1860s

1866 · 565 pages

Raskolnikov murders a pawnbroker to prove he stands above ordinary morality, then comes apart as a magistrate circles him. It reads like a thriller and works like a confession.

★ 9.6

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Second Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln · 1865

★ 9.3

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

1863

★ 9.2

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

First Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln · 1861

★ 9.0

Nude painting · Realism

Olympia

Edouard Manet

1863 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris

Manet took the pose from Titian's Venus of Urbino and gave it to a prostitute who looks straight back. The 1865 Salon was scandalized.

★ 8.9

Genre painting · Realism

Luncheon on the Grass

Edouard Manet

1863 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris

A naked woman picnics with two clothed men and looks calmly out at us. The Salon refused it, so it hung with the rejects.

★ 8.9

Fiction · Coming of age

Great Expectations

Charles Dickens

1861 · 469 pages

Pip, a blacksmith's boy, is handed a fortune by an unknown benefactor and turns snob. Miss Havisham waits in her rotted wedding dress, and Dickens makes the shame of low birth unbearable.

★ 8.8

Fiction · Historical fiction

Les Miserables

Victor Hugo

1862 · 1260 pages

Jean Valjean serves nineteen years for stealing bread, breaks parole, and is hunted the rest of his life by a relentless policeman. Around them Hugo builds the century's great argument for mercy.

★ 8.8

Opera · Classical

Tristan und Isolde

Wagner and Berlin Philharmonic

1865

Seventy-seven rehearsals in Vienna ended with the opera abandoned as unperformable. It waited six years for a stage willing to try it.

★ 8.7

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Gettysburg Address · 1863

★ 8.6

Fiction

Notes from Underground

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged!

1864 · 136 pages

Holed up in a shabby Petersburg room, a spiteful clerk talks at you, insisting people will wreck their own lives to prove they are free. Every alienated narrator since speaks in his voice.

★ 8.6

Fiction · Children's book

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll

1865 · 171 pages

Alice follows a rabbit down a hole into a country where logic runs sideways, ruled by a queen who wants everyone beheaded. Carroll freed children's books from having to teach anything.

★ 8.5

John Wilkes Booth

1865

★ 8.4

Fiction · Philosophical novel

The Idiot

Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.

1869 · 656 pages

Prince Myshkin returns to Russia from a Swiss clinic, epileptic and incapable of guile, and Petersburg cannot decide whether to adore him or use him. The world takes a genuinely good man apart.

★ 8.1

Novel

Imagination labors best in distant fields.

Crime and Punishment · 1866

★ 8.1

Travel writing

Mark Twain

The Innocents Abroad · 1869

★ 7.8

Nonfiction · Economic history

Capital

Volume 1

Karl Marx

1867 · 1152 pages

Workers create more value than their wages return, Marx argues, and that gap is profit. No economic book has reshaped politics more, and the chapter on the working day still burns.

★ 7.5

Novel

We always imagine eternity as something beyond our conception, something vast. But why must it be vast? Instead of all that, what if it’s one little room, like a bath house in the country, black and grimy and spiders in every corner, and that’s all eternity is?