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.

1. What Victorians Were
Reading

2. Superheroes

3. Spring-Heeled Jack
• 1830s urban legend in the
streets of London.
• A strange figure, said to
possess superhuman agility.
• an amorphous figure, the
devil in human form; an
inner-city
• By the mid-19th century he
was being featured in
novels and plays

4. The Scarlet Pimpernel
• by Baroness Orczy,
published in 1905.
• written after her 1903
stage play of the same
title enjoyed a long run in
London
• The original masked hero,
from Revolutionary France

5. Doctor Syn: A Tale of the
Romney Marsh
• 1915: Russell Thorndike’s
the Scarecrow.
• 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
• Spanish for "fox
• created in 1919 by
American pulp writer
Johnston McCulley
• appeared in the Pueblo of
Los Angeles during the era
of Spanish California
(1769–1821).
• Based in history?

7. '30s pulp fiction
"mystery men" such as the
Lone Ranger, the Shadow
and the Phantom

8. The Gothic

9. Gothic Begins
• Horace Walpole’s 1764 The
Castle of Otranto,
• 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. • "penny dreadful" serial
fictions
• G.W.M. Reynolds wrote a
trilogy of Gothic horror
novels: Faust (1846),
Wagner the Wehr-wolf
(1847) and The
Necromancer (1857).

11. Ghosts
• A Christmas Carol (1843)
• Emily Brontë's Wuthering
Heights (1847)
• Poe (1850)

12. Vampires
• Polidori's The Vampyre
(1819) revived Lamb's
Byronic "Lord Ruthven", but
this time as a vampire
• anonymously authored
Varney the Vampire (1847)
• 1897, Dracula by Bram
Stoker

13. Children’s Fantasy
• 1865 Alice in Wonderland
• Robert Louis Stevenson
• L. Frank Baum’s Oz books
(1900–1920) with
technological inventions
and devices including
perhaps the first literary
appearance of handheld
wireless communicators

14. Frankenstein
• Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
(1818) features the first
archetypal "mad scientist"
• gothic horror
• science fiction themes
such as technology and
the alien as antagonist

15. Science Fiction

16. Cryonics
• Jane C. Loudon's The
Mummy!: Or a Tale of the
Twenty-Second Century
(1827), he’s 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
• Shelley’s The Last Man
(1826) is often called the
first science fiction novel in
a post-apocalyptic
plague-riddled future.
• 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
• 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.
• Twain’s 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
• 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
• between 1860 and 1887, 11 similar works
were produced in the United States by
various authors

20. To the Moon!
• 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. • William Henry Rhodes’ 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.
• 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
• Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The
Coming Race (1871) has a
highly evolved
subterranean psi-sensitive
civilization with Darwinian
evolution and technology.
• The Lost World (1912) by Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle find
dinosaurs in South America

23. Alt-history
• Nathaniel Hawthorne's "P.'s
Correspondence” (1845) stars
"a madman" perceiving a
different 1845, in which long-
dead famous poets are alive.
• 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 Conquête
du Monde (1836), an alternate history of a
world conquered by Napoleon.

24. Sentient Robots
• Erewhon by Samuel Butler
(1872) dealt with machines
becoming sentient and
supplanting the human
race.
• R.U.R. (1920) a play by
Czech writer Karel Čapek.
stands for Rossumovi
Univerzální Roboti
(Rossum’s Universal
Robots).

25. Aliens
• C.I. Defontenay's Star ou
Psi de Cassiopée (1854),
chronicle of an alien world
and civilization.
• Astronomer Camille
Flammarion's La Pluralité
des Mondes Habités (1862)
speculating on
extraterrestrial life.

26. Jules Verne
• Five Weeks in a Balloon
(1862)
• Journey to the Center of
the Earth (1864)
• Twenty Thousand Leagues
Under the Sea (1870)
• Around the World in Eighty
Days (1873)

27. HG Wells
• The Time Machine (1895) is
more social than
technological, for a new
kind of scifi
• The Invisible Man (1897)
• The War of the Worlds
(1898)

28. More Popular
Fiction

29. What Was Hot?
• Dickens
• Bronte Sisters
• Jane Austen
• Thomas Hardy
• Arthur Conan Doyle
• Robert Browning (1812–89)
and Alfred Tennyson (1809–
92) were Victorian
England's most famous
poets,

30. Plays 1850-1900
• Gillbert and Sullivan
• George Bernard Shaw
• Oscar Wilde