100 books like The Victorian Guide to Sex

OK, yes, I know. It’s fiction, and the first steampunk novel too. But I think that sometimes fiction can tell us (almost) as much as factual history about the past, if the authors have done their research – and Gibson and Sterling absolutely have. I can even tell just what academic papers they’d been reading!

It’s alternative history Victorian, But I think it tells us a lot about the real Victorians too, because it shows just how much technology mattered to their sense of who they were and what made them different from their parents. And, obviously, it’s a great story.

What I really admire about this book is the way it brings to life bits of the Victorian past that are easily overlooked, even though lots of them are still there all around us. The Victorians were in love with their engineers and their monumental works: bridges, buildings, railways, steamships. They were their future.

I like the way Rolt takes us on a deep dive into the world the engineers built and draws pen portraits of the men themselves: larger than life, ambitious, brash. Think of that famous photo of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, chomping his cigar and a stovepipe hat on his head. That was them.

We’ve all seen them, those big British spectaculars – at royal coronations, funerals, and weddings. What I admire most about Cannadine’s book is the way he doesn’t just remind us that the Victorians invented all this but why it was so important to them too.

The Victorians were in love with spectacle – and making spectacles of themselves (think about those big Victorian dresses!) Cannadine is great at putting spectacle at the centre of their political world, too. Showing off was a way of showing power.

This is it. The original Victorian expose. I love the way Lytton Strachey takes his parents’ generation and pokes fun at their heroes. This is the first attempt to burst the Victorians’ bubble, and I think it’s brilliant. More than that, I don’t really think you can understand anything that’s been written about them since without starting here.

Strachey picks on four Victorian greats – Florence Nightingale included – and strips them naked. Not so great after all, he concludes. It’s the original tell-all biography.

This fascinating doorstopper of a book contains more than 500 photographs of buildings that have long since disappeared from London’s streets. It provides a tantalising glimpse of the city that our ancestors knew and carries me off on a time travelling adventure every time I look through it.

One of the reasons I like this book is because the author is a man writing about a woman’s inner thoughts and, unusually, doing a very good job.

The time and place: London, the 1890s. Single women are known as “the odd women,” the leftovers. Dr. Rhoda Nunn starts a school to train these women in secretarial skills (back then, most secretaries were men) so that they won’t be dependent on relatives or forced into unhappy marriages. Rhoda herself is proudly unmarried and independent – until she meets an absolutely wonderful man. Will she give up her advocacy for “odd women” and marry the man she loves? 

(Warning: this book is out of copyright, so shoddy rip-offs are being sold on Amazon. Make sure you get a legit copy.)

Listed as a ‘gas lamp’ fantasy, and me being a pre-Victorian/Victorian era London fan, I had to grab this one. It had a fresh twist on the mad scientist’s experiment went wrong, creating a superhero and a supervillain. I found that exciting. I loved how the main character (the hero) struggled to learn his abilities and limitations, all the while not knowing who the villain was or what he was up to. I enjoyed this master class on how to put your main character through the wringer. And the twist ending surprised me. Great stuff. 

Nobody does characters like Jess Kidd. Every person in this story is bizarre—a monster, misfit, or malefactor—yet not one feels contrived. I adored Bridie Devine, a small, rotund, pipe-smoking detective who begins to see the same ghost everywhere she goes.

Bridie’s quarry is a strange girl who’s been kidnapped and might (depending on who you ask) have supernatural powers or be a “lovely grotesque” who’s caught the eye of collectors. I fell in love with Kidd’s imaginative Victorian London, where nothing is as it seems, and evil lurks around every bend.

This is often overlooked by readers of Dickens. I think the term “sketches” is important here at a point where Dickens was still experimenting with his art and particularly his characters which were always going to be his greatest strength. Sketches by Boz is a collection of fascinatingly detailed insights into London life intertwined in episodes (or scenes) as Dickens terms it through a richly caricatured study of a set of interesting lives of the working classes, in a way that only Dickens has ever been able to do. The “sketches” had, prior to this, been serialized in weekly installments (the soap operas of the day). Dickens had experienced sufficient highs and lows of social mobility in his own life to fully qualify his portrayals. "The Tuggses at Ramsgate" is perhaps for me the most memorable but the whole volume is bursting with energetic individuality and character. I have… show more.

This book was recommended to me by a friend who knew I liked books set in the Victorian era. However, at the time, I had not read any books set in a music hall and certainly not a mystery. This book takes the reader deep into the underbelly of Victorian London and introduces a whole cast of eerie characters as well as some wonderful characters with hearts of gold.

The descriptions of the places our heroine is forced to visit are so exquisitely drawn that I could literally taste, smell, hear and see everything. The charm of Kitty and her friends gives a welcome reprieve from the darker aspects of the novel, yet it is those aspects that thrill the most!