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

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

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

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

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?

When I heard the learn'd astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

Crime and Punishment · 1866

★ 7.3

Nonfiction · History

The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy

Jacob Burckhardt

1860 · 402 pages

Burckhardt invented cultural history by looking past popes and battles at how Renaissance Italians lived, finding the moment people began to think of themselves as individuals. We still see the period his way.

★ 7.3

Genre painting · Impressionism

Bain a la Grenouillere

Claude Monet

1869 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

Monet and Renoir set up side by side at this riverside resort and worked out the quick broken stroke that became Impressionism.

★ 7.3

Landscape · Impressionism

The Magpie

Claude Monet

1869 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris

A single magpie on a gate in deep snow, the shadows tinged blue and violet rather than grey. The Salon turned it down.

★ 7.3

Poem

Walt Whitman

When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer · 1867

★ 7.3

Fiction

Fathers and Sons

Ivan Turgenev

1862 · 215 pages

Home from university, Arkady brings his friend Bazarov, who believes in nothing but science and refuses to respect anyone. Turgenev made the word nihilist famous and named a quarrel every family keeps having.

★ 7.2

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

Second Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln · 1865

★ 7.2

It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.

Second Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln · 1865

★ 7.1

No one is useless in this world who lightens the burden of it for any one else.

Charles Dickens

Our Mutual Friend · 1865

★ 7.1

Motto · Newspaper

Men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less.

Susan B. Anthony

1868

★ 7.1

Fiction · Realism

Sentimental Education

Gustave Flaubert

1869 · 479 pages

Frédéric Moreau spends his youth in Paris loving a married woman he will never have and drifting through the 1848 revolution. Flaubert made wasted life a permanent subject for the novel.

★ 7.0

Essay · Philosophical literature · Political literature

A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for...is a miserable creature, who has no chance of being free.

John Stuart Mill

1862

★ 7.0

An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.

George Eliot

Felix Holt, the Radical · 1866

★ 7.0

Fiction · Coming of age

Little Women

Louisa May Alcott

1869 · 777 pages

Four sisters grow up poor in a Massachusetts town while their father serves in the Civil War. Jo March wants to write, and readers have measured their own ambition against hers ever since.

★ 7.0