Best of
19th-Century

1853

Bleak House


Charles Dickens - 1853
    The obscure case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, in which an inheritance is gradually devoured by legal costs, the romance of Esther Summerson and the secrets of her origin, the sleuthing of Detective Inspector Bucket and the fate of Jo the crossing-sweeper, these are some of the lives Dickens invokes to portray London society, rich and poor, as no other novelist has done. Bleak House, in its atmosphere, symbolism and magnificent bleak comedy, is often regarded as the best of Dickens. A 'great Victorian novel', it is so inventive in its competing plots and styles that it eludes interpretation.

Egy magyar nábob


Mór Jókai - 1853
    He originally studied law and became an advocate in what is now Budapest. Encouraged by the reception of his first play, The Jewish Boy, he turned to writing, producing Working Days, and becoming editor of Életképek, the leading Hungarian literary journal. Following a revolution and the deposition of the Hapsburg dynasty, he became a political suspect. He spent the next fourteen years reviving the Magyar language, producing thirty romances and numerous other works. After the re-establishment of the Hungarian Constitution, he sat in parliament for twenty years, founded and edited the government organ Hon, and was later elevated to the upper house by the king. A Hungarian Nabob, considered by Jokai to be his best work, is a richly colored picture of aristocratic life, full of vivid, bustling scenes, various native characters, and humorous and dramatic incidents. The Nabob figure is a Hungarian potentate of vast estates, who lives amidst a crowd of retainers, wassailing companions, women, gamblers, fools, and gypsies. The plot relates to the intrigues of his dissolute heir, and his marriage with a young girl which serves to baffle them.

Herman Melville: The Complete works (Golden Deer Classics)


Herman Melville - 1853
    There are the usual inline tables of contents and links after each text/chapter to get back to the respective tables. The dates of first publication are noted.-------------Typee: A Romance of the South Seas. (1846)Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas. (1847)Mardi: and A Voyage Thither. (1849)Redburn: His First Voyage. (1849)White-Jacket: or, The World in a Man-of-War. (1850)Moby-Dick: or, The Whale. (1851)Pierre: or, The Ambiguities. (1852)Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile. (1855)The Piazza Tales (1856): The Piazza, Bartleby, Benito Cereno, The Lightning-Rod Man, The Encantadas; or, Enchanted Isles, The Bell-TowerThe Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. (1857)Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War. (1866)Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. (1876)John Marr and Other Sailors with Some Sea Pieces. (1888)Timoleon and Other Ventures in Verse. (1891)The Apple-Tree Table, and Other Sketches (1922): The Apple-Tree Table, Jimmy Rose, I and my Chimney, The Paradise of Bachelors and The Tartarus of Maids, Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!, The Fiddler, Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs, The Happy Failure, The ’Gees.Billy Budd, and Other Prose Pieces (1924): Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative), The Two Temples, Daniel Orme.Weeds and Wildings, With a Rose or Two. (1924)Essays: Fragments from a Writing Desk No. 1 & 2, Etchings of a Whaling Cruise, Authentic Anecdotes of “Old Zack,” Mr Parkman’s Tour, Cooper’s New Novel, A Thought on Book-Binding, Hawthorne and His Mosses.Uncollected Poems: Marquis de Grandvin at the Hostelry, Naples in the Time of Bomba, Immolated, Madam Mirror, The Wise Virgins to Madam Mirror, The New Ancient of Days, The Rusty Man, Thy Aim, Thy Aim?, The Old Shipmaster and his Crazy Barn, Camoens, Camoens in the Hospital, Montaigne and his Kitten, Falstaffs Lament over Prince Hal, Shadow at the Feast, Merry Ditty of the Sad Man, Honor, Fruit and Flower Painter, The Medallion, Time’s Long Ago!, In the Hall of Marbles, Gold in the Mountain, In Shards the Sylvan Vases Lie, In the Jovial Age of Old, A Spirit Appeared to Me, Give Me the Nerve, My Jacket Old, In the Old Farm-House, To ——, A Battle Picture, Old Age in his Ailing, Hearts-of-Gold, Pontoosuce, Epistle to Daniel Shepherd, Inscription for the Slain at Fredericksburgh, The Admiral of the White, To Tom, Suggested by the Ruins of a Mountain-Temple in Arcadia, Puzzlement, The Continents, The Dust-Layers, A Rail Road Cutting near Alexandria in 1855, A Reasonable Constitution, Rammon, Ditty of Aristippus, In A Nutshell, Adieu.

Bartleby the Scrivener


Herman Melville - 1853
    Set in the mid-19th century on New York City's Wall Street, it was also, perhaps, Herman Melville's most prescient story: what if a young man caught up in the rat race of commerce finally just said, "I would prefer not to"?The tale is one of the final works of fiction published by Melville before, slipping into despair over the continuing critical dismissal of his work after Moby-Dick, he abandoned publishing fiction. The work is presented here exactly as it was originally published in Putnam's magazine—to, sadly, critical disdain.

The Stones of Venice


John Ruskin - 1853
    Destroy its claims to admiration there, and it can assert them nowhere else." This was Ruskin's war cry as he entered the now almost forgotten Battle of the Styles on the side against "the school which has conducted men's inventive and constructional faculties from the Grand Canal to Gower Street."But first the reader must know the difference between right and wrong; he must find out for himself the best way of doing everything. "I shall give him stones, and bricks and straw, chisels and trowels and the ground, and then ask him to build, only helping him if I find him puzzled."Unhappily, both these exciting objectives were attained only after the expenditure of nearly half-a-million words; glorious words, but too many. For fifty years, The Stones of Venice was read by all who went there and thousands who could not; the sightseers whom the city captivates today seldom have its greatest guidebook with them.It is the aim of this new edition to put a fascinating book within reach of travelers--active or armchair--with limited resources of time. Much that was superfluous has been omitted; what remains is the essence of a now very readable and portable book. It is a book for the lover of architecture, the lover of Venice, the lover of lost causes, and, perhaps above all, for the lover of fine writing.

No Condemnation in Christ Jesus


Octavius Winslow - 1853
    Winslow gives an exposition of Romans chapter eight which puts on display the treasures of grace to be found in the letter which Martin Luther once called 'the clearest Gospel of them all'.

Galatians


John Brown - 1853
    Spurgeon said in his Commenting and Commentaries, 'Brown is a modern Puritan of the utmost value.'