1850s
Showing 291 works across all media from the 1850s
Moby Dick
American fiction has attempted nothing bigger. Ahab drags a whaling crew across the world after the whale that took his leg, and Melville keeps stopping the hunt to explain whales.
Madame Bovary
Emma Bovary reads romances, takes lovers, and runs up debts trying to feel something in a provincial town. Flaubert weighed every sentence, and modern fiction's idea of style begins with him.
Leaves of Grass
Whitman threw out rhyme and meter to write the body, the country, and himself at full voice. In "Song of Myself" he speaks straight at you, delighted that you finally showed up.
On The Origin of Species
More creatures are born than can survive, they differ, and the useful differences carry forward. Darwin builds that one plain idea into an explanation of every living thing on earth.
Bleak House
Dickens's supreme achievement, and his angriest. A lawsuit over a will has dragged through the courts so long that nobody alive understands it, and its fog settles over every life in England.
The Flowers of Evil (Oxford World's Classics)
Modern poetry starts here, in gorgeous verse about boredom, rot, and the crowds of Paris. Baudelaire opens by calling the reader his hypocrite brother, then makes ugliness beautiful.
A Burial at Ornans
Courbet gave an ordinary village funeral the scale reserved for kings and saints, and the critics were furious about it.
The Gleaners
Three women bend for the stalks left after harvest while a full farm sits small in the distance, which unsettled the people buying paintings.
On Liberty
Mill sets the limit that still governs the argument: society may interfere with you only to prevent harm to others. Silence an opinion and you rob everyone, including the people who are right.
Walden
Two years in a cabin by a Massachusetts pond, and the permanent argument against a life spent earning. Thoreau writes about beans, loons, and why most people lead lives of quiet desperation.
Sudden Shower over Shin-Ohashi Bridge and Atake
Rain falls as fine diagonal scratches over the bridge, a trick Van Gogh admired enough to copy the whole print in oil.
The Scarlet Letter
Puritan Boston fastens a red letter to Hester Prynne's dress for adultery, and she refuses to name the child's father. Hawthorne turns public shame into something you feel in your body.
David Copperfield
Put to work in a warehouse as a boy, David escapes to an aunt he has never met. Dickens gave him his own childhood, and loved this novel above all the others.
Washington Crossing the Delaware
Almost every detail is wrong, including the flag and the boat, and Leutze painted it in Germany seventy-five years after the fact.
Selected Poems
Daffodils, a solitary reaper singing in a field, and a valley revisited after five years: Wordsworth wrote these in ordinary speech and found that remembering keeps remaking the person who remembers.
Bartleby the Scrivener (and other short stories)
Hired to copy documents in a Wall Street office, a clerk answers every request with "I would prefer not to." He explains nothing, and quiet refusal turns out to be unanswerable.
There is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.
The World as Will and Representation
Underneath everything we perceive, Schopenhauer argues, runs a blind will that wants without knowing why. Because wanting never finishes, living is suffering, and only art and music briefly suspend it.
A Tale of Two Cities
Eighteen years in the Bastille have left Doctor Manette making shoes in the dark. Dickens carries his daughter's household from London into the Terror, where Madame Defarge knits a death list.
Collected Tales
A civil servant wakes to find his nose gone and walking Petersburg in a senior official's uniform. Elsewhere a clerk saves for an overcoat, and Gogol's comedy tips steadily into nightmare.
Twelve Years a Slave
Northup was a free New Yorker with a family and a violin. Lured to Washington in 1841, he woke chained in a slave pen and spent twelve years on Louisiana cotton plantations.
The Ancien Regime and the Revolution
Revolutions come not when oppression is worst but when it begins to lift. Tocqueville digs through the old monarchy's records and finds the Revolution completing the centralized state it believed it was destroying.
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Eliza crosses the frozen Ohio on breaking ice with her child. Stowe sold three hundred thousand copies within twelve months and made slavery intolerable to Northerners who had lived comfortably beside it.
North and South
Gaskell moves Margaret Hale from a soft southern parish to a smoke-blackened cotton town, where she despises the mill owner Thornton until a strike teaches her what masters and workers each risk.
Sketches from a Hunter's Album
Turgenev sends a hunter across the provinces with a gun and a dog, and the serfs he meets emerge as individuals. The book did for serfdom what Uncle Tom's Cabin did for slavery.
Master and Man and Other Stories
A merchant drives into a blizzard to close a cheap land deal, dragging the servant he underpays. The stories around it, of angels and pilgrims and soldiers, ask what a life is for.
View of Mount Fuji from Satta Point
The eye sweeps from pines on the cliff across Suruga Bay to Fuji, a whole vista folded into a few flat planes of color.
The County Election
Voting on the courthouse steps with electioneering, arguing and one man too drunk to stand. Bingham had run for office himself.
View of Mount Fuji from Harajuku
Travelers go about their day along the road and Fuji sits pale behind them, near and far balanced with Hiroshige's usual quiet.
Night Scene in the Yoshiwara
Oi was Hokusai's daughter and studio collaborator, and her handling of lantern light against darkness beats anything else in the ukiyo-e of her time.
All collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.
Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll! Leave thy low-vaulted past!
The shield may be as important for victory, as the sword or spear.
We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest.