Books set in the 19th century

Books set in the 1800s, from Paris barricades to London fog and the American South. Victor Hugo's Les Misérables and George Eliot's Middlemarch come from the century itself, Percival Everett's James retells Huckleberry Finn from Jim's side, and R. F. Kuang's Babel imagines a translation institute at the heart of the British Empire. Solomon Northup's Twelve Years a Slave is a first-hand account.