# The 27 Best 19th-Century English Novels

> Drawing-room comedies sit beside gothic nightmares, social satires and detective puzzles, all from a century when the novel grew up. Expect beloved comfort reads and a few grim masterpieces that still split classrooms.

*By YPB Team · Published October 17, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/the-27-best-19th-century-english-novels*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **Pride and Prejudice** — score 1000/1000
   Jane Austen's 1813 comedy of manners following Elizabeth Bennet and the proud Mr Darcy.
2. **Villette** — score 693/1000
   Charlotte Brontë's darker, introspective story of a lonely English teacher in a Belgian town.
3. **Sense and Sensibility** — score 682/1000
   Two sisters with opposite temperaments navigate money, heartbreak and social ruin.
4. **A Tale of Two Cities** — score 656/1000
   Dickens's French Revolution drama of sacrifice, set between London and Paris.
5. **The Picture of Dorian Gray** — score 515/1000
   Oscar Wilde's only novel, about a beautiful young man whose portrait ages in his place.
6. **Our Mutual Friend** — score 515/1000
   Dickens's last completed novel, a murky Thames-side story about money, identity and dust heaps.
7. **Middlemarch** — score 515/1000
   George Eliot's panoramic study of a provincial town, often named the greatest English novel.
8. **Silas Marner** — score 515/1000
   A bitter miser finds redemption when an abandoned child wanders into his cottage.
9. **Emma** — score 515/1000
   Austen's 1815 portrait of a clever, meddling matchmaker who misreads everyone around her.
10. **Great Expectations** — score 454/1000
   Dickens's story of Pip, a blacksmith's boy raised by a secret fortune and a bitter dream.
11. **Mansfield Park** — score 454/1000
   A poor relation raised in a wealthy household tests her principles against a charming, careless crowd.
12. **Vanity Fair** — score 454/1000
   Thackeray's satire of ambition and snobbery, starring the unforgettable schemer Becky Sharp.
13. **Tess of the d'Urbervilles** — score 454/1000
   Hardy's tragic story of a country girl crushed by class, chance and a rigid moral code.
14. **David Copperfield** — score 384/1000
   Dickens's most personal novel, tracing an orphan's rise from hardship to authorship.
15. **Frankenstein** — score 384/1000
   Mary Shelley's 1818 tale of a scientist whose created being turns on him, often called the first science fiction novel.
16. **The Woman in White** — score 384/1000
   Wilkie Collins's twisting sensation novel of stolen identities and a ghostly figure on a moonlit road.
17. **Treasure Island** — score 303/1000
   Stevenson's pirate adventure of maps, mutiny and Long John Silver.
18. **The Mill on the Floss** — score 303/1000
   Eliot's tender, tragic story of a brother and sister bound together by the river of their childhood.
19. **Dracula** — score 303/1000
   Bram Stoker's 1897 epistolary horror classic that defined the modern vampire.
20. **Persuasion** — score 303/1000
   Austen's last completed novel, a quiet second-chance romance between Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth.
21. **The Moonstone** — score 303/1000
   Collins's cursed diamond mystery, widely regarded as the first English detective novel.
22. **Jane Eyre** — score 303/1000
   Charlotte Brontë's orphan-turned-governess who refuses to give up her independence for love.
23. **Oliver Twist** — score 303/1000
   A workhouse orphan falls in with London's pickpockets in Dickens's early social crusade.
24. **Alice's Adventures in Wonderland** — score 303/1000
   Lewis Carroll's 1865 fantasy of a girl tumbling down a rabbit hole into nonsense.
25. **Wuthering Heights** — score 206/1000
   Emily Brontë's savage, haunting story of Heathcliff and Catherine on the Yorkshire moors.
26. **Little Dorrit** — score 0/1000
   Dickens's tale of debtors' prison, bureaucracy and a quiet heroine born behind its walls.
27. **Bleak House** — score 0/1000
   A sprawling Dickens satire of a never-ending lawsuit and the lives it swallows.

Tags: books, classics, england, fiction, victorian