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The 19th Century was definitely one of the most amazing periods of time in human history. It rivals the 20th, the 1st and the 15th as being the most amazing, and unlike the last two is close enough in time that many of the events and people are still having a direct influence on ourselves.
Just HOW amazing, and interesting it was is often glossed over in our culture. "Victorian" is used as an insult to mean old, stuffy and boring. This is about as accurate as defining the middle ages in terms of bold knights honourably jousting for the favour of a fair lady in a beautiful tower.
To a large extent I suspect this is due to political correctness. The really exciting stuff in the 19th Century consisted of an enormous range of struggles, almost all of which were won by the technically advanced, militaristic, capitalists that current mythology paints as villains. To be fair, by modern standards most of them were villains. Indeed many of them were overdue for hanging by the standards of the Victorians.
Having the villains win everything is viewed as unsuitable for the modern public, particularly children, and hence all this sort of thing is glossed over, if not outright censored, when it comes to modern education.
Even the bits that are taught are distorted into a sort of reverse morality play, in which the bad guys win and the good die young. The "Good" in this case being defined as those who lost, which stretches the definition of "good" to previously unheard of levels.
With the education of everyone since about the 1960s distorted to this extent, even adult culture has adopted the idea of the 19th century as boring and stuffy with only the bad guys winning. There are however some shining counterexamples, of which the best that I know of is the Flashman books.
Flashman is a character first mentioned by a different author all together. In Thomas Hughes' work Tom Brown's School Days Harry Flashman is an important figure as the school bully that is eventually expelled for drunkenness. He also appears throughout the Blackadder saga as the badly behaved friend of Edmund Blackadder. However it is in the Books by George MacDonald Frazer that he reaches his pinnacle.
Starting with his expulsion from school, this series of books follows Harry Flashman as he travels around the world, nominally as an agent of the British army, but really in a desperate attempt to stay out of danger, have sex with as many exotic women as possible, and occasionally pick up some ill gotten gains. In the process he visits every interesting place, event, and person in the later half of the 19th century. And we the readers get to learn a hell of a lot.
The author, George MacDonald Frazer, is a historian specializing in the 19th Century, so he really does know what he is talking about. And in case you are confused as to what is truth and what is fiction, the entire books are meticulously footnoted with references to all the historical events and persons referred to therein. This means that you really need two bookmarks, one for the place you are reading and the other to the endnote you are up to, but that is a small price to pay for the most enjoyable history lesson you are likely to ever get.
We get to see the history of the 19th Century at its most strange. From the British East India companies military campaigns to establish a corporate Empire in India, through to private individuals like Brooke who set up their own kingdoms amoung the pirate kings and headhunters of the East Indies. There are dictators who carried out genocides as viscious as anything in the 20th Century (contrary to what you may have heard) and wars you've never heard of with death tolls as large as World War One. You can learn that Mao was in fact the leader of the SECOND communist revolution in China, that cricket was never free of corruption, and that many people now pictured as innocent victims were in fact truly horrible.
You also learn that many accepted myths were absolutely correct. And you learn what a hell of a lot of our culture actually Means. Throughout the books we come across the origin of a stream of poems, songs, rhymes, stories, and other aspects of our general background. These are things that you've heard since childhood but does anyone other than an American actually know what John Brown's body actually is about, or what all those feathers on the red Indians meant. And where does the expression "the thin red line" come from, or to score a "hat-trick"?
The books below are in a rough order, but it doesn't really matter what order you read them in. For a start they are not published or written in chronological order, so it is difficult to work out what the real order should be.
Flashman and the Mountain of Light
Flashman and the Angel of the Lord
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