85 books like The Mysteries of London

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…’

Published in 1834, this one amplifies Ann Radcliffe's Gothic-ness to eleven. I loved the story because it's fun, wild, gloomy, rogue, and riveting, like a gripping telenovela. 

The plot is all about inheritance, family drama, illegitimate sons, and revenge. It features villains, gypsies, apparitions, corpses, evil priests, murders, curses, and the famous highwayman Dick Turpin and his mare Black Bess. It recounts Turpin's midnight ride through the English countryside as he flees capture, and like it, the entire novel is a wild ride. 

Though a bit antiquated and with "songs" aplenty—which Ainsworth himself lamented had been lost in British literature and tried to resurrect—its gloomy and despairing story captivated me. The book begins at night inside a mausoleum, where the sexton Peter Bradley tells his grandson Luke his family history.

Right off the bat, we have a desecration and a rotting hand; how much more Gothic can this story be?

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. 

I dreamed for many years of writing a book about crime fiction. I’m primarily a crime novelist, but so was Julian Symons, and the experience of writing fiction is invaluable when discussing other writers and understanding what they were trying to do. I approached Oxford University Press, with a view to producing a Companion about the genre, comprising essays by writers including myself. This led to a fruitful meeting with an OUP editor and novelist, Michael Cox, but the project was stillborn when his American colleagues had commissioned just such a book, to be edited by Rosemary Herbert. Rosemary invited me to contribute twenty-odd essays to her Companion, and I found the work of my fellow contributors (including Symons) a delight to read.

A precursor to Dracula, and largely forgotten today in the mainstream, the globe-hopping adventures of Varney bring to mind many spy adventure tales.

In this novel, one of the original “penny dreadfuls” the episodic tone (due to its original publication as a continuing weekly serial from 1845-1847), contributes to the espionage feel, especially as Varney takes on a cover as “Baron Stolmuyer Saltsburgh” in order to further his activities.

Also notable is, among the other vampiric Gothic traits displayed by Varney, he is also able to be revived by moonlight, a trope which is now more attributed to werewolves.

This is a comprehensive anthology of non-Dracula short stories (although it does include Bram Stoker’s Dracula’s Guest!) covering the whole of the nineteenth century and beyond, including John Polidori’s The Vampyre and Sheridan le Fanu’s influential Carmilla.

It even has an extract from the hugely popular Victorian ‘penny dreadful’ Varney The Vampire, which is so awful that it’s hilarious.

If you’re interested in the literary roots of vampires, and Dracula in particular, I’d heartily recommend this nonfiction title. It delves into the origins of characters like the Count in earlier 19th-century texts and examines how and why Dracula became such a long-lasting cultural influence. It’s also very good on Bram Stoker’s life and less famous works.

Henry Mayhew’s sprawling record of nineteenth-century London can be overwhelming, but his ear for the vernacular and eye for weird detail means that the reader can dip in and find something.

London’s population exploded in the nineteenth century, bulked out by a huge number of itinerant workers. Mayhew interviews these people–in the prologue to the first volume, he describes himself as a "traveller in the undiscovered country of the poor"–and because he gives no judgment on their lives, the book feels more like a modern documentary.

The voices are one thing; Mayhew’s statistics are another–"expenditure in ham sandwiches supplied by street sellers is £1,820 yearly…a consumption of 436,800 sandwiches." Anyone who thinks that Dickens’ writes grotesques should read this. The first book that really brought old London alive for me. 

Do not be put off by the fact this book, and the others in the Sally Lockhart quartet, are often marketed as children’s/YA literature. Like the best of fiction, they transcend categorisation.

The Ruby in the Smoke introduces us to the indomitable Sally Lockhart, orphaned and forced to uncover the secret behind her father’s death. She’s feisty and fiercely independent, navigating her way in a world where the chips are stacked against her. Pullman provides us with an impeccably researched foray into the 1870s, all wrapped up in a hugely entertaining read.