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1860s

1860 – 1869

Showing 269 works across all media from the 1860s

Fiction · Historical fiction

War and Peace

Leo Tolstoy
1869 · 1392 pages

Five families carried through Napoleon's invasion of Russia, with battle, marriage, farming, and a theory of history held in one design. You finish it knowing these people better than your own friends.

★ 9.8
Olympia
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
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
Speech · Political speech

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.

Abraham Lincoln
Gettysburg Address · 1863
★ 8.6
Fiction

Notes from Underground

Fyodor Dostoevsky
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 · Philosophical novel

The Idiot

Fyodor Dostoevsky
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
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
Poem

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.

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
Speech · Political speech

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."

Abraham Lincoln
Second Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln · 1865
★ 7.2
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
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
Fiction

Silas Marner

George Eliot
1861 · 209 pages

Robbed of gold he hoarded for fifteen years, a lonely weaver finds a golden-haired child on his hearth. Eliot turns a village fable into a full account of how a person is repaired.

★ 6.7
Fiction · Mystery

The Woman in White

Wilkie Collins
1860 · 671 pages

Walking home from Hampstead at night, a drawing master meets a woman all in white escaped from an asylum. Collins tells it as sworn testimony, and Victorian England bought Woman in White perfume.

★ 6.7
Fiction · Mystery

The Moonstone

Wilkie Collins
1868 · 528 pages

T.S. Eliot called it the first and best of modern English detective novels. A diamond looted from an Indian shrine arrives as a birthday present and vanishes that night.

★ 6.6
Novel

"What's this? am I falling? my legs are giving way under me," he thought, and fell on his back. He opened his eyes, hoping to see how the struggle of the French soldiers with the artilleryman was ending, and eager to know whether the red-haired artilleryman was killed or not, whether the cannons had been taken or saved. But he saw nothing of all that, Above him there was nothing but the sky-the lofty sky, not clear, but still immeasurably lofty, with gray clouds creeping quietly over it.

Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace · 1869
★ 6.4
Fiction · Love story

First Love

Ivan Turgenev
1860 · 298 pages

Turgenev said this was the only work of his that still gave him pleasure. Vladimir, sixteen, loves the princess next door, twenty-one, and her secret lover is nobody he can fight.

★ 5.6
Fiction

The Cossacks and Other Stories

Leo Tolstoy
1863 · 480 pages

Sick of Moscow, a young nobleman soldiers in the Caucasus and sets about living like the Cossacks he admires, wanting a girl promised to one of them. Turgenev called it his favorite Tolstoy.

★ 5.5
Speech · Political speech

If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?

Abraham Lincoln
Second Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln · 1865
★ 5.5
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