My favorite books featuring the 1820s (officially the best decade ever)

The Red and the Black (or Le Rouge et le Noir) was published by French author Stendhal in 1830. The action across the two volumes takes place from 1814 to 1830, so the 1820s are included. The title refers to the two competing ambitions of the hero, Julien Sorel, who can’t decide whether he wants the glamour and excitement of a military career (red uniform) or the moral calm of life as a priest (black cassock). I was forced to read this in French at school and hated it, but when I returned to it in English years later I was completely absorbed by Julien’s struggles – although, to be honest, he’s a ghastly fellow and rather deserves his fate. It’s an epic, sweeping read and guaranteed to impress anyone French if you mention you’ve read it.

The Pickwick Papers is the first novel by uber-Victorian Charles Dickens, but the action takes place in 1827 and 1828.  The main character is Samuel Pickwick, founder and chairman of the Pickwick Club.  He and his three companions – Mr. Winkle, Mr. Snodgrass, and Mr. Tupman – travel around the country and then report on their adventures (or rather, misadventures) to members of the club. There is no grand plot as such; the tales were originally written for serialisation in a periodical and appeared in nineteen installments. This makes the book a perfect one to dip into for shorter reads, as it really doesn’t matter where you start and stop. Plus, of course, it is hilarious in its skewering of our human failings – it’s a go-to book for cheering me up.

Serialised in Punch magazine in 1847/8, Vanity Fair covers the period from 1813 to about 1831. The heroine is an ambitious young woman called Becky Sharp, whose plan on leaving school is to use her youth, good looks, flirtatious nature, and, well, feminine charms to climb the social ladder. She’s what my grandmother would have called a minx. And minxes are such fun to watch from a safe distance, particularly when their adventures take them to Brighton (Regency hotspot), Brussels (awaiting news from the field as the Battle of Waterloo rages), and even to Court to be presented to the Prince Regent. It’s a soap opera, but one with fabulous historical detail and great costumes.

This poem was published anonymously in 1823. It’s such a Christmas staple that it’s hard to imagine how ground-breaking it was, but the simple plot – a family sleeps on Christmas Eve while the father hears a noise outside and sees Santa Claus in a sleigh pulled by eight reindeer – was the first to set that quintessential Christmas scene. A friend of the author was charmed by the poem and sent it anonymously to a New York newspaper. The author finally owned up to it in 1837, confessing that as a Professor of Oriental and Greek Literature, he had been uneasy about being associated with “unscholarly verse” that he had written only to amuse his children. But this “unscholarly verse” made his name and charms us still.

And this choice is a sneaky one: it was published in 1826, but it’s actually set in the late 21st century. I couldn’t resist including it for three reasons: it’s a product of the 1820s (and deals with several social concerns of the time, such as republicanism), it’s written by a woman (and my other four choices aren’t), and its rather apposite storyline concerns a mysterious pandemic that rapidly sweeps across the entire globe, ultimately resulting in the near-extinction of humanity (leaving just the last man)… It wasn’t popular at the time – widely considered to be Shelley’s weakest work – but to be fair to her, she was simply ahead of the game and had invented the genre of dystopian fiction. Read in that light, it’s a brave and fascinating work.