BEST-SELLERS OF
THE 19TH CENTURY

Take a look at this week’s best-selling books list in your local newspaper. Perhaps you’ve read and enjoyed one or two of them…but will they be considered “classic” 100 years from now? Probably not. How do we know? Check out these examples of what most Americans were reading in the 1800s. Hint: It wasn’t Moby-Dick or Huckleberry Finn.

The Spanish Brothers: A Tale of the 16th Century by Deborah Alcock

This historical novel from 1871 takes place about 300 years before that, during the Spanish Inquisition of the early 1500s. After two brothers of Seville secretly convert to Protestantism, they’re rounded up by the Catholic Church and tortured, never losing their convictions. Alcock reportedly earned so much from the sales of this salacious story with religious overtones that she was able to buy two carriages. (That’s a lot of money.)

She: A History of Adventure by H. Rider Haggard

First serialized in The Graphic in 1886 and 1887, this influential early work of fantasy literature is the first-person account of a daring explorer named Horace Holly. Along with his loyal ward, Leo, he ventures deep into “darkest Africa,” and stumbles upon a lost kingdom. It’s ruled by the all-powerful She, a white-skinned queen named Ayesha. (And all of her subjects have dark skin.) Similar works by later authors—such as The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling and The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle—endured into the 21st century; She did not.

Guy Mannering by Sir Walter Scott

Sir Walter Scott only wrote poetry under his own name. Slightly embarrassed of his less artistic and more blatantly commercial historical fiction, he published those novels anonymously. He eventually claimed credit, of course, and his most famous novel today is Ivanhoe. During his creative heights in the 1810s, however, his most popular work was Guy Mannering, a thrilling tale of smugglers, kidnapping, and grand adventure. In this story set in the 1760s, Harry Bertram, five-year-old son of a Scottish lord, witnesses some smugglers kill a customs officer, so they kidnap him and bring him along on their criminal exploits. Released just a few months after Scott’s previous hit novel, Waverly, fans lined up at bookstores to buy copies of Guy Mannering. It sold 2,000 copies on its first day, and 50,000 in the next few months. It had such influence that the Prince Regent (later crowned King George IV) requested an audience with the author. It was so popular that a dog breeder named a new kind of Scottish terrier after a character in the book—the Dandy Dinmont Terrier.

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Looking Backward: 2000–1887 by Edward Bellamy

In this 1888 work of science fiction, a Boston man named Julian West falls into a hypnosis-induced sleep in the late 19th century…and wakes up in the year 2000. By then, the United States is a socialist (or, as the book calls it, “Nationalist”) utopia. A guide named Dr. Leete shows Julian all the advancements in society, such as how the government owns everything and redistributes wealth equally, and the government provides free food for all. Looking Backward was so popular—the only novels that sold more copies in the United States in the 1800s were Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben-Hur—that more than 150 “Bellamy Clubs” were formed. Club members sat around and discussed ways to enact the reforms of the book.

The Soldier’s Wife by George W. M. Reynolds

If staying power is any indication, Reynolds wasn’t nearly as accomplished a writer as his English contemporary Charles Dickens. But in the 1850s, his work greatly outsold that of the Great Expectations writer. Reynolds’s serialized Mysteries of London sold 40,000 copies a week (at a penny a pop), and he also wrote the first werewolf novel, Wagner the Wehr-Wolf, and one of the first romance novels, Rosa Lambert. But The Soldier’s Wife was his biggest blockbuster, selling 60,000 copies on the day it hit stores in 1852. It has a little something for everyone. It’s about an innocent young man who joins the British Army but who rubs his superiors the wrong way, and frequently gets whipped (500 lashes on more than one occasion). Along the way he manages to carry on a swoon-worthy love affair, but is ultimately executed by a firing squad.

Trilby by George du Maurier

Who hasn’t dreamed of leaving their mundane life and moving to Paris to live a bohemian lifestyle, hanging around in cafés reading poetry all day, and drinking wine all night? A lot of that romantic imagery first became embedded in the American consciousness from the 1894 novel Trilby. The story is about Trilby O’Ferrall, a half-Irish girl working in Paris as both a laundress and a model for painters. Every man she meets in this idealized 1850s Paris falls madly in love with her, among them an older cad named Svengali. (Trilby introduced that word into the English language.) After being serialized in Harper’s Monthly in 1894, it was published as a novel in September 1895 and quickly sold a whopping 200,000 copies. (If the sales figure doesn’t wow you, keep in mind that at that time there were no big-box retail stores, no bookstore chains, and no internet.)

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