The 19th Century in Literature

Great Novelists and Social Sagas

Victor Hugo, a giant of French literature, published Les Misérables (1862) and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831), denouncing social injustice. 

• Honoré de Balzac built La Comédie humaine, a vast portrait of French society with characters like Rastignac and Lucien de Rubempré. 
• Charles Dickens criticized Victorian society in David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, and A Tale of Two Cities. 
• Émile Zola founded naturalism with Les Rougon-Macquart, including Germinal (1885), which exposed the miners' harsh conditions. 
• Gustave Flaubert marked realism with Madame Bovary, a scandalous novel tried for immorality. 
• George Eliot (Middlemarch) and Thomas Hardy (Jude the Obscure, Tess of the d’Urbervilles) offered sensitive and critical portraits of English society. 
• Alexandre Dumas captivated readers with serialized novels like The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. 

Romantic and Realist Voices

• Stendhal explored ambition and passion in The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma. 
• Fyodor Dostoevsky delved into human psychology with Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov. 
• Leo Tolstoy wrote the epic War and Peace and the tragic Anna Karenina, painting imperial Russia. 
• Jane Austen, though bridging the centuries, laid the foundation of the English novel of manners with Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. 
• George Sand challenged gender and moral conventions in novels rooted in rural and intellectual life. 
• Charlotte and Emily Brontë emerged with Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, combining passion, independence, and darkness.

Science, Fantasy, and Imagination

• Mary Shelley launched science fiction with Frankenstein (1818), imagined during a ghost-story night in 1816. 
• Jules Verne placed scientific progress at the heart of futuristic novels like Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. 
• H.G. Wells followed with The War of the Worlds (1898). 
• Robert Louis Stevenson explored duality and the fantastic in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Treasure Island. 
• Bram Stoker created the modern vampire myth with Dracula (1897), inspired by Vlad the Impaler. 
• Lewis Carroll published Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, masterpieces of absurdity and childhood.

Poetry and Drama

• Charles Baudelaire transformed poetry with The Flowers of Evil (1857), a collection deemed scandalous. 
• Oscar Wilde embodied decadence and aestheticism in The Picture of Dorian Gray and brilliant plays. 
• Lord Byron combined engagement and lyricism in Don Juan, a symbol of the romantic rebel. 
• John Keats composed sublime odes like To Autumn (1820) before dying young. 
• Emily Dickinson wrote nearly 1800 poems, most unpublished during her lifetime. 
• Edmond Rostand revived French theatre with Cyrano de Bergerac (1897), a huge popular success. 

Commitment and Literary Destinies

• Zola published J’accuse (1898) in defense of Dreyfus and justice. 
• Hugo, exiled under the Second Empire, became the voice of the oppressed. 
• Mark Twain portrayed America with irony in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. 
• Later in life, Tolstoy rejected his privileges and embraced ascetic simplicity and spiritual reflection. 
• Oscar Wilde was imprisoned for homosexuality and died in poverty in France. 
• Arthur Rimbaud abandoned poetry at 21 for a life of adventure after a brief, blazing literary career.

Children’s Literature, Tales, and Popular Fiction

• Hans Christian Andersen delighted readers with The Little Mermaid and The Snow Queen. 
• The Brothers Grimm collected Europe’s fairy tales in Children’s and Household Tales. 
• Rudyard Kipling created The Jungle Book and became the youngest Nobel laureate in literature in 1907, at age 42. 

Characters and Mythical Figures

Jean Valjean, D’Artagnan, Edmond Dantès, Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, Cyrano, Heathcliff, Anna Karenina, Elizabeth Bennet, Huckleberry Finn, Moby Dick, Frankenstein — all born in the 19th century, all now part of the world’s literary imagination.