Older Than Radio

The Oldest Ones in the Book
Older Than the NES | Before 1985
Older Than Cable TV | 1939 — 1980
Older Than Television | 1890 — 1939
Older Than Radio | 1698 — 1890
Older Than Steam | 1439 — 1698
Older Than Print | 476 — 1439
Older Than Feudalism | ~800 BC — 476 AD
Older Than Dirt | Before ~800 BC

Tropes first documented after the invention of the steam engine (1698) and before the invention of the radio (1890).

This is the classic age of English literature, and of the penny dreadful: Sir Walter Scott, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, but also Frankenstein, Varney the Vampire, the first Sherlock Holmes novel, Alice in Wonderland, and the earliest Science Fiction—to say nothing of the maudlin numbers that funded Benjamin Disraeli's political career. This is also the age of western political philosophers like Thomas Paine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who helped lay the foundations of modern democracy, as well as treatises and literature both pro- and anti-slavery. It is also the last time when books dominated popular entertainment, although many of these "books" were originally serialised in magazines, such as The Strand, Blackwood's etc.

This is also when many compilations of legends and fairy tales were collected and recorded, such as 19th-century Finnish work The Kalevala, the Child Ballads, The Brothers Grimm books, and most European Fairy Tale collections.

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Notable works and authors from this time period include:

• Neoclassicist art.
  • William-Adolphe Bouguereau:
    • The Birth of Venus
    • Charity
    • Dante and Virgil in Hell
    • Dawn
    • Nymphs and Satyr
    • Psyche and Cupid
    • The Return of Spring
  • Alexandre Cabanel:
    • The Birth of Venus
    • The Fallen Angel

Tropes:

• Acid Reflux Nightmare: A Christmas Carol, 1843
• Adoption Conflict: Silas Marner by George Eliot, 1861. Long after the theft of his savings, Silas comes home to discover a young girl who broke in to get warm on a winter night. He adopts and raises Eppie, only finding out when she's grown that she's the love child of the wealthy Godfrey Cass. Silas and Godfrey agree to let Eppie choose whether to be adopted as Godfrey's heir. She chooses to remain with Silas, and Godfrey accepts her choice and then pays to renovate the Marners' house when her new husband Aaron moves in with her and Silas.
• Advanced Ancient Acropolis: Apoikis by Kurd Laßwitz, 1882
• Adventurer Archaeologist: 19th-century gothic horror
• Afro Asskicker: The Hadendoa people, a nomadic subset of northeastern Africa's Beja ethnic group, were known both for their elaborate afro-like hairstyles (earning them the nickname Fuzzy-Wuzzy) and for their fierce resistance to The British Empire during the Mahdist War of the 1880s and 1890s.
• All Love Is Unrequited: Gilbert and Sullivan
• Alone with the Psycho: Great Expectations, Charles Dickens, 1860-1861
• The Alternet: Jules Verne's Paris in the Twentieth Century (written in 1863, though not published until 1994), banks communicate via a linked network of fax-style document machines.
• America Takes Over the World: Technically the United States is a continuously-expanding nation and has been so ever since the original Thirteen Colonies declared independence in 1776, but its first forays into imperial expansion really get going in the mid-19th century: it ramps up wars of occupation against Native American tribes and First Nations in the 1830s, grabs a lot of Mexico's territory in Mexican-American War in the 1840s, begins studying annexation of Cuba as early as 1848 (its first attempt to seize territory that didn't become a state and is not one today), is involved in a Nicaraguan invasion and passes laws to annex overseas guano islands in 1856, and acquires Alaska by 1867. The better-known examples of American imperialism such as the overthrow of Hawai'i in 1893 and the Spanish-American War fallout after 1898 sit right smack at the beginning of the age of radio.
• And There Was Much Rejoicing: A Christmas Carol, 1843
• Banana Peel: "Banana-Skin Butcheries", Harper's Weekly cartoon, 1880 (see here)
• Band of Relatives: The Hutchinson Family Singers, one of the first American vocal groups to achieve nationwide fame, in the 1840s.
• Beautiful All Along: "The Ugly Duckling" (1843) and "The Rough Faced Girl" (at least 1884).
• Become a Real Boy: The Adventures of Pinocchio, early 1880s
• Blind and the Beast: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• Boxing Kangaroo: An actual practice of the 1800s.
• Brain Fever: Happens to the doctor in Frankenstein. Accidentally invoked in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
• Brand Name Takeover: Kerosene, 1854
• Briar Patching: West African Anansi stories, known in North America as Uncle Remus.
• Car Meets House: The first car accident in history was one of these. In 1771 a prototype steam-powered car crashed through the wall of a French military building. The accident wrecked its inventor's reputation.
• Casts No Shadow: The protagonist of Peter Schlemihl's Miraculous Tale (1814) by Adelbert von Chamisso sells his shadow to a mysterious stranger in exchange for a purse that never gets empty.
• Catapult Nightmare: Treasure Island, 1881
• Cat Scare: God's Judgment on a Wicked Bishop by Robert Southey, 1799
• Chained to a Railway: "Captain Tom's Fright," 1867
• Clock Discrepancy: Around the World in Eighty Days, 1873
• Colonel Badass: Max Piccolomini from Wallenstein, 1799.
• Color Me Black: The Inky Boys from Der Struwwelpeter, 1845.
• Corner of Woe: The Fallen Angel by Alexandre Cabanel shows Lucifer atop a rocky mountain, scrunched up with his arms protecting his face, and doing some major sulking because he's no longer welcome in Heaven.
• Cosmic Horror Story: The early precedents of this genre (of which H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos is the Trope Codifier) originated around the 1880s, with early weird-fiction authors such as Ambrose Bierce (An Inhabitant of Carcosa, 1886, source of the Carcosa place-name in Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow, 1895, itself published in the first decade of successful applied radio experiments). Going even farther back, we have Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), featuring a bizarre trip to Mysterious Antarctica that makes the continent feel like an Eldritch Location.
• Delicate and Sickly: Jane Fairfax in Emma, 1815
• Delivery Stork: Victorian English folklore
• Depth Deception: "The Sphinx," short story by Edgar Allan Poe, 1850
• Domed Hometown: Three Hundred Years Hence by William Delisle Hay, 1881
• Doom It Yourself: Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) by Jerome K. Jerome, 1889
• Door-Closes Ending: A Doll's House, 1879
• Down to the Last Play: "Casey at the Bat," Ernest Thayer, 1888
• Dramatic Spotlight: Started with the use of 'limelight' (created by directing an oxygen-hydrogen flame at calcium oxide—i.e. lime—causing the lime to incandesce bright white) at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden in 1837.
• Dramatic Wind: Alexandre Cabanel's The Fallen Angel captures The Climax of Lucifer's story. Being cast from Heaven after a long war against his beloved God is the turning point for his descent into full-blown villainy. Among other things, this is conveyed by the wind tousling his mop of hair. It's justified because, for added Rule of Drama, Lucifer is nested atop a mountain, so strong winds are no strange occurrence. This also serves to justify why his locks aren't obscuring his eyes, which are the painting's main element.
• Dreaming of a White Christmas: Along with all its Santa Claus codifying, 'Twas the Night Before Christmas (1823) mentions "new-fallen snow" on Christmas Eve. Christina Rossetti’s “In the Bleak Midwinter” (1872) describes a snowy Christmas on the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem.
• Elite Agents Above the Law: The Three Musketeers includes the Musketeers (answering directly to Louis XIII), the Cardinal's Guards (answering to Cardinal Richelieu), and the Cardinal's collection of what would be called NOC agents in modern times, such as Milady deWinter.
• Evil Hand: Fairy tale about three surgeons recorded by The Brothers Grimm.
• Evil Laugh: Faust, Charles Gounod, 1859
• Eyeless Face: The Devil in Edgar Allan Poe's short story "Bon-Bon" (1835) wears green sunglasses to conceal that he has neither eyes nor eyesockets; the space where the eyes should be being "simply a dead level of flesh".
• Explosive Overclocking: The steam engine, bringing this to the brink of Older Than Steam without actually crossing the line.
• Fairytale Wedding Dress: Queen Vicky wore a white dress in 1840 — before, a wedding dress was otherwise indistinguishable from a regular Pimped-Out Dress.
• Fantasy Conflict Counterpart: The Begum's Millions, Jules Verne, 1879, with two fictional cities standing in for France and Germany.
• Fictional United Nations: "Locksley Hall" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson predicts "the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world".
• Film Noir: The literary forbears that inspired the genre began to coalesce in the 19th century, evolving out of disparate elements such as Gothic Horror and gritty realist fiction, which became more relevant in an age of accelerating urban growth, and with it, urban poverty and crime. Sensation novels with labyrinthine plots set in Victorian Britain (and especially Victorian London) appeared in the mid-1800s (e.g. Lady Audley's Secret, by M.E. Braddon, or works like The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins), but they had equivalents elsewhere, like the works of Paul Féval, which depicted the seediness of early 19th-century Paris. Meanwhile, the developing field of psychology provided closer and deeper looks into human minds, including those of criminals, with novels like Crime and Punishment examining its characters' minds more minutely.
• Fire Keeps It Dead: Vampires in Gothic Horror literature (the Ur-Example being Varney the Vampire, c. 1845) had to be burned to keep them from coming back to life after being staked and beheaded.
• Fish out of Temporal Water: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Mark Twain, 1889
• For Your People, By Your People: Abraham Lincoln's famous Gettysburg Address contains the phrase: "a government of the people, by the people, for the people".
• Four-Temperament Ensemble: The Three Musketeers, 1844
• Fowl-Mouthed Parrot: In real life one of the earliest documented instances was President Andrew Jackson's pet parrot, which had to be removed from his funeral because it wouldn't stop swearing (in two languages, no less).
• Frankenstein's Monster: The Trope Namer appears in Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, 1818 (reprinted in 1823, and republished with edits in 1831)
• "Freaky Friday" Flip: F. Anstey's Vice Versa: A Lesson to Fathers 1882
• Freaky Is Cool: Frankenstein
• Frothy Mugs of Water: The Temperance Bible changed every mention of wine to "grape juice", unless someone is getting drunk off it or condemning it^note This is particularly egregious considering that before pasteurization was invented, grape juice didn't really exist - pressed grapes begin to ferment almost immediately due to the wild yeasts that live on their skins, and will generally be alcoholic enough to cause intoxication within forty-eight hours.
• Future Imperfect: The Year 4338: Petersburg Letters, 1840, features archeologists concluding that the Germans, Deutsche, Teutons and Allemans were all different ethnic groups.
• Giving Radio to the Romans: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Mark Twain, 1889
• Going Down with the Ship: The trope is derived from Age of Sail maritime salvage laws, which said that if a ship was abandoned by all crew but didn't sink, it was first come, first serve on the ship and its cargo.
• Gothic Horror: Officially begins with the publication of Trope Maker The Castle of Otranto (Horace Walpole, 1764)
• Great White Hunter: Ned Land in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1869).
• Haunted Castle: The Castle of Otranto, 1764
• Have You Tried Not Being a Monster?: "The Little Mermaid" (1837) has been interpreted to represent Hans Christian Andersen's inability to be with the man he loved.
• Heart Trauma: "The Snow Queen" by Hans Christian Andersen, 1845
• Hero Antagonist: Porfiry Petrovich in Crime and Punishment
• Hikikomori: Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov, 1859
• Historical In-Joke: The Three Musketeers, 1844; possibly its source material in 1700.
• I Do Not Own: Lord Byron's Don Juan, 1824
• I'm a Doctor, Not a Placeholder: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne, 1869
• I'm Going to Hell for This: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) is the Trope Namer.
• Inspector Javert: Les Misérables, 1862 is the Trope Namer.
• Interracial Adoption Struggles: In Emily Brontë's 1847 novel Wuthering Heights, the byronic Heathcliff starts out as an Ambiguously Brown foundling—described as a "gypsy," but largely as a convenient shorthand for his dark skin, as we never find out his actual ethnicity. Even after adopting him, the white English Earnshaw family treats him as a mere servant, and his outcast status drives him down the path of vindictive villainy as he grows up.
• Interrupted Suicide: Twice in Die Zauberflöte by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, 1791
• Jukebox Musical: The Black Crook, 1866.
• Jungle Opera: King Solomon's Mines, 1885
• Kubrick Stare: Bleak House, 1852. Played for Drama in Alexandre Cabanel's The Fallen Angel — Lucifer has his head tilted down while staring hatefully and mournfully toward Heaven above.
• Kiss Me, I'm Virtual: The Tales of Hoffmann, 1880.
• Leitmotif: Term coined by a critic describing Carl Maria von Weber's classical compositions, 1871, but Weber died in 1826.
• Lemony Narrator: Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne (1759-1767) and Jacques The Fatalist by Denis Diderot (1765-1780).
• Lesbian Vampire: In Carmilla (1872) by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, the vampire Carmilla only feeds off young women she falls in love with. Some already see a lesbian subtext in the unfinished poem "Christabel" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (c. 1797–1801), in which the adolescent, eponymous heroine meets a mysterious girl, named Geraldine, who possibly is a vampire, or in the character of Miss Clara Crofton in Varney the Vampire by James Malcolm Rymer (c. 1845–47), whose only confirmed victim is a girl.
• Literary Allusion Title: Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy (1874) and "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" by Robert Browning (1855).
• Living Toys: The Nutcracker and the Mouse King by E. T. A. Hoffmann, 1816.
• Lyrical Dissonance: The song "My Grandfather's Clock," written in 1876.
• Mad Scientist: In "The Sandman (1816)", the alchemist Coppelius and the physicist Professor Spalanzani are concerned with creating an artifical human. In the same year, Mary Shelley started to work on Frankenstein (1818), in which Victor Frankenstein succeeds in the same endeavour.
• Mad Scientist's Beautiful Daughter: Olimpia in The Sandman (1816) (although she is a subversion), 1816.
• Madwoman in the Attic: Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë, 1847.
• Magic Pants: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll, 1865. An Implied Trope in the actual text, but made explicit by John Tenniel's illustrations showing Alice wearing the same dress for the whole story.
• Man-Eating Plant: Early examples include a giant flytrap in Arthur Conan Doyle's short story "The American's Tale" (1879) and the "man-eating tree of Madagascar," a newspaper hoax born in 1881.
• Man in a Kilt: The earliest depictions of men in kilts◊ as Fanservice date back to The Napoleonic Wars.
• Maybe Ever After: Great Expectations, 1861
• Message in a Bottle: Chunosuke Matsuyama wrote one in 1784 after a shipwreck in the Pacific.
• Mile-High Club: Rumours of people having sex in airborne vessels first circulated in 1785, after the allegedly first female balloonist, a certain Mrs Sage, had completed a flight in a hot air balloon together with a certain Mr Biggin. The idea of it being a kind of sexual goal for men also dates from the period, at least according to a certain eighteenth-century wager book quoted on QI:
  Stephen Fry: "Lord Cholmondely has given two guineas to Lord Derby, to receive 500 guineas whenever his lordship 'plays hospitals' with a woman in a balloon 1,000 yards from the Earth." For "plays hospitals with" I think you can insert your own—word.
• Miraculous Malfunction: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1886
• Mistaken for Special Guest: The Inspector General by Nikolai Gogol, 1836, although a similar plot-twist already was used in Die deutschen Kleinstädter ("The German Small-Towners", 1802) by German-Russian author August von Kotzebue.
• The Mockbuster: Victorian-era publisher Edward Lloyd made a living off of works copying Charles Dickens like Oliver Twiss and The Penny Pickwick in the 1830s and 1840s.
• Mon: The Japanese card game Obake Karuta, which was first invented in the Edo period.
• Must Have Caffeine: Johann Sebastian Bach's "Coffee Cantata," Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht, BWV 211, 1732-1734, a miniature opera dedicated to caffeine addiction.
• My Hovercraft Is Full of Eels: English as She Is Spoke, an attempted 1883 guide to learning English written by a Portuguese schoolteacher who relied on a French phrasebook and a French/English dictionary.
• Naughty Tentacles: The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife, 1814 woodcut by Hokusai
• Never Bring a Knife to a Gun Fight: Tchaikovsky's opera Mazeppa, 1884, at least for the modern codified trope.
• No Ontological Inertia: The stepmother's poisons have none in The Brothers Grimm fairy tale "Snowdrop" (a.k.a. Snow White).
• Not the Nessie: Early attacks by the Nautilus in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1869) were blamed on a giant narwhal.
• "Not Wearing Pants" Dream: The Dream of Councillor Popov, Alexey Tolstoy, 1873
• The Noun and the Noun: Many of Jane Austen's novels.
• Now It's My Turn: Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews, 1742
• Occult Detective: Dr. Martin Hesselius from Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's In A Glass Darkly, 1872.
• Oh Wait, This Is My Grocery List: Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, 1817. Catherine, having read way too many Gothic novels, mistakes a laundry list it's too dark to read for something lurid such as a suicide note.
• The Old Convict: The Count of Monte Cristo, 1844
• One Crazy Night: A Christmas Carol, 1843
• Open Sesame: Literal words in "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves", added to The Arabian Nights in the 18th century.
• Orphanage of Fear: Oliver Twist is often cited as the Trope Maker, although it actually features a workhouse. Even if that doesn't count, Jane Eyre features Lowood School and also predates radio, so there.
• Pensieve Flashback: A Christmas Carol, 1843
• Personal Raincloud: "The Devotee to Whom Allah Gave a Cloud for Service and the Devout King" from The Arabian Nights, 19th century
• Pirate Parrot: Treasure Island, 1881
• Playing Drunk: The Barber of Seville, 1816
• Police Pig: The earliest known usage of the word "pig" to refer to a police officer dates back to 1785.
• Post-Apocalyptic Dog: Lord Byron's poem "Darkness," 1816.
• POW Camp: What were essentially proto-concentration camps were used by American settler-colonial forces against Native tribes starting in the 1830s. They're more commonly known as the Indian Reservations.
• The Pratfall: Shows up in vaudeville and music hall theater.
• Princess Classic: Supposedly Victorian, and already deconstructed by Mark Twain in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889).
• Race Against the Clock: Around the World in Eighty Days, 1872
• Rambling Old Man Monologue: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1798
• "Rashomon"-Style: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, by James Hogg, 1824
• "Rear Window" Investigation: Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey.
• Reports of My Death Were Greatly Exaggerated: Mark Twain said similar words when he was mistakenly declared dead in the 1880s. He also wrote such a situation into The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
• Right on the Tick: A Christmas Carol, 1843
• River of Insanity: "Doctor Livingston, I presume?"
• Robotic Reveal: The Sandman (1816) by E.T.A. Hoffmann, 1816
• Rodent Cellmates: Already Parodied Trope in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1884
• Romantic Rain: Jane Austen's Lemony Narrator pokes fun on it in Emma.
• Ruins of the Modern Age: "Ozymandias" by Horace Smith, 1818
• Salvage Pirates: Robinson Crusoe, 1719
• Save the Villain: The Woman in White Wilkie Collins, 1859
• Science Is Useless: The legend of John Henry from the mid-19th century: man with sledgehammers digs a tunnel faster than a steam-powered drilling rig and dies.
• "Scooby-Doo" Hoax: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow Washington Irving, 1820
• Scrapbook Story: Goes back at least to Tomcat Murr by E. T. A. Hoffmann (1819); as the Epistolary Novel it is Older Than Steam.
• Seadog Peg Leg: See the pirates trope above.
• Seduction as One-Upmanship: The opera Così Fan Tutte by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart involves a bet between two rivals on trying to seduce the other's fiancee.
• Send in the Search Team: How I Found Livingstone by Henry Morton Stanley, 1871
• Single Mom Stripper: Les Misérables, Victor Hugo, 1862
• The Shut-In: GreatExpectations by Charles Dickens, 1860-1861
• So Much for Stealth: The Leatherstocking Tales by James Fenimore Cooper, 1820s, possibly older.
• Soup of Poverty: Oliver Twist, 1837
• Speculative Biology: In On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin theorizes that given time bears might become more adapted to aquatic environments and evolve into whale-like animals.
• Split Personality: In The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson, the reputable Dr Jekyll creates a potion that transforms him into the criminal brute Edward Hyde, a manifestation of the bad side of Jekyll's character. Also a possible interpretation of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) by James Hogg, in which the protagonist is encouraged to commit crimes by the mysterious Gil-Martin, who may or may not be a figment of his own imagination.
• Stock "Yuck!" (Inedible Christmas Fruitcakes): "Miss Fogarty's Christmas Cake," 1883
• Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl: "The Ghost of Oyuki," c. 1750
• Super-Powered Robot Meter Maids: Frankenstein, 1816
• Sympathetic Murderer: The monster in Frankenstein when killing his creator.
• Textbook Humor: Johnson's Dictionary (1755) has entries such as "Lexicographer: a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge that busies himself in tracing the original and detailing the signification of words."
• There Is No Higher Court: In The Three Musketeers, Milady de Winter claims her convict's brand of a fleur-de-lis was done by the Duke of Buckingham to frame her as a criminal under French law for refusing his sexual advances (she was actually branded in France for theft). If the brand had been a British mark, she could have appealed it to any court in the land, but there is no appeal under French law.
• Tomato in the Mirror: "William Wilson" by Edgar Allan Poe, 1839
• Tomboyish Name: Josephine "Jo" March of Little Women, 1868, by Louisa May Alcott
• Town with a Dark Secret: Germelshausen, 1800s, by Friedrich Gerstäcker, source for Brigadoon.
• Trapped in the Past: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, 1889
• True Love's Kiss: The Brothers Grimm version of "The True Bride" — but not the original versions of "Snow White," "Sleeping Beauty," or "Frog Prince."
• Übermensch: Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1866
• "Ugly American" Stereotype: The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain, 1869
• Unconventional Formatting: Tristram Shandy, 1767
• Vampires Are Sex Gods: "The Vampyre'', J. William Polidori, 1819
• Victoria's Secret Compartment: The opera Die Fledermaus by Johann Strauss II, 1871
• Wacky Cravings: This happens in the European fairy tales "Rapunzel" and "Petrosinella," both first recorded during the early 19th century.
• Walk the Plank: Francis Grose's Dictionary Of The Vulgar Tongue, 1788
• The Walls Are Closing In: The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe, 1842
• The Wild West
  • Dawn of the Wild West
  • The Western
• The Watson: Watson's portrayal as this goes back to A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle, 1887
• With This Herring: "The Brave Little Tailor," a European folktale collected by The Brothers Grimm.
• When I Was Your Age...: Typical in societies when a culture changes as a result of new technology, enough to result in a Generation Gap like the one from the Industrial Revolution, in contrast with the gradually shifting Generation Xeroxs that came before.
• Working on the Chain Gang: Les Misérables, 1862
• Wrong Guy First: Jane Austen's writing, or earlier.
• Year X: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, 1818. Later Treasure Island by Robert Lewis Stevenson, 1883. Incidentally, both are set in "17—".
• Your Costume Needs Work: "The Masque of the Red Death" by Edgar Allan Poe, 1842
• Zillion-Dollar Bill: The Sampo in The Kalevala.

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