100 books like Rookwood

An exuberant serial novel by Regency sporting journalist Egan, illustrated by a young George Cruikshank (Dickens’ future artist). In it, three friends (based on the author, Cruikshank, and his younger brother Robert), document their ‘rambles and sprees through the metropolis’. It is a tale of dandies on safari written entirely in ‘flash’ slang, the language of the 19th-century underworld. The book was a publishing sensation, inspiring Dickens’ Pickwick Papers. I was introduced to this by my dear friend the late Professor Roger Sales many years ago, and it has been inspiring me ever since as a novelist and cultural historian. Egan’s style is bawdy and irreverent, until his voice was silenced by Victorian propriety a generation later. Can also be read as early social investigation.  

This is the first of the ‘Newgate novels’ or ‘criminal romances’ that essentially heralded the start of modern crime fiction. After the death of Walter Scott and before the rise of Dickens, Lytton, like his contemporary W.H. Ainsworth, was the bestselling English novelist of his day; a position both men continued to share with Dickens until the late-1840s. Paul Clifford is a redemptive tale of a fictional Georgian highwayman, full of adventure and intrigue, underpinned by a social message about the link between poverty and crime. Imprisoned for an offence he didn’t commit, the hero emerges apprenticed in crime and ready to use these skills to survive. Paul Clifford is now only remembered, if it is remembered at all, for its opening line, ‘It was a dark and stormy night…’

A lurid penny dreadful serial launched in 1844. The English counterpart of Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris (1843), the Chartist author/publisher Reynolds inaugurates the ‘city mysteries’ genre, exploring shady urban underworlds, and revealing corruption and exploitation through a focus on violence and sexual deviance. Using sensation to make a powerful political point and to reach working-class readers, Reynolds reduced all the problems of the world to the divide between wealth and poverty. Even Queen Victoria does not escape judgment. His dark urban labyrinths mirror those of Dickens, but his politics are much more radical, making the two men bitter ideological and commercial rivals. I’ve always found Reynolds inspiring, and have written about him academically and in historical fiction. 

Discovered and first published by W.H. Ainsworth, ‘Ouida’ – named from a childhood mispronunciation of ‘Louise’ – went on to become a prolific and bestselling novelist. Her style was melodramatic, intense, and bodice-ripping, her novels usually set against a society or military background. She wrote forty-five novels, Under Two Flags being the most successful. She remained popular until the early 1890s and, like Ainsworth, was granted a Civil List pension for her services to literature. Also like Ainsworth, she is not much read nowadays. In the novel, the profligate hero fakes his own death to avoid gambling debts and exiles himself to Algeria, joining the Chasseurs d’Afrique, the forerunner of the French Foreign Legion. A long way from the moralising tone of much Victorian fiction, ‘Ouida’ always keeps it racy and swashbuckling. 

Ah, a Victorian woman feeling restricted, what a shock. Thus, Lady Finchingfield decides to become Mademoiselle Noire, and enthralls Lord Henry. In something of a reaction to the excesses of the Regency period, the Victorian period had more rules than women could keep up with, and this way of addressing—or circumventing them—appealed to me as very creative. The disguise and gentlemen’s club add an aura of suspense so it was a super quick read for me. I love fast-paced books.

In 1842, after 45 years of frustratingly sedentary domesticity, the Austrian-born Ida Pfeiffer gave full vent to her wanderlust. Within five years, her jaw-dropping round-the-world journeys would make her one of the most widely-traveled persons of that century, while her talent for vivid portrayals made her one of the most well-known travel writers. Of her many chronicles, I especially enjoy this tale of her 1845 trip to the northern reaches of Scandinavia and Iceland—a place almost no continental Europeans had visited and few even knew existed. Pfeiffer’s insights and thoughtful reportage, as well as a newly emerging fascination with Iceland and Icelanders in our own time, has given this rare travel narrative new currency.

A dusty bundle of 150-year-old letters found in a deserted house in rural France forms the premise of this intriguing literary hybrid. Author Gillian Tindall beckons us to follow her on an enthralling, real-life detective story, as she uncovers the life and loves of the letters’ addressee, an obscure provincial innkeeper’s daughter named Célestine Chaumettte. As she pieces Célestine’s story together, Tindall breathes life back into a whole slice of history and a community now vanished. A rich cast of forgotten characters springs from the pages as we see, taste, and smell the many textures of rural society in 19th-century France, along with the seasons and cycles that governed it. This evocative, haunting account of a country girl’s experience and place within this world really is social history at its best.

Surely the rise of Hitler and the impact of global depression gave an air of inevitability about the holocaust to follow? In this successor volume, Steiner makes clear many other factors were in play that might have altered Europe’s fate. She details the West’s overriding fear of Soviet communism, the crucial role Mussolini played as termite to the tentative international order built in the 1920s, and the deep internal divisions that French leaders ultimately were unable to overcome, divisions that played their own role in strengthening British Prime Minister Chamberlain’s decision to deal with Hitler at the Munich conference. 

Clare is another consummate wordsmith – he even managed to write an engaging book about spending months on container ships – but with Orison he manages to weave a fascinating story using beautiful prose and superb writing to bring intelligent discussions and good research to life while introducing us to key conservation personalities he meets during his journeys.
Clare sets out to search for the highly endangered and secretive slender-billed curlew in a range of wetlands in a troubled Eastern Europe and discovers inspiring if sometimes eccentric movers and shakers devoted to saving our wild places.
And how about this for a profound final sentence in a book: ‘Too much certainty is a miserable thing, while the unknowable has a pristine beauty and a wonder with no end.’

As the first in his series of novels on the 1930s in Europe, Alan Furst's Night Soldier tends to earn the most critical praise, but Dark Star remains my personal favorite. Furst masters the noir ambiance and moral ambiguity of Europe as war approaches, where everyday people are drawn into the world of espionage and intrigue. His settings often lie outside the main urban centers of Paris and Berlin in the remote reaches of Eastern Europe. Furst's novels are impeccably researched for accurate detail-one of my must-haves in historical fiction-and each book will draw you to read the next in his series.