15 British Classics: Books to Read It's Famous for all Time

A classic is a book that, while it may not have the best writing, was the first in a category to do something groundbreaking.

01. Lord of the Flies is a novel written by William Goldman.

Lord of the Flies continues to elicit impassioned debate today as it did when it was first published in 1954, with its shocking, terrible portrayal of human nature. Despite its critical praise, it was mostly overlooked when it first came out. Nonetheless, it quickly became a cult favorite among students and literary critics, who compared it to J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye in terms of its impact on modern thought and literature.

Lord of the Flies has been described as a fable, an allegory, a myth, a morality story, a parody, a political treatise, and even a vision of the apocalypse.

02. New World, Brave by Aldous Huxley (Aldous Huxley)

The World Controllers have constructed the ultimate society in the far future. All of its members are happy customers thanks to the creative use of genetic engineering, brainwashing, recreational sex, and narcotics.

Bernard Marx appears to be the only one who has an ill-defined desire to be free. However, a trip to one of the few surviving Savage Reservations, where the ancient, imperfect way of life still exists, could be the answer to his problems.

03. Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe

Since its publication (in two volumes) in 1719, Defoe's most famous narrative of Crusoe's shipwreck, his cunning and inventiveness in his solitary life on a desert island, and his rescue of Man Friday has been reduced and repeated numerous times. It was even recently adapted into a graphic novel.

Kathleen Lines set out in 1968 to make the original text more accessible to young readers by breaking Defoe's original, continuous narrative into chapters, slightly shortening Crusoe's long meditations, and condensing the relevant bits of The Farther Adventures into a neat Epilogue, so that readers could learn what happened to Friday.

04. Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles

"A sweet and humane soul, a tremendous imagination, a profound and poetic genius." —Virginia Woolf, author of Virginia Woolf's Virginia Woolf's Virginia Woolf's In this heartbreaking story by the author of Far From the Madding Crowd, an innocent young woman is bound by tradition and circumstance and makes a terrible choice.

05. Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book

"This is the hour of talon and tush and claw, pride and power." Oh, do you hear the call? -Good hunting to everyone who follows the Jungle Law!"

There are seven short stories and seven poems in The Jungle Book. The first three stories are about Mowgli, whereas the last four are about various characters. Father Wolf and Mother Wolf come to a man's cub in the bushes, abandoned and nude, on the night of a large hunt. Mother Wolf decides right once that he will be raised as one of her own pups, much to the tiger Shere Khan's chagrin. Shere Khan believes the youngster is his to devour, and he is displeased that he has been denied. Mother Wolf gives the infant the name Mowgli, which means "frog" in Hindi. Only when Baloo, a gentle bear who teaches the cubs about the Jungle Law, and Bagheera, the black panther, vouch for Mowgli is he welcomed by the other wolves at the wolf Pack Council.

06. D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover

As the tale begins, Constance Chatterley is imprisoned in an unfulfilling marriage to a wealthy nobleman who is bedridden and impotent due to his military wounds. Lady Chatterley has a passionate connection with Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper on the family estate, after a brief but unhappy affair with a playwright.

Lady Chatterley advances from the heartless, bloodless world of intellect and nobility into a real and profound connection centered on sexual fulfillment after falling in love and having a child with Mellors.

07. A Clockwork Orange is a novel by Anthony Horowitz.

Anthony Burgess is a writer who lives in the United Kingdom. Alex is the 15-year-old leader of his gang of "droogs" living in the ultra-violent future as prophetically depicted by Anthony Burgess in this 1962 classic, a novelistic investigation of modern crime and retribution. Alex and his buddies freely plunder and slash their way across a nightmare metropolitan landscape, speaking a strange Russian-derived lingo, until Alex is apprehended by the state's judicial arm. He is subsequently used as a coveted guinea pig in a scientific experiment to "redeem" him for society.

08. A Room with a view by E.M Forster

This work by the great English writer and essayist E. M. Forster exhibits an extraordinarily acute vision of British society in the early twentieth century, as does most of his other works.

A Room with a View is a social comedy set in Florence, Italy, and Surrey, England, written in 1908. Lucy Honeychurch, who is battling Victorian ideals of arrogance, narrow-mindedness, and snobbery, falls in love with the socially inappropriate George Emerson while on vacation in Italy.

09. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: A Strange Case by Robert Louis Stevenson

Two witnesses apprehend Edward Hyde after he tramples an innocent girl and forces him to pay reparations to the girl's family. When Utterson, a distinguished lawyer, hears this narrative, he begins to piece together his best friend, Dr. Henry Jekyll's, allegedly insane conduct and his relationship with Hyde.

Utterson enquires further into both Jekyll and his unusual protégé, becoming increasingly uneasy with each new revelation. Robert Louis Stevenson uses Hyde to show that we are both disgusted and attracted to the darker side of life, particularly when we may experience it in anonymity, in a foreshadowing of psychological dramas to come.

10. Pride and Prejudice by  Jane Austen

Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice is one of her best-loved and well-known works. This is Classic books are those that are well-written and/or have cultural significance, even within genres or literary movements enduring classics of English literature because of her sense of humor and satire.

11. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Great Expectations is a Bildungsroman that tells the story of the orphan Pip and his journey to maturity through many trials and tribulations. It is often regarded as Dickens' masterpiece. It contains a fantastic ensemble of supporting characters and distills and refines themes from earlier Dickens's books.

12. Gulliver's Travels By Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels is widely regarded as the greatest satire ever written in English. It follows Lemuel Gulliver on his fantastic journeys to four fantastic realms: Lilliput, where people are six inches tall; Brobdingnag, a land inhabited by giants; Laputa, a wondrous flying island; and a country where the Houyhnhnms, a race of intelligent horses, are served

A damning condemnation of human malevolence, folly, greed, vanity, and short-sightedness lies beneath the surface of this lovely fiction. Gulliver's Travels is one of literature's most enduring classics, a remarkable combination of adventure, humor, and philosophy.

13. Vanity Fair By William Makepeace Thackeray

Becky is just one of the many intriguing characters in William Makepeace Thackeray's novel Vanity Fair, a satirical portrait of upper-middle-class life and manners in London at the turn of the nineteenth century.

14. 1984 By George Orwell

The vocabulary of George Orwell's classic political satire, 1984, has entered the English language, symbolizing the horrors of totalitarianism. Newspeak, Doublethink, Big Brother, the Thought Police—the vocabulary of George Orwell's classic political satire, 1984, has entered the English language, symbolizing the horrors of totalitarianism.

15. The Wind in the Willows By Kenneth Grahame

Kenneth Grahame's lively but whimsical The Wind in the Willows is a famous children's tale from the golden age of children's literature. These charming, exciting, and humorous stories about the riverbank and its inhabitants, feature the wonderfully imagined Ratty, Mole, Badger, and the irrepressible but conceited Toad of Toad Hall, whose passion for motor cars ("The only way to travel! Here today—in next week tomorrow") gets him into a lot of trouble, continue to enchant adults and children alike.