The setting is London in the 1750s in Paula Allardyce's novel Miss Philadelphia Smith (1977). This romantic novel looks at class differences on a London street that is divided between the odd-numbered houses of the wealthy and the even-numbered houses of the middle-class. Philadelphia Smith lives in an even-numbered cottage and attracts the attention of a wealthy rake whose family lives on the odd-numbered side of the street.

Jack Sheppard, written by William Harrison Ainsworth in 1839, is a novel that, like Moll Flanders, greatly romanticizes crime and criminals. In what is considered one of the "Newgate novels," named for the famous English prison, Ainsworth tells the story of Sheppard, a real-life burglar and jail-breaker.

Soldiers of Fortune (1962), by Peter Bourne, gives a profile of the colonists of Virginia as they make the hard trip across the Atlantic Ocean. Their stories and...