50 Fun Facts About 19th-Century Literature

Which author began Frankenstein at eighteen after a ghost-story challenge near Lake Geneva?

Mary Shelley was 18 when she started the story, and its first edition came out anonymously in 1818, when she was 20. Her name went on the title page only in later editions.

Which Russian novelist was led out to a firing squad, then reprieved at the last moment and sent to Siberia?

Fyodor Dostoevsky was condemned for joining a circle that discussed banned books, and the death sentence was commuted at the last moment. Four years in a hard labour camp followed.

Which children's character died by hanging at the original ending of Carlo Collodi's 1881 serial?

Pinocchio dies hanged in Chapter 15, where the serial first stopped. Reader demand and the editor's request brought the puppet back for the chapters in which he becomes a real boy.

Which Hans Christian Andersen heroine dies at dawn after the prince she loves marries someone else?

The Little Mermaid dissolves into foam and becomes a spirit of the air instead of winning the prince. Andersen's working title for the tale was Daughters of the Air.

Which young Gascon, the hero of The Three Musketeers, is not actually one of the three of the title?

D'Artagnan leaves Gascony for Paris hoping to join the Musketeers of the Guard, and is befriended by the trio of Athos, Porthos and Aramis. He was loosely based on a real soldier.

Which Massachusetts poet saw only ten of her nearly 1,800 poems published during her lifetime?

Emily Dickinson kept her writing so private that few people knew of it until her younger sister Lavinia found the poems in her desk after her death. The first volume appeared four years later.

Which Jane Austen novel about a family of five daughters was first drafted as First Impressions?

Pride and Prejudice began in 1796 as First Impressions. When Austen's father offered that draft to a London publisher the next year, his letter came back marked as declined by return of post.

Under which pen name did Oxford mathematics lecturer Charles Dodgson publish his children's classics?

Lewis Carroll is a play on his real name: Charles Lutwidge was put into Latin as Carolus Ludovicus, turned back into English and then reversed.

Which captain hunts the white whale that bit off his leg in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick?

Ahab's quest for vengeance drives a book that flopped: Moby-Dick was a commercial failure and was out of print when its author died in 1891.

Which Charles Dickens novel has a workhouse orphan, chosen by lot, ask for another portion of gruel?

Oliver Twist is the loser when the hungry workhouse boys draw lots over who must ask. The story ran as a magazine serial from 1837 to 1839.

Which Victor Hugo novel follows ex-convict Jean Valjean through to the June Rebellion of 1832 in Paris?

Les Misérables took its hero partly from life: Valjean is loosely based on Eugène François Vidocq, an ex-convict who went on to found France's first criminal investigative agency.

Which Irish author wrote Dracula while working as business manager of London's Lyceum Theatre?

Bram Stoker travelled the world on the theatre company's tours yet never visited Eastern Europe, the setting that made his most famous novel.

Which Mark Twain novel is narrated by a boy rafting down the Mississippi with Jim, a runaway slave?

Huckleberry Finn tells it all in his own vernacular, and the book was widely criticized for coarse language on release. One Massachusetts public library committee excluded it from the shelves.

Which novel did Emily Brontë publish as Ellis Bell a year before her death at the age of thirty?

Wuthering Heights is the only novel she wrote. All three sisters published under male pseudonyms with the same surname, appearing in print as Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell.

Which master of Thornfield Hall is revealed at the altar to be already married in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre?

Mr. Rochester is exposed in mid-ceremony, when a lawyer declares that he cannot marry Jane because he already has a wife, Bertha, the cause of the strange happenings in the house.

Which Leo Tolstoy novel follows Russian aristocratic families through the French invasion led by Napoleon?

War and Peace weaves five interlocking family narratives together with chapters in which Tolstoy steps outside the story to discuss history and philosophy.

Which Jules Verne novel begins with Phileas Fogg staking half his fortune at London's Reform Club?

Around the World in Eighty Days has Fogg bet £20,000 that he can make the trip in time, then carry his remaining £20,000 along to cover the expenses.

Which one-legged ship's cook is the secret leader of the pirates in Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island?

Long John Silver so dominates the story that its working title was The Sea Cook. He fixed the popular image of the one-legged seaman with a parrot on his shoulder.

Which playwright's only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, was quoted against him in court in 1895?

Oscar Wilde first published the story as a shorter tale in an American magazine in 1890, and the novel-length version followed the next year.

Which of the March sisters in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women is the tomboy who writes?

Jo shares the family home with traditional Meg, pianist Beth and artist Amy. The novel is loosely based on the lives of the author and her own three sisters.

Which author's anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin sold 300,000 copies in the United States in its first year?

Harriet Beecher Stowe first published it as a 40-week serial in an abolitionist periodical. It was planned to run for only a few weeks, but she expanded the story and it was instantly popular.

Which Nathaniel Hawthorne heroine must wear a red letter on her dress as punishment in Puritan Boston?

Hester Prynne is sentenced to stand on the scaffold for three hours and to wear the letter for the rest of her life, after bearing a child of unknown paternity.

Which bell-ringer of Notre-Dame cathedral loves the street dancer Esmeralda in Victor Hugo's 1831 novel?

Quasimodo was deafened by the loud ringing of the bells, so his guardian taught him sign language. He had been found abandoned at the cathedral as a small child.

Which American author created both Rip Van Winkle and the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow?

Washington Irving also gave New York City its nickname Gotham in an 1807 magazine, and is credited as the first American to earn his living solely by his pen.

Under which male pen name did Mary Ann Evans publish Middlemarch and Silas Marner?

George Eliot wanted to escape the stereotype that women's writing was light fare, not to be taken very seriously. The name may also have shielded her private life from public scrutiny.

Which English poet, author of Don Juan, died of fever in 1824 while fighting for Greek independence?

Lord Byron joined the Greek fight against the Ottoman Empire and died at 36 after the sieges of Missolonghi. Greeks revere him as a folk hero.

Which war's Battle of Balaclava inspired Alfred Tennyson's poem The Charge of the Light Brigade?

The Crimean War reached Tennyson through The Times, and he wrote the poem in a few minutes from his recollection of the newspaper's account of the cavalry's losses.

Which H. G. Wells novel has Martians in three-legged fighting machines overrun Surrey and London?

The War of the Worlds ends without a human victory: the invaders are killed by earthly pathogens, to which they have no immunity.

What is the name of Captain Nemo's submarine in Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas?

Nautilus runs on electric batteries, and its design is regarded as ahead of its time: real submarines of the 1860s were comparatively primitive vessels.

Which Charles Dickens character, jilted on her wedding day, stops her clocks and never takes off the dress?

Miss Havisham stopped every clock in the mansion at twenty minutes to nine, the exact time she received the letter telling her she had been left at the altar.

Which Charles Dickens novel ends with Sydney Carton going to the guillotine in place of his lookalike?

A Tale of Two Cities has Carton drug the condemned Charles Darnay and swap places with him. He does it for Lucie, the woman he loves, who married Darnay instead.

At which Swiss waterfall did Arthur Conan Doyle send Sherlock Holmes to an apparent death in 1893?

Reichenbach Falls was meant to be the end: Doyle felt the detective was distracting him from more serious work, and was only later persuaded to revive him.

Which Poe tale featuring C. Auguste Dupin has been called the first modern detective story?

The Murders in the Rue Morgue gave its sleuth traits that became conventions for later detectives such as Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. Poe called it a tale of ratiocination.

In which city was Edgar Allan Poe found delirious at a tavern in 1849, four days before his death?

Baltimore has never given up the mystery: the cause of his death was never established, and the shabby clothes he was found in are believed not to have been his own.

Which French novelist, grandson of an enslaved woman in Saint-Domingue, wrote The Count of Monte Cristo?

Alexandre Dumas carried the surname of that grandmother, Marie-Cessette Dumas. His father, born in the colony to her and a French nobleman, rose to become a general.

Which Henrik Ibsen play ends with Nora leaving her keys, her wedding ring and her husband Torvald?

A Doll's House was given an alternative ending for its German premiere. Ibsen's agent felt the original would not play well there, so Ibsen wrote the change himself to stop a translator altering it.

Which William Makepeace Thackeray novel follows Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley through the Napoleonic Wars?

Vanity Fair takes its title from a never-ending fair in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and it was published with the subtitle A Novel without a Hero.

Which literary movement prized imagination, emotion and nature in reaction to the Age of Enlightenment?

Romanticism grew out of an earlier German movement called Sturm und Drang, or Storm and Stress, and it pushed back against the Industrial Revolution as well.

Which flowers did William Wordsworth make famous after seeing them beside Ullswater with his sister Dorothy?

Daffodils in a long belt along the lake shore caught their eye on a walk in April 1802. The poem was written two years later and first published in 1807.

Which French novelist was tried in 1857 over the alleged obscenity of Madame Bovary and acquitted?

Gustave Flaubert and his publisher were both cleared, and the trial only made the book notorious. It had first run as a serial in the Revue de Paris the year before.

Which Goethe hero, a scholar striving to learn everything, is the subject of a bet between God and Mephistopheles?

Faust then makes a wager of his own with the demon: if he is ever granted a moment so blissful that he wishes to stay in it forever, he will die at once and serve the Devil.

Which Thomas Hardy novel ends soon after its heroine is captured while asleep on a stone altar at Stonehenge?

Tess of the d'Urbervilles closes with a black flag raised over the prison to signal her execution. Hardy gave the book the subtitle A Pure Woman.

Which Russian poet, author of Eugene Onegin, was fatally wounded in a duel with his wife's alleged lover?

Alexander Pushkin faced Georges d'Anthès, a French officer serving in a Russian guards regiment, who was also married to the sister of the poet's wife.

In which Yorkshire seaside town does the ship carrying the Count run aground in the 1897 novel Dracula?

Whitby watches a large dog leap ashore from the wreck while the captain's corpse is found tied to the helm. The author did some of his research at a library in the town.

Which pen name, taken from his younger brother's family nickname, did Charles Dickens use on his early sketches?

Boz started as Moses, a pet name for his brother Augustus borrowed from The Vicar of Wakefield. Pronounced jokingly through the nose it came out as Boses, which was then shortened.

Which Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem was left a fragment after a visitor from Porlock interrupted his writing?

Kubla Khan came to him in an opium-influenced dream, by the account in his own preface. He kept it for private readings among friends until it was published in 1816.

Which phrase stood on the title page of Sense and Sensibility in place of Jane Austen's name?

By a Lady was all that the first edition said about its author. Austen paid to have the book published and gave the publisher a commission on its sales.

Which Henry James novella follows a governess who becomes convinced the two children in her care are haunted?

The Turn of the Screw was first read as a plain ghost story when it ran as a magazine serial in 1898. In the 1930s some critics suggested the ghosts were figments of her imagination.

In the Brothers Grimm's 1812 first edition of Snow White, what relation is the murderous queen to the heroine?

Her mother was the wicked queen in the 1812 first edition, and later editions turned her into a stepmother. The brothers made the same switch in Hansel and Gretel.

Which former slave's 1845 Narrative, written in Lynn, Massachusetts, sold five thousand copies within four months?

Frederick Douglass, already known as an orator, wrote the memoir as a treatise on abolition too, and almost 30,000 copies had been sold by 1860.