1853 · Skopia

Showing 16 works across all media from 1853

Fiction · Social criticism

Bleak House

Charles Dickens

1853 · 1036 pages

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.

★ 8.8

I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one... But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.

Theodore Parker

1853

★ 8.7

Bartleby the Scrivener (and other short stories)

Herman Melville

1853 · 176 pages

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.

★ 7.1

Nonfiction · Autobiography and memoir

Twelve Years a Slave

Solomon Northup

1853 · 432 pages

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.

★ 6.9

Speech · Political speech

The ground which a colored man occupies in this country is, every inch of it, sternly disputed.

Frederick Douglass

1853

★ 5.5

All partings foreshadow the great final one.

Charles Dickens

Bleak House · 1853

★ 4.0

Personal journal

Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each.

Henry David Thoreau

1853

★ 3.7

Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.

1853

★ 3.7

You have undertaken to cheat me. I won't sue you, for the law is too slow. I'll ruin you.

Cornelius Vanderbilt

1853

★ 3.6

Better build schoolrooms for "the boy", Than cells and gibbets for "the man".

1853

★ 3.6

Life is so constructed that the event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation.

Charlotte Bronte

1853

★ 2.0

A man is so in the way in the house.

Elizabeth Gaskell

Cranford · 1853

★ 2.0

Speech · Political speech

The striking incidents of your history, replete with instruction and furnishing abundant grounds for hopeful confidence, are comprised in a period comparatively brief. But if your past is limited, your future is boundless. Its obligations throng the unexplored pathway of advancement, and will be limitless as duration.

Franklin Pierce

Inaugural Address of Franklin Pierce · 1853

★ 1.9

Speech · Political speech

I believe that involuntary servitude, as it exists in different States of this Confederacy, is recognized by the Constitution. I believe that it stands like any other admitted right, and that the States where it exists are entitled to efficient remedies to enforce the constitutional provisions.

Franklin Pierce

Inaugural Address of Franklin Pierce · 1853

★ 1.9

Wherever there is a human being, I see God-given rights inherent in that being, whatever may be the sex or complexion.

William Lloyd Garrison

1853

★ 1.9

The one great principle of the English law is to make business for itself.

Charles Dickens

Bleak House · 1853

★ 1.3