Set texts
The plays, novels and poems most often set for GCSE English Literature, free to read in the Library After Dark: no account, no advertising, and it works on phones and school computers alike. In the library they stand in the Set Texts Room, through a door in the English Reading Room.
Go to the Set Texts RoomSetting a chapter or a scene
Open a book’s plain text and choose Contents: every chapter, act and scene has an address of its own, such as read.html?book=46#stave-iii for the third stave of A Christmas Carol. Copy it into a homework post and the page opens at that place. A student’s place in each book is kept on their device, and a reading card (four words and two digits) carries it between home and school without an account.
Shakespeare
Macbeth William Shakespeare
A Scottish general meets three witches on a heath who tell him he will be king, and he and his wife decide not to wait. Written around 1606, it is Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy, and it moves at a terrible speed from one murder to the next. Actors still call it the Scottish play rather than say its name in a theatre.
Read it in the 3D library · Plain text, with a link to each act and scene
Romeo and Juliet William Shakespeare
Two teenagers fall in love across a family feud old enough that nobody remembers how it began, and manage, through a series of very solvable misunderstandings, to make it fatal anyway. It is often read as the greatest love story in the language and is, I would argue, at least as much a story about terrible timing. A letter arrives one scene too late, and that is the entire tragedy.
Read it in the 3D library · Plain text, with a link to each act and scene · Listen: the LibriVox recording (3.1 hours)
The Tempest William Shakespeare
Prospero, the overthrown Duke of Milan, has lived twelve years on an island with his daughter Miranda, the spirit Ariel and Caliban, and he raises a storm to wreck his enemies on its shore. Written around 1611, it is probably the last play Shakespeare wrote on his own. It ends with Prospero giving up his magic and asking the audience to set him free.
Read it in the 3D library · Plain text, with a link to each act and scene
The Merchant of Venice William Shakespeare
Antonio borrows three thousand ducats from the moneylender Shylock to help a friend court Portia, and signs a bond for a pound of his own flesh if he cannot repay. Written in the late 1590s, it is a comedy and one of Shakespeare’s most uncomfortable plays. Portia makes her speech on the quality of mercy in a courtroom, disguised as a young lawyer.
Read it in the 3D library · Plain text, with a link to each act and scene
Much Ado About Nothing William Shakespeare
Beatrice and Benedick swear they will never marry anyone, least of all each other, while their friends Hero and Claudio are nearly parted by a lie. Written around 1598, it is Shakespeare’s comedy of quick tongues. The constable Dogberry, who gets every long word wrong, uncovers the plot by accident.
Read it in the 3D library · Plain text, with a link to each act and scene
Julius Caesar William Shakespeare
Brutus, Cassius and their fellow senators stab Caesar on the Ides of March to save the Roman republic, and then have to answer to Mark Antony and the crowd. It was seen at the new Globe in 1599, one of the first plays performed there. The library also has it in Latin, in the Latin Reading Room.
Read it in the 3D library · Plain text, with a link to each act and scene
The nineteenth-century novel
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Robert Louis Stevenson
A respectable doctor brews a formula to separate his better nature from his worse one, and discovers the worse one enjoys being let out. The twist is common knowledge now, which was not always true, and the book survives being spoiled remarkably well. Read it as a essay on restraint rather than a mystery, and it improves.
Read it in the 3D library · Plain text, with a link to each chapter · Listen: the LibriVox recording (2.8 hours)
A Christmas Carol Charles Dickens
A miserly man is shown three ghosts and, unusually for this genre, actually listens to them. It invented a good portion of what people now think Christmas is supposed to feel like. Even Clio sits differently near this one in December.
Read it in the 3D library · Plain text, with a link to each chapter · Listen: the LibriVox recording (2.7 hours)
Great Expectations Charles Dickens
An orphan comes into money from a benefactor he misidentifies for the entire book. Every act of gratitude in it turns out to be aimed at the wrong person. Expectations, as the title warns you, are the whole problem.
Read it in the 3D library · Plain text, with a link to each chapter · Listen: the LibriVox recording (20.4 hours)
Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë
A governess with no family and no fortune insists, repeatedly and at some personal cost, on being treated as an equal soul. There is a fire, a secret, and an attic that keeps its own counsel. She gets the ending she demanded rather than the one anyone offered her.
Read it in the 3D library · Plain text, with a link to each chapter · Listen: the LibriVox recording (18.6 hours)
Frankenstein Mary Shelley
A young man builds a life from spare parts and then refuses to raise it. Everyone remembers the monster; almost no one remembers he is never given a name. That omission is the whole tragedy, if you ask me.
Read it in the 3D library · Plain text, with a link to each chapter · Listen: the LibriVox recording (7.4 hours)
Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen
Two families and five daughters, and a great many people mistaking pride for principle. She meant it as a joke about the marriage market; readers keep insisting it is also about love. I have never resolved which of us is right.
Read it in the 3D library · Plain text, with a link to each chapter · Listen: the LibriVox recording (13.4 hours)
The Sign of the Four Arthur Conan Doyle
Watson gets a wife out of this one, which the detective treats as a mild inconvenience to the casework. There is a treasure, a wooden leg, and a dog that tracks a scent no one else could follow. It is shorter than it feels while you are inside it.
Read it in the 3D library · Plain text, with a link to each chapter · Listen: the LibriVox recording (4.3 hours)
Silas Marner George Eliot
A weaver, wrongly exiled from his community and his faith, hoards gold in isolation until a foundling child arrives and slowly teaches him to value something considerably harder to count. Eliot believed redemption arrives quietly, through relationship, rather than through any single dramatic event. It is one of the gentlest stories on this whole shelf about how trust can be rebuilt after it is broken.
Read it in the 3D library · Plain text, with a link to each chapter · Listen: the LibriVox recording (6.8 hours)
The War of the Worlds H. G. Wells
Martians land in England with weapons no army of the era can answer, and the whole apparatus of empire discovers, briefly and instructively, what it feels like to be on the losing end of one. Wells wrote it as a pointed rebuke to a country very sure of its own permanence. The ending humbles the invaders rather than the defenders, and I suspect that was deliberate too.
Read it in the 3D library · Plain text, with a link to each chapter · Listen: the LibriVox recording (6.6 hours)
Poetry: the anthologies
23 poems from the GCSE anthologies, all those old enough to be in the public domain, bound as one book, Poems from the Anthologies, which lies open on the lectern in the Set Texts Room. Each poem has a short note and a link of its own; the modern poems in the same anthologies are still in copyright, so they are not here.
Power and Conflict
- Ozymandias Percy Bysshe Shelley
- London William Blake
- From The Prelude William Wordsworth
- My Last Duchess Robert Browning
- The Charge of the Light Brigade Alfred Tennyson
- Exposure Wilfred Owen
- The Destruction of Sennacherib George Gordon Byron
- A Poison Tree William Blake
- The Man He Killed Thomas Hardy
Love and Relationships
- When We Two Parted George Gordon Byron
- Love's Philosophy Percy Bysshe Shelley
- Porphyria's Lover Robert Browning
- Sonnet 29 Elizabeth Barrett Browning
- Sonnet 43 Elizabeth Barrett Browning
- Neutral Tones Thomas Hardy
- The Farmer's Bride Charlotte Mew
- She Walks in Beauty George Gordon Byron
- La Belle Dame sans Merci John Keats
- Cousin Kate Christina Rossetti
Time and Place
- To Autumn John Keats
- Composed upon Westminster Bridge William Wordsworth
- Adlestrop Edward Thomas
- Home-Thoughts, from Abroad Robert Browning
Every text is in the public domain, from Project Gutenberg; the recordings are LibriVox’s, read by volunteers. Something missing? The library takes suggestions in its visitors’ book.