They found that readers today

[aminaas1576]

Now, however, thanks to preservation and scanning by libraries at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and elsewhere, thousands of those forgotten novels are available at the Internet Archive. The list below has links to fifty of them—mostly British novels published between 1800 and 1899—as well as to Wikipedia articles for many of the authors.

I compiled this list after reading a fascinating recent study by Melanie Walsh and Maria Antoniak about books regarded as classics by users of the book-rating site Goodreads. seem to read mainly the well-known canonical works. Jane Eyre, for example, has more than 1,700,000 ratings at Goodreads and over 45,000 reviews.

For the following list, I chose only 19th-century novels that, as of May 2021, have not been reviewed or rated by anyone at Goodreads. There are many such forgotten novels in the Internet Archive’s phone number library collections, and it’s likely that some of them have not been read by anyone for over a century.

Would you like to be the first?

Tom Gally lives in Yokohama, Japan, and teaches at the University of Tokyo. In 2019, he wrote about travel books found at the Internet Archive.

Francis Adams, John Webb’s End: Australian Bush Life [link] (1891)
Fanny Aikin-Kortright, Anne Sherwood: Or, The Social Institutions of England [vol 1, vol 2, vol 3] (1857)
John Ainslie (ed.), Antipathy: Or, The Confessions of a Cat-hater [vol 1, vol 2, vol 3] (1836)
W.W. Aldred, A Lost Cause: A Story of the Last Rebellion in Poland [vol 1, vol 2, vol 3] (1881)
Elizabeth M. Alford, Netherton-on-Sea [vol 1, vol 2, vol 3] (1869)
Charlotte Anley, Earlswood: A Tale for the Times, and All Time [link] (1853)
Anonymous, Uncle Tweazy and His Quizzical Neighbours: A Comi-satiric Novel [vol 1, vol 2, vol 3] (1816)
William Delafield Arnold, Oakfield: Or, Fellowship in the East [vol 1, vol 2] (1854)
Blanche Atkinson, A Commonplace Girl [link] (1895)
Isabella Banks, Glory: A Wiltshire Story [link] (1881).