How much science fiction and fantasy had Victorians read? What should you include in your Steampunk? It turns out...lots! A fun guide for writers, readers, fans, and those who'd like to learn more.
3. Spring-Heeled Jack
โข 1830s urban legend in the
streets of London.
โข A strange figure, said to
possess superhuman agility.
โข an amorphous figure, the
devil in human form; an
inner-city
โข By the mid-19th century he
was being featured in
novels and plays
4. The Scarlet Pimpernel
โข by Baroness Orczy,
published in 1905.
โข written after her 1903
stage play of the same
title enjoyed a long run in
London
โข The original masked hero,
from Revolutionary France
5. Doctor Syn: A Tale of the
Romney Marsh
โข 1915: Russell Thorndikeโs
the Scarecrow.
โข Gentle parson Dr. Syn -
formerly feared pirate
Captain Clegg, and currently
the apparently meek and mild
village parson - assumes a
third masked identity to
protect his parishioners from
the King's Revenue Men.
6. Zorro
โข Spanish for "fox
โข created in 1919 by
American pulp writer
Johnston McCulley
โข appeared in the Pueblo of
Los Angeles during the era
of Spanish California
(1769โ1821).
โข Based in history?
9. Gothic Begins
โข Horace Walpoleโs 1764 The
Castle of Otranto,
โข Ann Radcliffe developed
the feminist gothic. She
introduced the brooding
villain (A Sicilian Romance)
in 1790. All, especially The
Mysteries of Udolpho
(1794), were best-sellers.
10. โข "penny dreadful" serial
fictions
โข G.W.M. Reynolds wrote a
trilogy of Gothic horror
novels: Faust (1846),
Wagner the Wehr-wolf
(1847) and The
Necromancer (1857).
11. Ghosts
โข A Christmas Carol (1843)
โข Emily Brontรซ's Wuthering
Heights (1847)
โข Poe (1850)
12. Vampires
โข Polidori's The Vampyre
(1819) revived Lamb's
Byronic "Lord Ruthven", but
this time as a vampire
โข anonymously authored
Varney the Vampire (1847)
โข 1897, Dracula by Bram
Stoker
13. Childrenโs Fantasy
โข 1865 Alice in Wonderland
โข Robert Louis Stevenson
โข L. Frank Baumโs Oz books
(1900โ1920) with
technological inventions
and devices including
perhaps the first literary
appearance of handheld
wireless communicators
14. Frankenstein
โข Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
(1818) features the first
archetypal "mad scientist"
โข gothic horror
โข science fiction themes
such as technology and
the alien as antagonist
16. Cryonics
โข Jane C. Loudon's The
Mummy!: Or a Tale of the
Twenty-Second Century
(1827), heโs revived into a
world in political crisis,
where technology has
advanced to gas-flame
jewelry and houses that
migrate on rails, etc.
Mary Shelley's short story "Roger
Dodsworth: The Reanimated Englishman"
(1826) sees a man frozen in ice revived in
present day
17. Post-apocalyptic
โข Shelleyโs The Last Man
(1826) is often called the
first science fiction novel in
a post-apocalyptic
plague-riddled future.
โข Victor Hugo wrote in his
poem The Legend of the
Centuries (1859) a 20th
century dystopia/utopia.
Mankind has gone toward
the stars in a starship
seeking liberty.
18. Time Travel
โข 1836 Alexander Veltman published
Predki Kalimerosa: Aleksandr Filippovich
Makedonskii (The forebears of Kalimeros:
Alexander, son of Philip of Macedon),
the first time-travel Russian science
fiction novel.
โข Twainโs Connecticut Yankee
(1889)
The narrator rides to ancient Greece on a
hippogriff, meets Aristotle, and goes on a voyage
with Alexander the Great before returning to the
19th century.
19. Time Travel
โข The second-best selling novel in the U.S.
in the 19th century: Edward Bellamy's
Looking Backward (1888) predicts the
future extrapolates a rather socialist
utopian future society
โข between 1860 and 1887, 11 similar works
were produced in the United States by
various authors
20. To the Moon!
โข By John Leonard Riddell, a
Professor of Chemistry in
New Orleans, it follows a
student who builds a
rocket with an alloy that
prevents gravitational
attraction, with scientific
footnotes for hard science
fiction.
Orrin Lindsay's plan of aerial navigation,
with a narrative of his explorations in the
higher regions of the atmosphere, and his
wonderful voyage round the moon! (1847)
21. โข William Henry Rhodesโ The
Case of Summerfield (1871)
introduced a weapon of
mass destruction as a mad
scientist called Black Bart
blackmails the world with a
plan to turn all water to fire.
โข Edward Page Mitchell (1874)
wrote about invisibility, faster
than light travels,
teleportation, time travel,
cryogenics, mind transfer,
mutants, cyborgs and
mechanical brains.
22. Lost Worlds
โข Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The
Coming Race (1871) has a
highly evolved
subterranean psi-sensitive
civilization with Darwinian
evolution and technology.
โข The Lost World (1912) by Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle find
dinosaurs in South America
23. Alt-history
โข Nathaniel Hawthorne's "P.'s
Correspondenceโ (1845) stars
"a madman" perceiving a
different 1845, in which long-
dead famous poets are alive.
โข Castello Holford's Aristopia
(1895) is a utopia funded by the
gold found in Virginia.
The earliest is Livy's Ab Urbe Condita Libri:
Rome vs Alexander the Great
Louis Geoffroy's Napoleon et la Conquรชte
du Monde (1836), an alternate history of a
world conquered by Napoleon.
24. Sentient Robots
โข Erewhon by Samuel Butler
(1872) dealt with machines
becoming sentient and
supplanting the human
race.
โข R.U.R. (1920) a play by
Czech writer Karel ฤapek.
stands for Rossumovi
Univerzรกlnรญ Roboti
(Rossumโs Universal
Robots).
25. Aliens
โข C.I. Defontenay's Star ou
Psi de Cassiopรฉe (1854),
chronicle of an alien world
and civilization.
โข Astronomer Camille
Flammarion's La Pluralitรฉ
des Mondes Habitรฉs (1862)
speculating on
extraterrestrial life.
26. Jules Verne
โข Five Weeks in a Balloon
(1862)
โข Journey to the Center of
the Earth (1864)
โข Twenty Thousand Leagues
Under the Sea (1870)
โข Around the World in Eighty
Days (1873)
27. HG Wells
โข The Time Machine (1895) is
more social than
technological, for a new
kind of scifi
โข The Invisible Man (1897)
โข The War of the Worlds
(1898)
29. What Was Hot?
โข Dickens
โข Bronte Sisters
โข Jane Austen
โข Thomas Hardy
โข Arthur Conan Doyle
โข Robert Browning (1812โ89)
and Alfred Tennyson (1809โ
92) were Victorian
England's most famous
poets,