English Lit 101: From Jane Austen to George Orwell and the Enlightenment to Realism, an essential guide to Britain's greatest writers and works

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English Lit 101

From Jane Austen to George Orwell and the Enlightenment to Realism, an essential guide to Britain’s greatest writers and works

Brian Boone

Avon, Massachusetts

Copyright © 2017 Simon and Schuster

All rights reserved.

This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher; exceptions are made for brief excerpts used in published reviews.

Published by

Adams Media, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

57 Littlefield Street, Avon, MA 02322. U.S.A.

www.adamsmedia.com

ISBN 10: 1-4405-9971-8

ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-9971-2

eISBN 10: 1-4405-9972-6

eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-9972-9

Cover design by Michelle Kelly

Cover images © iStockphoto.com/221A; traveller1116; ClaudioDivizia; borsvelka.

Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Introduction

Chapter 1: Old English

Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People: The First English Book

A People’s History

Moments in Time

Beowulf: A Monster of Early Literature

The Conquering Hero

The Age of Beowulf

Survival and Revival

The Vision of Piers Plowman: It Was All Just a Dream

Visions and Symbols

Alliteration and Illustration

Wycliffe’s Bible: Now Available in English

A Building Resentment

Give the People What They Want

Geoffrey Chaucer: The Birth of English Poetry

The Canterbury Tales

Stories in Poem Form

The King Arthur Legends: All Hail the King

A Welsh Tale

King Arthur, English Icon

National Treasure

Chapter 2: The Elizabethan Era

The King James Bible: A Transformative Translation

Building a Better Bible

The Good Book

The Book of Common Prayer: Uncommonly Original

By Official Decree

Following Along

John Donne: Metaphysical Poetry

Early Works

The Conceit

Christopher Marlowe: Drawing a Blank

Creating Blank Verse

The Faustian Bargain

Edmund Spenser: From Castle to Castle

Fit for a Queene

Politically Incorrect

Ben Jonson: Publish or Perish

Trying on Many Masques

Going to Print

William Shakespeare: The Bard

The Plays

From the Globe to All Around the Globe

The Sonnets

Chapter 3: The Restoration and Beyond

John Milton: Paradise Found

An Epic Journey

John Locke: Creating a New Age

Governmental Affairs

Toward a Greater Understanding

Changing the World

Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe

A Novel Idea

Jonathan Swift: The Sultan of Satire

Making a Point

To Lilliput and Beyond

Alexander Pope: An Un-Enlightened Man

Emulating the Classics

The Mock of the Lock

Henry Fielding: King of Comedy

What a Farce

A Joke Made Serious

Samuel Johnson: Master of the Dictionary

Words, Words, Words

Legacy of a Language

Chapter 4: The Romantic Era

William Wordsworth: Emotional Accessibility

Man versus Mankind

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Rhymes and Rimes

Truly Divine

An Unreliable Memory

Saving Shakespeare

Jane Austen: Minding Manners

Not So Happily Ever After

Lord Byron: A Romantic Don Juan

A Heroic Act

Back to Basics

Don Juan

Isn’t It Romantic?

William Blake: Burning Bright

Taking a Stand

Breaking Free

Horace Walpole, Mary Shelley, and Gothic Romanticism: Scary Monsters and Super Creeps

Downright Spooky

Horace Walpole

How to Make a Monster

Robert Burns: The Scottish Bard

The Toast of Scotland

A National Treasure

Chapter 5: The Victorian Era and the Industrial Revolution

Alfred, Lord Tennyson: It’s Good to Be the King

Good Knight

Idyll Hands

Charles Dickens: Voice of the People

Literature from Everyday Life

Becoming a Cultural and Literary Influence

George Eliot: Out in the Country

Getting Real

Mill and Marner

Glorifying the Normal

An Expanding Viewpoint

The Brontë Sisters: Moor Power

Life in a Northern Town

Pseudonym Success

A Not Very Plain Jane

To New Heights

Grey Days in the Hall

Tragic Endings

Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The First Couple of Poetry

Setting the Scene

A Man and a Woman of Letters

Unfortunate Inspiration

A Change Is Gonna Come

Lewis Carroll: Adventures in Absurdity

A Man of Many Talents

Down the Rabbit Hole

Split Personality

Robert Louis Stevenson: Set a Course for Adventure

Wanderlust

A Man of the World

Beware, Pirates

The Monster Within

For Children?

Take It Easy

Rudyard Kipling: Welcome to the Jungle

Early Life

From the Jungles of Vermont

What a Boer

Oscar Wilde: For Art’s Sake

Mentors and Modernism

Extremely Important

Gross Indecency

Thomas Hardy: Going Backward to Go Forward

An Architectural Approach

A Novel Approach

Chapter 6: The Modernist Movement

William Butler Yeats: The Diamond of the Emerald Isle

Ireland’s Poet

T.S. Eliot: Going to Waste

Heading East

Pulling from the Past

Thinking It Through

A Towering Achievement

Switching Gears

D.H. Lawrence: Love Gone Wrong

Art Imitates Life, Life Imitates Art

Courting Controversy

Forbidden Love

The Lover

E.M. Forster: Where Nature Meets Human Nature

Looking to Italy

A Broken System

Imperialism

Trudging Forward

Virginia Woolf: A Movement of One’s Own

Early Life

A Light Amongst the Darkness

Making Room

James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist

A Master of Languages

For Dublin

Up from the Ashes

A Day in the Life

In the Wake of Ulysses

Legacy

W.H. Auden: A New Classicist

To America

Dylan Thomas: The Clear Expression of Mixed Feelings

The Celebrity

Chapter 7: Contemporary English Literature

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: It’s Elementary

The Game Is Afoot

A Brief and Unfortunate Death

A Knight’s Tale

George Bernard Shaw: Ireland’s Shakespeare

Highly Theatrical

Getting Serious

Joseph Conrad: Into Darkness

Exiled

Life at Sea

Oh, the Horrors

The World Comes to England

William Golding: Lord of the Flies

Try, Try Again

Island of Misfit Boys

An Uncomfortable Reality

J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: Two Towers

Tolkien

Lewis

George Orwell: Big Brother Is Watching

Getting Experimental

An Unclear Future

Down on the Farm

Current Voices: The Widening Definition of Englishness

Zadie Smith

Hilary Mantel

Kazuo Ishiguro

Neil Gaiman

Nick Hornby

Harold Pinter

Martin Amis

J.K. Rowling

About the Author

To M.: I was made and meant to look for you and wait for you and become yours forever. —Robert Browning

Introduction

English literature started when there was barely even an English language to use. Dating back a millennium or so, the epic Anglo-Saxon tale of Beowulf was the first thing written down in the very earliest version of what would become English. Various Anglo-Saxon groups migrated to the British Isles and brought with them different dialects that would eventually combine to form a single language. It would evolve to become a sophisticated language, and with it would evolve one of the world’s most important literary canons: English literature.

Which is to say British literature. Literature in the English language is among the most influential and vital in the world, spreading the mechanics of poetry, prose, film, and drama to every corner of the globe. But before there was American literature, or Australian literature, there was the written word of England. And that’s what English Lit 101 is all about. It’s a vast, thorough—but simplified and easy to understand—survey of England-based literature.

The authors, poets, and storytellers in the English canon have always tried to answer the big questions: What does it mean to be human? How can rational thought live comfortably with emotions and spirituality? What does it mean to be English?

Uniquely, English authors have approached those big questions by making them personal. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice may have been about one woman bristling against the confines of society, but it’s really just a story about fitting in while being true to oneself. Charles Dickens wrote books that resonated with his Victorian-era audience because they called attention to the social injustices of his day. Personal accounts, whether written in Middle English or delivered in rhythmic verse, reflect universal themes.

In English Lit 101, you’ll get a glimpse of how major literary forms were created, as well as how they’ve evolved . . . and amazingly, how they’ve remained unchanged. (Shakespeare pretty much nailed how a play should be written, and children’s authors of today still owe quite a debt to Lewis Carroll, for example.) Here you’ll learn how forms change to reflect the prevailing political opinions of their era—such as how poetry went from a way to tell stories and glorify a nation with much pomp and circumstance in the Elizabethan era to the simplified, bare-bones approach befitting the alienation widely felt after World War I. Or how the novel went from showcasing grand tales of adventure (Robinson Crusoe) to somber depictions of normal, real life (Middlemarch) to getting banned for being too real (here’s to you, D.H. Lawrence). And through it all, English authors explored, altered, refined, and transformed the English language itself so as to better express the human condition.

English literature is a huge topic that encompasses a lot of material, so here you’ll find it broken down by era, and then by each era’s major contributors. And with each entry you’ll find information on historical context, literary context, and specifically each author’s contribution to the canon and why he or she is so important. So whether you’re looking to fill in some holes in your knowledge, getting a refresher on what you learned in high school or college, or merely supplementing an English lit course you’re taking at this very moment, English Lit 101 has got you covered.

Chapter 1

Old English

To the modern-day reader of contemporary English literature, the earliest examples of English literature may seem like they were written in an entirely foreign language . . . and they kind of were. The beginnings of the English language took shape in the seventh century after multiple tribes—collectively referred to as Anglo-Saxons—migrated from central Europe to the British Isles. Most spoke Germanic languages—and each tribe spoke its own Germanic language—and brought those languages with them. Eventually, those different dialects coalesced into a single language, one with wildly inconsistent spelling and grammar, but a single language nonetheless: Old English.

Old English literature runs concurrent with the Anglo-Saxon era, which comprises works from the seventh century up through to a few decades past the Norman Conquest of 1066. Old English was complex, ever changing, and adaptable. New words and rules became standardized over the centuries, eventually creating a language that was nearly universal across Britain. Language was a necessary tool for communication, and communication became a vital tool for evolving the common tongue.

Very little written material from the Old English era survived, and what documents did survive are primarily what those in power felt was necessary for scribes to record. This is especially true after the large-scale conversion to Christianity by invading Romans. The local church kept records and histories because the monks were the ones who were literate, and many of the Old English documents that we still have around include sermons, church writings translated from Latin, Anglo-Saxon histories, and legal documents. In addition, scribes and poets outside of the sphere of the church’s influence wrote down things that weren’t quite so dry, things that provide a window into the lives and thoughts of the people who lived in this era. Luckily, those myths, legends, and stories (many of which had been passed down orally for generations) were preserved.

Only about 400 manuscripts total from the Anglo-Saxon period even survive—the expulsion of the Roman-controlled church in the 1500s from England would lead to a lot of intentional document destruction, particularly by way of fire. But these manuscripts would be the basis for a language and a canon that would emerge as comparable, and often superior, to anything ever produced in Greek, Latin, or French.

Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People

The First English Book

Also known as St. Bede or the Venerable Bede, the monk named Bede (672–735) has additionally been called the father of English history. A historian and archivist at the monastery of Saint Peter in Monkwearmouth in what was at the time the kingdom of Northumbria, Bede was the first to document for the ages the already extensive history of the rapidly growing civilization of the British Isles. To Bede, this history largely meant the rise of Christianity, but this drive to convert the residents of early Britain happened at the same time as the development of the island, as well as the development of what would soon be a common tongue to unite the disparate tribes.

Bede deftly championed English pride as a way to bring about more converts to Christianity by making religious texts more available to Britons. Drawing on his monastery’s library of more than 200 volumes of early Catholic Church books, Bede compiled the story of the local church and made it more accessible. His most famous and lasting work is his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (731). While written in Latin rather than English, this five-book series is the first permanent work to be written in the British Isles. Ecclesiastical History of the English People, as it’s called in English, was written with the assistance of an abbot named Albinus, and it covers the history of England through the lens of the history of Christianity in Britain. Without Bede’s work, which relied on oral histories and interviews in addition to church texts, the details of the Roman invasion and settlement of Britain—really, the history of England itself to that point—would have been lost forever.

Photo Credit: Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

Illustration of the Venerable Bede, author of Ecclesiastical History of the English People, as seen in the Nuremberg Chronicle.

A People’s History

Historia ecclesiastica depicts the religious and political history (which are more or less one and the same) of the Anglo-Saxons on the British Isles. This time period runs from the fifth century up to about A.D. 731, which is when Bede finished writing. This book isn’t so much literature as it is a methodically delivered historical survey, but this history book makes the history books because it’s the oldest text written in England.

Any good contemporary literature both reflects its time period and serves as a de facto historical document, and Historia ecclesiastica certainly qualifies. Bede includes an outline of Roman Britain’s geography, reports on significant disagreements between the two main local religious factions (Roman-influenced Christians and Celtic Christians in present-day Ireland and Scotland), and passages on the political uprisings of the 600s, even ones that aren’t expressly related to ecclesiastical history. And while books made in England were new, this book’s style was not—it was written to emulate the classical history style of the Greeks and Romans.

Bede took his research from those people who historically were the historians and record keepers—monasteries and government records—and he is hardly objective. Less a journalist and more of a storyteller, Bede has a distinct angle and bias: to bring in new Christians. (As Bede later became St. Bede, that’s a telling indication of his aims.) That perspective affected the way he wrote: simply, plainly, and for maximum comprehension.

Literary Lessons

One other lasting effect of Historia ecclesiastica is that Bede solidified the way the West told time: The books popularized and universalized anno Domini as a form of marking years. Prior to this, governments and the church used various local systems, such as indictions, which noted the passage of time in fifteen-year cycles, and regnal years, a complicated system in which a year was indicated by where it fell inside of a particular monarch’s reign.

Moments in Time

Book I of Historia ecclesiastica begins in 55 B.C. with the moment Britain became a part of the rest of Europe: when Caesar invaded and brought it into the Roman Empire. The evolution of the Roman Empire into the Holy Roman Empire as it unfolded in Britain is covered, particularly Augustine’s A.D. 597 mission to the islands.

Book II concerns the evangelization of Northumbria, which is jeopardized when a pagan king named Penda kills Edwin, the chief missionary.

Book III covers the growth of Christianity under local kings as each is converted to the new religion, and Book IV’s main event is the consecration of Theodore, the first to hold the iconic post of the archbishop of Canterbury.

The fifth and final book takes things up to Bede’s present day (731), and particularly covers both the conflict between the Roman and British churches over the correct dating of Easter and how England forged its own identity (in terms of the church) once the Romans departed.

Now a nearly 1,300-year-old document, more than 160 manuscripts of Historia ecclesiastica are somehow still intact. That’s especially impressive as they were all handwritten and there were probably only ever about 200 copies overall. Bede wrote more than forty more books in his life, mostly biblical commentaries written in Latin, and few of those other manuscripts have survived.

Beowulf

A Monster of Early Literature

In 1066, William the Conqueror led troops in the Norman Conquest of