his own life. The modern Christmas takes its shape from this book.
★ 7.1
The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don't turn against him; they crush those beneath them.
Wuthering Heights · 1847
Fear and Trembling
1843 · 158 pages
Abraham climbs the mountain to sacrifice Isaac, and Kierkegaard asks how obedience to God can require a murder. Faith suspends ethics altogether, and the believer cannot explain himself to anyone.
★ 7.1
Lost Illusions
1843 · 721 pages
Lucien leaves Angouleme certain his poems will make him famous in Paris, and finds literature there is a trade in favors and paid reviews. Balzac invented the modern story of selling out.
★ 7.0
The Communist Manifesto
1848 · 287 pages
A spectre is haunting Europe, Marx and Engels announce, then read all recorded history as class struggle and hand the workers of the world a program. No pamphlet has moved more people.
★ 7.0
Either/Or
1843 · 640 pages
Two ways of living stand side by side, unreconciled: the aesthete who lives for the interesting moment and whose papers include a seducer's diary, and the judge who defends marriage and duty.
★ 7.0
Either Or · 1843
The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.
Essays: First Series (Emerson) · 1841
The Count of Monte Cristo
1844 · 1276 pages
Edmond Dantes, a sailor about to marry, is denounced by rivals and buried in an island prison for fourteen years. He returns rich and unrecognizable, and revenge fiction still runs on his design.
★ 7.0
★ 7.0
New York Evening Mirror · 1845
The Sickness Unto Death
1849 · 179 pages
Despair, Kierkegaard argues, is not a passing mood but the standing condition of a self refusing to be itself. He catalogs its forms with clinical precision, and the diagnosis reaches everyone.
★ 6.8
A Hero of Our Time
1840 · 168 pages
Pechorin seduces, duels, and wrecks lives across the Caucasus, then records in his diary exactly why he does it. Russian fiction took its habit of merciless self-analysis from this bored young officer.
★ 6.6
The Three Musketeers
1844 · 625 pages
Arriving in Paris from Gascony, d'Artagnan duels Athos, Porthos, and Aramis into friendship, then serves the queen against Cardinal Richelieu. No adventure novel has ever moved faster or been better company.
★ 6.6
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
1848 · 576 pages
Helen Graham bolts her bedroom door against a drunk husband, takes her son, and lives by selling paintings. Victorian reviewers called it coarse and unfit to put in a girl's hands.
★ 6.6
The Desperate Man (Self-portrait)
1845 · Private collection
Courbet at twenty-six, lunging at the viewer with both hands in his hair and his eyes wide. Half self-portrait, half performance.
★ 6.5
Takiyasha the Witch and the Skeleton Spectre
1844 · British Museum, London
One vast skeleton pushes through a torn bamboo blind, where the convention had always been crowds of small phantoms. Three sheets wide.
★ 6.5
Democracy in America · 1840
What is Property?
1840 · 225 pages
Property is theft, Proudhon answered, meaning property that lets one man live off another's labor. Nobody had called himself an anarchist before, and his quarrel with Marx still splits the left.
★ 6.2
The System of Economic Contradictions · 1846
★ 6.0
History of the Conquest of Mexico
1843 · 1005 pages
Cortés lands with six hundred men and topples an empire of millions. Prescott, half-blind and never in Mexico or Spain, told it so vividly historians still pry the conquest from his version.
★ 5.8
The Seducer's Diary
1843 · 214 pages
Johannes engineers every meeting and letter to make Cordelia love him, and wants nothing once she does. Kierkegaard hands you the notebook of a man who turned another person into an experiment.
★ 5.7
A Christmas Carol · 1843
Raftsmen Playing Cards
1847 · Saint Louis Art Museum (Saint Louis), St. Louis
Rivermen break off work for a card game on a flatboat, arranged with a stillness that lifts the scene toward history painting.
★ 5.4
The Oregon Trail
1849 · 951 pages
Twenty-three and fresh from Harvard, Parkman rode onto the 1846 prairie and spent three weeks hunting buffalo with an Oglala Sioux band. He got the West down before the railroads reached it.
★ 5.4
Democracy in America · 1840
Twenty Years After
1845 · 845 pages
Twenty years on the musketeers are older and on opposite sides: d'Artagnan and Porthos serve Cardinal Mazarin, Athos and Aramis the rebels, and the quarrel carries all four to Charles I's scaffold.
★ 5.3
Chartism · 1840
On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic · 1840
Essays: Second Series (Emerson) · 1844
1843
M'Naghten's Case · 1843
No space of regret can make amends for one life's opportunities misused!
A Christmas Carol · 1843
The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.
The Communist Manifesto · 1848
Democracy in America · 1840
The Three Musketeers · 1844
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door! Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."
New York Evening Mirror · 1845
Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains.
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass · 1845
Jane Eyre: An Autobiography · 1847
Democracy in America · 1840
Essays: First Series (Emerson) · 1841
I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will.
Jane Eyre: An Autobiography · 1847