Old books that tell the most about everyday life in the time they were written

These lists include a few books which aren't good enough for pleasure reading but are, nevertheless, informational. I will mark them with L (for learn).

18th Century

Tristram Shandy

This is one of the longest books on this list. Most of them are compact and potent. Tristram Shandy is intentionally NOT so, but in its humorous digressions and bawdy attention to inconsequential incidents it tells you a lot about the everyday life of the British middle class during the mid-1700s.

Jane Austen's Juvenilia

The stories here are very silly but they're compact and hilarious and even when they're not they tell quite a bit about the time. Perhaps one of the greatest insights into everyday life in the 1790s is the fact that these were stories written by a young girl to read to her middle-class family around the fireside and the picture of fifteen-or-eighteen-year-old Jane Austen splitting the sides of her clergyman father with a boisterous parody of contemporary novels - well, it brings the 18th century a lot closer.

Regency Era

Jane Austen's Novels but especailly Emma and Mansfield Park

If you're going to write about the Regency Era - whether as a historian or novelist - you should definitely read all of Jane Austen's novels, but I think Northanger Abbey , Mansfield Park , and Emma tell the most about everday life.

Thomas Love Peacock's Mansion Books

Headlong Hall, Melincourt L , Nightmare Abbey, Crotchet Castle - a compendium of the philosophies and cultural movements being bandied about from the 1810s to 1831. And you could hardly have a more fun reading assignment.

Confessions of an Old Bachelor

This is the first of the many books on my list that just overflow with information about everyday life in their era (from here out I will mark them with SUPER ). It's also quite humorous.

Victorian Era

There are so many Victorian Books that fall into this category that I have to put them in a compact list:

• Sketches by Boz by Charles Dickens L SUPER
• A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
• Vara or the Child of Adoption
• Cora and the Doctor by Mrs. Madeleine Leslie
• The Wide Wide World by Susan Warner L SUPER
• The Gilded Age by Mark Twain and Charles Dudly Warner L
• What Katy Did by Susan Coolige SUPER
• What Katy Did at School by Susan Coolige
• When I was a Little Girl by Eliza Tabot SUPER
• How they Made a Man of Him by Julia Smith
• The Little Women Trilogy by Louisa May Alcott SUPER
• An Oldfashioned Girl by Louisa May Alcott SUPER
• The Chautauqua Girls books by Pansy
• The Peterkin Papers by Lucretia Peabody Hale SUPER
• Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome SUPER
• John Jerome; His Thoughts and Ways A Book Without Beginning by Jean Inglow
• A Fair Barbarian by Frances Hodgson Burnett
• A Romance of a Quiet Watering Place SUPER
• An American Girl in London SUPER
• Lucy Maud Montgomery's Journals Unabridged the P.E.I. years SUPER
• The Angel of the Tenement by George Madden Martin

1900-20

• The Price of Youth by Marjory Williams SUPER
• Lavender and Old Lace by Myrtle Reed
• Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm by Kate Douglas Wiggin SUPER
• Pollyanna and Pollyanna Grows Up by Eleanor H. Porter
• Cross Currents by Eleanor H. Porter
• The Sunbrige Girls at Six Star Ranch by Eleanor H. Porter L SUPER
• The Miss Billy books by Eleanor H. Porter
• Understood Betsy by Dorothy Canfield Fisher SUPER
• The Squirrel-Cage by Dorothy Canfield Fisher SUPER
• The Bent Twig by Dorothy Canfield Fisher SUPER
• Just Patty by Jean Webster SUPER
• When William Came by Saki
• The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne and Emily Books

Of course! But be careful. Don't imagine that they're based on experience just because they take place where the author grew up. Most of it is borrowed from other stories and polished up to be ten times better than it originally was. Emily's Quest ignores WWI.