The Enlightenment

For most of a century, the novel is the Enlightenment's favorite instrument: picaresque heroes test a corrupt world, letters expose private virtue to public scrutiny, and philosophical tales mock every system that claims to have reason all figured out. Then, right at the end, one book breaks the pattern completely, and points straight at Romanticism.

1. 1
   Pamela

   Samuel Richardson · 1740

   Lvl 4500pp

   Richardson's servant girl fends off her master's advances in real-time letters: the epistolary novel's founding bestseller, virtue as suspense plot.

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2. 2
   Joseph Andrews

   Henry Fielding · 1742

   Lvl 4340pp

   Fielding can't resist parodying Pamela's virtue-under-siege premise: comedy talking back to the era's own bestseller.

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3. 3
   Tom Jones

   Henry Fielding · 1749

   Lvl 5890pp

   Fielding's mature answer: a foundling's picaresque education across the whole breadth of English society, plotted like a machine.

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4. 4
   Candide

   Voltaire · 1759

   Lvl 3120pp

   Voltaire's philosophical tale is the era's sharpest tool: reason's confidence in 'the best of all possible worlds' mocked to pieces in under a hundred pages.

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5. 5
   A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy

   Laurence Sterne · 1768

   Lvl 5160pp

   Sterne turns the travel narrative into pure digression and feeling-for-its-own-sake: reason's discipline already starting to loosen.

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6. 6
   Dream of the Red Chamber

   Cao Xueqin · 1791

   Lvl 92500pp

   China's own Enlightenment-era masterpiece: a sprawling household in decline, a philosophy of impermanence folded into a domestic epic five times the length of anything else on this list.

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7. 7
   The Sorrows of Young Werther

   Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · 1774

   Lvl 3176pp

   The capstone, and the crack: Goethe's lovesick young man feels his way to suicide, reason offers no argument that reaches him, and the next era has already begun.

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