Peter Ackroyd's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Peter Ackroyd recommends? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Peter Ackroyd's favorite book recommendations of all time. At Shortform, we know books. Our book guides are the best in the world. Learn why.

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The Diary of Samuel Pepys

Samuel Pepys, Robert Latham

4.2

The 1660s represent a turning point in English history, and for the main events -- the Restoration, the Dutch War, the Great Plague and the Fire of London -- Pepys provides a definitive eyewitness account. As well as recording public and historical events, Pepys paints a vivid picture of his personal life, from his socializing and amorous entanglements, to his theatre-going and his work at the Nav

Recommended by Alex Carlile, Alex Chase-Levenson, and Peter Ackroyd.

Peter Ackroyd

It is an invaluable picture of daily life in mid-17th century London and one that has never really been rivalled by any other diarist. [source]

Alex Carlile

Pepys gives you a total flavour of his time. It’s a wonderful picture of London – no one else has written remotely as well about London in those days. [source]

Alex Chase-Levenson

Pepys is a really great person to follow through an epidemic. He records day by day what it’s like to live in a plague-stricken city, and shows us the intertwining of things that are normal and things that are surreal. [source]

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Bleak House

Charles Dickens, Nicola Bradbury, Hablot K. Brown

4.2

Bleak House opens in the twilight of foggy London, where fog grips the city most densely in the Court of Chancery. The obscure case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, in which an inheritance is gradually devoured by legal costs, the romance of Esther Summerson and the secrets of her origin, the sleuthing of Detective Inspector Bucket and the fate of Jo the crossing-sweeper, these are some of the lives Dick

Recommended by Peter Ackroyd and Trevor Phillips.

Peter Ackroyd

Bleak House is the work which most powerfully suggests the darkness of London. It conveys a haunted city, half pantomime-half graveyard. [source]

Trevor Phillips

Bleak House tells us not to rely on the courts for justice. In the end, a just society can’t be delivered by people in a courtroom. [source]

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Survey of London

John Stow

4.4

John Stow first published his Survey of London in 1598 during the reign of Elizabeth I. His detailed description of the city and its suburbs was an immediate success when it first appeared and has remained a popular classic of English history ever since.

Recommended by Peter Ackroyd.

Peter Ackroyd

It has helped enormously. When I was preparing myself for the book I wrote about London – London: The Biography – I read it carefully from page to page. The first edition of A Survey of London was published in 1598 when John Stow himself was then past 70. It is a monumental and magnificent work. [source]

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Prehistoric London

E O Gordon

4.5

Recommended by Peter Ackroyd.

Peter Ackroyd

There was a vogue for these sorts of books in the 1920s and 30s when there was a particular effort by prehistorians to discover something of London’s supposedly hidden past. There were books on the language of London, the early inhabitants and so forth. And they all tended to identify tokens and traces of Celtic or Druidic London. This sort of work was effectively killed off in World War II, but for me it still has abiding interest in the way that, for example, existing street names may betray a Celtic or prehistoric origin, such as Pancras Lane, Maiden Lane. The book reveals long forgotten trackways which, in fact, guide modern thoroughfares. The crossroads at the Angel, Islington, for example, mark the point where two prehistoric British roads intersected. So for all those reasons I find this particular book very absorbing and very revealing. [source]

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London: A Pilgrimage

Blanchard Jerrold, Gustave Doré, Peter Ackroyd

4.3

'London: A Pilgrimage' was conceived in 1868 by the journalist and playwright Blanchard Jerrold. Accompanied by the famous artist Gustave Dore, Jerrold prowled every corner of the heaving metropolis, sometimes with plain-clothes police for protection. 'London: A Pilgrimage' is a forgotten classic of social journalism, a frank and brutal look at the poverty striken, gin-swilling London of the ninet

Recommended by Peter Ackroyd.

Peter Ackroyd

This is a work which was published in 1872. It had 118 engravings by Doré and it is a most wonderful and remarkable depiction of what you might call the low life of London in the 1870s – the working life of London. It shows people in the shipyards, it shows market traders, it shows the poor, it shows the railways systems. It is a very moving and evocative description of the life of London that was normally not recognised at the time – it was ignored. And in fact there were some contemporary critics who said that he was inventing the poverty rather than copying it, but he wasn’t doing that at all. He was observing what was all around him. [source]