A tight little canon of science, doubles, decay, and the aristocratic undead.

Bram Stoker, Dracula – Epistolary dread and imperial anxiety, where desire, contagion, and modernity collide in a Transylvanian castle and a very Victorian bloodstream.

Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Stories – The clean laboratory and the dirty alley share a wall; Stevenson’s novella remains the definitive study of the respectable self splitting.

Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings – Psychological rot built this house. Poe’s stories fold atmosphere inward until mind and building collapse together.

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein – Not a monster story but a responsibility story: creation without care, ambition without foresight, and the loneliness of being assembled rather than born.

If you want a compact syllabus in 19th-century anxiety, this is it.