History of The English Literature

Timeline

• Old English*Historical or non-English / American item• B.C. — A. D. 428: Celtic and Roman Britain• 428 — 1100: Old English (Anglo-Saxon) Period• c. 700 — Beowulf composed in present form• *1066 — Battle of Hastings (Norman Conquest)• *1215 — Signing of Magna Carta• *c. 1307 — 1321 — Dante's Divina Commedia

• 1350 — 1500: Middle English Period• c. 1387 — Chaucer, "Prologue" to Canterbury Tales *1492 — Columbus lands in America

• 1500 — 1660: The Renaissance (in England; 1607 - 1780 is considered the "Colonial" period in America)

*1517 —Martin Luther posts his theses in Wittenberg, leading to Protestant Reformation *1532 — Machiavelli, The Prince• 1539 — English Bible (the "Great Bible") published *1558 — 1603 — Reign of Queen Elizabeth I• 1564 — 1616 — Life of William Shakespeare• 1601 — Shakespeare's Hamlet *1605 — Cervantes, Don Quixote, Part I *1607 — Settlement at Jamestown, Virginia• 1611 — King James translation of the Bible *1620 — Pilgrims land at Plymouth *1640 — Bay Psalm Book: first book printed in America *1649 — Execution of Charles I *1649 — 1660 — Commonwealth Period–England ruled by Parliament

• 1660 — 1798: Neoclassical Period (also known as "The Long 18th Century")

*1660 — Charles II restored to the throne ("The Restoration")• 1667 — John Milton, Paradise Lost *1687 — Sir Isaac Newton, Principia Mathematica *1692 — Salem witchcraft executions• 1719 — Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe• 1726 — Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels• 1740 — Samuel Richardson, Pamela• 1740-5 — The Great Awakening (religious revival)• 1749 — Henry Fielding, Tom Jones *1751 — Gray, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"• 1755 - Ben Johnson, Dictionary• 1760-67 — Lawrence Stern, Tristram Shandy• 1765-1830 — Revolutionary and Early National Period *1770 — Oliver Goldsmith, "The Deserted Village"• 1771 — Ben Franklin, Autobiography• 1775-1783 — Revolutionary War• 1776 —Declaration of Independence• 1783-85 — Noah Webster, Grammatical Institute of the English Language (speller, grammar, reader) *1789 — French Revolution begins

• 1798-1832: Romantic Period

• 1798 — William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads

• 1811 — Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility• 1817 — Mary Shelley, Frankenstein• 1819 — Lord Byron, Don Juan I and II *1820 — The Missouri Compromise• 1820 — Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe• 1830 — Edgar Allan Poe, Poems

• 1832-1870: Early Victorian Age (English Literature)

• 1836 — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature• 1836 — Charles Dickens, Pickwick Papers• 1837 — Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twice-Told Tales• 1842 — Robert Browning, Dramatic Lyrics; Lord Tennyson, Poems• 1845 — Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven• 1847 — Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights; Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre• 1847-8 — Thackeray, Vanity Fair• 1849 — Charles Dickens, David Copperfield• 1850 — Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese• 1850 — Nathaniel Hawthorne, Scarlet Letter• 1851 — Herman Melville, Moby Dick• 1852 — Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin• 1854 — Henry David Thoreau, Walden• 1855 — Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass• 1859 — Charles Darwin, Origin of the Species• 1860 — George Eliot, Mill on the Floss *1860-5 — American Civil War

• 1865-1914: Realistic Period (American Literature)

• 1867 — Karl Marx, Das Kapital• 1868 — Louisa May Alcott, Little Women• 1872 — George Eliot, Middlemarch• 1874 — Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd• 1876 — Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer• 1879 — Henry James, Daisy Miller; * Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House• 1883 — Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island• 1884 — Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn• 1891 — Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles• 1893 — George Bernard Shaw, Mrs. Warren’s Profession• 1895 — Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest; Stephen Crane, The

Red Badge of Courage

• 1900-1930: Naturalistic and Symbolistic Period (American Only)

• 1900 — Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie

• 1901-1910: Edwardian Period• 1903 — Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness; Jack London, The

Call of the Wild• 1905 — Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth• 1907 — John Millington Synge, Playboy of the Western World• 1913 — D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers; Willa Cather, O

Pioneers!

• 1914-1918: First World War

• 1917 — T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"• 1921- Aldous Huxley, Chrome Yellow• 1922 - James Joyce, Ulysses; T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land• 1924 - E.M. Forster, A Passage to India• 1925 — Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway• 1926 — T.E. Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom; Earnest

Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises• 1929 — William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury• 1933 — W.B. Yeats, Collected Poems• 1937 — John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men; The Red Pony

• 1939-1945: The Second World War

• 1939 — James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake• 1940 — Richard Wright, Native Son• 1946 — George Orwell, Animal Farm• 1949 — Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman• 1951 — J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye• 1952 — Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot• 1955 — Vladmir Nabokov, Lolita• 1957 — Jack Kerouac, On the Road• 1958 — Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart• 1961 — Iris Murdock, A Severed Head• 1964 — Theodore Roethke, The Far Field

• 1965 - ? Postmodernist Period

• 1966 — Sylvia Plath, Ariel• 1969 — Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings• 1973 — Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow• 1981 — Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children• 1983 — Alice Walker, The Color Purple• 1985 — Raymond Carver, Cathedral• 1987 — Toni Morrison, Beloved• 1988- Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses• 1989 — Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club; Thoman

Pynchon, Vineland

The term ‘Old English’ was invented as a patriotic and philological convenience. The more familiar term ‘Anglo- Saxon’ has a far older pedigree. ‘Old English’ implied that there was a cultural continuity between the England of the sixth century and the England of the nineteenth century (when German, and later British, philologists determined that there had been phases in the development of the English language which they described as ‘Old’, ‘Middle’, and ‘Modern’). ‘Anglo-Saxon’ had, on the other hand, come to suggest a culture distinct from that of modern England, one which might be pejoratively linked to the overtones of ‘Sassenach’ (Saxon), a word long thrown back by angry Celts at English invaders and English cultural imperialists. In 1871 Henry Sweet, the pioneer Oxford phonetician and Anglicist, insisted in his edition of one of King Alfred’s translations that he was going to use ‘Old English’ to denote ‘the unmixed, inflectional state of the English language, commonly known by the barbarous and unmeaning title of “Anglo-Saxon”’. A thousand years earlier, King Alfred himself had referred to the tongue which he spoke and in which he wrote as ‘englisc’. It was the language of the people he ruled, the inhabitants of Wessex who formed part of a larger English nation. That nation, which occupied most of the ferale arable land in the southern part of the island of Britain, was united by its Christian religion, by its traditions, and by a form of speech which, despite wide regional varieties of dialect, was already distinct from the ‘Saxon’ of the continental Germans.

• In 604 Ethelbert promulgated a law code known as the "Dooms of Ethelbert"; this is not only the first of several "Dooms" of Anglo-Saxon kings, it is the first known written law code in English. Ethelbert's Dooms fixed the legal standing of the Catholic clergy in England as well as setting in place a good number of secular laws and regulations.

• From the thirteenth century onwards, however, Alfred’s ‘English’ gradually became incomprehensible to the vast majority of the English speaking descendants of those same Anglo-Saxons. Scholars and divines of the Renaissance period may have revived interest in the study of Old English texts in the hope of proving that England had traditions in Church and State which distinguished it from the rest of Europe. Nineteenth-century philologists, like Sweet, may have helped to lay the foundations of all modern textual and linguistic research, and most British students of English literature may have been obliged, until relatively recently, to acquire some kind of mastery of the earliest written form of their language, butthere remains a general and almost ineradicable prejudice that the culture of early England was severed from all that came after it by the Norman Conquest of 1066. 1066 is still the most familiar date in the history of the island of Britain, and, despite Henry Sweet’s Victorian protest, many latter-day ‘barbarians’ have persisted in seeing pre Conquest England, and its wide and complex civilization, as somehow that of a lost tribe of ‘Anglo-Saxons’.

• The Germanic peoples known as the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes, who had successfully invaded the former Roman colony of Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries, brought with them their language, their paganism, and their distinctive warrior traditions. They had also driven the Christianized Celtic inhabitants of Britain westwards to the confines of Wales and Cornwall and northwards into the Highlands of Scotland. The radical success of their colonization is evident in the new place-names that they imposed on their areas of settlement, emphatically English place-names which proclaim their ownership of homesteads and cultivated land (the main exceptions to this nomenclature generally pertain to the residually Celtic names of rivers, hills, and forests or to the remains of fortified Roman towns which were delineated by the Latin-derived suffixes -chester and -cester).

• The fate of the old Celtic inhabitants who were not able to remove themselves is announced in the English word Wealh (from which the term ‘Welsh’ is derived), a word once applied both to a native Briton and to slave. The old Roman order had utterly disintegrated under pressure from the new invaders, though stories of determined Celtic resistance to the Saxons in the sixth century, a resistance directed by a prince claiming imperial authority, were later associated with the largely mythological exploits of the fabled King Arthur.

• With his inherited alertness to the Anglo-Saxon concept of wyrd, LaZamon seems to recognize that Britain, first colonized by refugees from a devastated Troy, continues to derive a certain moral authority from its acceptance of the processes of change and decay. Its future, like its past, will reflect the uncertainties, reversals, and restorations which mark all human experience, but a providentially inspired continuity will determine its survival. Stories of Arthur are central to the text both physically and morally. Despite the fact that his greatest battles are fought against invading, pagan Saxons, LaZamon’s Arthur is the kind of generous, splendidly nonchalant and unswervingly mighty warrior familiar to the audiences of Old English poetry. The poem’s imagery, unlike that of LaZamon’s more circumspect sources, equally hearkens back to a wilder heroic world. In the most famous of LaZamon’s similes, Arthur comes down on his foes like a swift wolf of the woods, his fur hung with snow (‘bihonged mid snawe’), intent on devouring whatever animals he chooses (‘swule deor swa him likeD’).

• Chaucer symbolizes, as no other writer does, the Middle Ages. He stands in much the same relation to the life of his time as Alexander Pope does to the 18th century, and Tennyson to the Victorian era. And Chaucer’s place in English literature is even more important than theirs, for he is the first great English writer—the first man to use "naked words" in English, the first to make our composite language a thing compact and vital.

• According to John Dryden, Chaucer is the father of English poetry. Dryden venerates Chaucer

as highly as the Greeks venerated Homer and the Romans venerated Virgil. "Chaucer", says Dryden, "is a perpetual foundation of good sense. He is learned in all sciences and therefore speaks properly on all subjects. As he knew what to say, so he knew also when to leave off."

•Chaucer’s art of characterization is another contribution to English poetry. He is the first great painter of character in English literature. In fact, next to Shakespeare he is the greatest master in this field. But he is also the grand father of the English Novel. In his Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales, we have the seeds of the novel which have been cultivated by others later.

• For some two hundred years after their respective deaths, Chaucer’s contemporary and friend, John Gower (1330- 1408), was considered to be his rival in English eloquence, richness of style, and narrative artistry. The honour originally accorded to Gower’s English poem, the Confessio Amantis (c. 1386), is witnessed by the survival of over fifty manuscript copies (three times as many as Troilus and Criseyde, though some eighty manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales are extant) and by the elegant illuminations provided for certain copies by the prestigious court painter, Herman Scheerre (a mark of status rarely accorded to Chaucer). The poems of both were amongst the earliest vernacular works to be issued by the prodigiously busy printer, publisher, and translator, William Caxton, in the late fifteenth century (Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in 1478, Gower’s Confessio Amantis in 1483). Caxton was both the first to print a book in English, and the first English printer. He realised the commercial potential of the new technology while working as a merchant in the Low Countries and Germany, birthplace of printing in Europe. Late in 1475 or early in 1476 Caxton set up his own printing press in London.

• Patriotic pride dictated that editions of both poets were to be formally dedicated to King Henry VIII in 1532 and it was to Gower that Shakespeare respectfully turned for a source for Pericles, Prince of Tyre (1608) (though it must be admitted that his tribute to ‘the worthy and ancient’ poet begins to look condescending once a superannuated Gower is pressed into service to act as his dusty choric narrator).

• The English language had almost no prestige abroad at the beginning of the sixteenth century. One of the earliest sixteenth-century works of English literature, Thomas More's Utopia, was written in Latin for an international intellectual community. It was only translated into English during the 1550s, nearly a half-century after its original publication in Britain. By 1600, though English remained somewhat peripheral on the continent, it had been transformed into an immensely powerful expressive medium, as employedby Shakespeare, Marlowe, and the translators of the Bible.

• The development of the English language is linked to the consolidation and strengthening of the English state. The Wars of the Roses ended with Henry VII’s establishment of the Tudor dynasty that would rule England from 1485 to 1603. The Tudors imposed a much stronger central authority on the nation. The royal court was a center of culture as well as power, finding expression in theater, masques, fashion, and taste in painting, music, and poetry. The court fostered paranoia, and in this anxious atmosphere courtiers became highly practiced at crafting and deciphering graceful words with double or triple meanings. For advice on the cultivation and display of the self, they turned to Castiglione's Il Cortigiano (The Courtier). Beyond the court, London was the largest and fastest-growing city in Europe, and literacy increased throughout the century, in part due to the influence of Protestantism as well as the rise of the printing press. Freedom of the press did not exist, and much literature, especially poetry, still circulated in manuscript.

• The movement now known as the Renaissance unleashed new ideas and new social, political and economic forces that gradually displaced the spiritual and communal values of the Middle Ages. The Renaissance came to England through the spiritual and intellectual orientation known as humanism. Humanism, whose adherents included Sir Thomas More, John Colet, Roger Ascham, and Sir Thomas Elyot, was bound up with struggles over the purposes of education and curriculum reform. Education was still ordered according to the medieval trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) andquadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astrology, and music), and it emphasized Latin, the language of diplomacy, professions, and higher learning. But the focus of education shifted from training for the Church to the general acquisition of “literature,” in the sense both of literacy and of cultural knowledge.

• Another well know writing is Machiavelli’s The Prince that has been incredibly influential since it was published 5 years after his death in 1532. It was written during the European Renaissance when intellect and the discussion of new ideas was a widespread them of the era. Machiavelli did not write The Prince to become famous but instead wrote his book to achieve a position in the new Italian government formed by the Medici family. The Prince was written as a political handbook for rulers and has been used this way for many centuries. The book has caused passionate debates and controversy since the day it was published and it appears that it will continue to do so. When The Prince was published, Italy was not a unified country but a compilation of city states that were all fighting to gain power over one another. Machiavelli was greatly influenced and interested in the complicated nature of European politics.

• Officially at least, England in the early sixteenth century had a single religion, Catholicism. The Protestant Reformation, with its emphasis on the authority of scripture (sola scriptura) and salvation by faith alone (sola fide), came to England as a result of Henry VIII’s insistence on divorcing his wife, Catherine of Aragon, against the wishes of the Pope. Henry declared himself supreme head of the Church of England (through the Act of Supremacy). Those like Thomas More who refused the oath acknowledging the king’s supremacy were held guilty of treason and executed. Henry was an equal-opportunity persecutor, hostile to Catholics and zealous reformers alike. His son Edward VI was more firmly Protestant, whilst Mary I was a Catholic. Elizabeth I, though a Protestant, was cautiously conservative, determined to hold religious zealotry in check.

• A female monarch in a male world, Elizabeth ruled through a combination of adroit political maneuvering and imperious command, enhancing her authority by means of an extraordinary cult of love. The court moved in an atmosphere of romance, with music, dancing, plays, and masques. Leading artists like the poet Edmund Spenser and the miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard celebrated Elizabeth’s mystery and likened her to various classical goddesses. A source of intense anxiety was Mary Queen of Scots, a Catholic with a plausible claim to the English throne, whom Elizabeth eventually had executed. When England faced an invasion from Catholic Spain in 1588, Elizabeth appeared in person before her troops wearing a white gown and a silver breastplate; the incident testifies to her self-consciously theatrical command of the grand public occasion as well as her strategic appropriation of masculine qualities. By the 1590s, virtually everyone was aware that Elizabeth’s life was nearing an end, and there was great anxiety surrounding the succession to the throne.

• Renaissance literature is the product of a rhetorical culture, a culture steeped in the arts of persuasion and trained to process complex verbal signals. Aesthetically, Elizabethan literature reveals a delight in order and pattern conjoined with a profound interest in the mind and heart. In his Defense of Poesy, Sir Philip Sidney argued that poetry’s magical power to create perfect worlds was also a moral power, encouraging readers to virtue. The major literary modes of the Elizabethan period included pastoral, as exemplified in Marlowe’s The Passionate Shepherd to his Love, andheroic/epic, as in Spenser’s Faerie Queene.

• A permanent, freestanding public theater in England dates only from 1567. There was, however, a rich and vital theatrical tradition, including interludes and mystery and morality plays. Around 1590, an extraordinary change came over English drama, pioneered by Marlowe’s mastery of unrhymed iambic pentameter, or blank verse. The theaters had many enemies; moralists warned that they were nests of sedition, and Puritans charged that theatrical transvestism excited illicit sexual desires, both heterosexual and homosexual. Nonetheless, the playing companies had powerful allies, including Queen Elizabeth, and continuing popular support.

• Whereas the creative revolutions of the Italian Renaissance took place mainly within the visual and architectural arts, in England (from Henry VII’s reign onward) they mainly took place in a new spiritual and intellectual orientation known as humanism. In England and elsewhere, humanism was bound up with the struggles over the purposes of education and curriculum reform, and many humanists, such as Thomas More and Erasmus, were critical of what they regarded as a hopelessly narrow and outmoded intellectual culture based on scholastic hair-splitting and a dogmatic adherence to the philosophy of Aristotle, and educational programs in England began to shift their focus from training men for the church to the general acquisition of "literature," in the sense both of literacy and of cultural knowledge.

• The two impulses illustrated by Mulcaster above—humanist reverence for classical literature and English pride in the vernacular language—gave rise to many distinguished translations throughout the century: Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey by George Chapman, Ovid’s Metamorphosesby Arthur Golding, Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano by Sir Thomas Hoby, and Montaigne’s Essais by John Florio, just to name a few. Let us remind ourselves, too, that this was not the first time in England that such impulses led to the English translation of both classical literature as well as native literature that had been originally written in Latin—in the 9th century, King Alfred initiated a program whereby many works seen as important to the Anglo-Saxons (i.e., the Vulgate Bible, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, Aelfric’sLives of the Saints, among others) were translated into Old English. Therefore, even in the so-called "Dark Ages," the importance of a "national culture" and education in the classics was perceived and acted upon.

• As a prose polemicist, John Milton (1608-74) was a masterly and at times vituperative defender of the various public causes he chose to espouse. In the early 1640s he produced five pamphlets attacking both the idea and the supposed enormities of English episcopacy; between 1643 and 1645 he published four tracts in favour of divorce, stemming from the unhappiness of his own marriage; in 1644 he offered his great defence of ‘free’ speech, Areopagitica, as a means of countering the licensing ordinance of a predominantly Presbyterian Parliament; following the execution of Charles I in 1649 he argued in both English and Latin for the propriety of bringing a tyrant to account and he attempted to undermine the success of Eikon Basilike by scathingly attacking its pretensions; in 1660, shortly before the restoration of the monarchy, he proposed in The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonmealth the establishment of a ‘Grand Councel of ablest men chosen by the people’ as a means of safeguarding the unsteady republic. Of the anti-episcopal tracts, two, The Reason of Church Government and An Apology for Smectymnuus (both 1642), contain pertinent digressions on Milton’s own life, education, and development. In the earlier tract he writes of his serene determination ‘to lay up as the best treasure, and solace of a good old age ... the honest liberty of free speech from my youth’, and, with a self assertive attempt to disarm protest, he adds, ‘if I be either by disposition, or what other cause too inquisitive, or supositious of my self and my own doings, who can help it?’ His intellectual credentials, he insists, had been proved by his ready acceptance into the high-minded salons of Italy during his travels of 1638-9, but despite his early success as a Latin stylist, he had subsequently resolved ‘to be an interpreter & relater of the best and sagest things among mine own Citizens throughout this Iland in the mother dialect’. In Of Reformation Touching Church Discipline (1641), however, he briskly lays out a general argument against the Anglican compromise based on a severely anti-episcopalian reading of English Reformation history.

• John Dryden (1631-1700) was perhaps Restoration England's most learned writer. Appointed Poet Laureate in 1688, Dryden was an accomplished poet, dramatist, literary critic and social commentator who recognized that the English language and literature of his day was becoming something new as it evolved away from earlier models of literary production. At the heart of much of Dryden's writing was his reliance on the Bible and how its stories could be used to reflect and understand contemporary political conditions. His political satire Absalom and Achitophel, for instance, draws upon 2 Samuel 13-19 and allegorizes the Exclusion Crisis of the late-1670s by casting King Charles II as King David, the Duke of Monmouth as David’s son, Absalom, and the Duke of Buckingham as Absalom's mentor, Achitophel. The original owner of OSU's copy of this poem has astutely equated each character to his real-world equivalent by writing the names of the King and the Duke alongside their printed spoken parts.

• In 1697 Swift wrote The Battle of the Books to buttress his beleaguered patron Sir William Temple in a controversy over the relative merits of ancient learning and modern learning. Gentlemen with old Tory money or new Whig pretensions affected a haughty disdain for the new philosophy of Descartes and the new social science of Hobbes, and their disdain affected Swift. They saw in modernism a childish self-absorption, disregard for the classics, disrespect for traditional authorities, and bad manners. Swift ridiculed the new trends by contrasting them with the sound wisdom and graceful art of the old masters.

• Today the word ‘romantic’ evokes images of love and sentimentality, but the term ‘Romanticism’ has a much wider meaning. It covers a range of developments in art, literature, music and philosophy, spanning the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The ‘Romantics’ would not have used the term themselves: the label was applied retrospectively, from around the middle of the 19th century.

• When reference is made to Romantic verse, the poets who generally spring to mind are William Blake (1757-1827), William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), George Gordon, 6th Lord Byron (1788-1824), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) and John Keats (1795-1821). These writers had an intuitive feeling that they were ‘chosen’ to guide others through the tempestuous period of change.

• This was a time of physical confrontation; of violent rebellion in parts of Europe and the New World. Conscious of anarchy across the English Channel, the British government feared similar outbreaks. The early Romantic poets tended to be supporters of the French Revolution, hoping that it would bring about political change; however, the bloody Reign of Terror shocked them profoundly and affected their views. In his youth William Wordsworth was drawn to the Republican cause in France, until he gradually became disenchanted with the Revolutionaries.

• This was a time of physical confrontation; of violent rebellion in parts of Europe and the New World. Conscious of anarchy across the English Channel, the British government feared similar outbreaks. The early Romantic poets tended to be supporters of the French Revolution, hoping that it would bring about political change; however, the bloody Reign of Terror shocked them profoundly and affected their views. In his youth William Wordsworth was drawn to the Republican cause in France, until he gradually became disenchanted with the Revolutionaries.

• Shelley’s companion poems, “Song to the Men of England” and “The Mask of Anarchy,” are full of the particulars of the contemporary working-class experience during this period.

• No poet of the period so effectively extended this grasp of rural communal relationships as did William Wordsworth (1770-1850). Wordsworth’s admiration for Burns’s achievement is evident both in the pilgrimage he made to Ayrshire in 1803 in search of sites associated with the poet and in a poem of his own addressed ‘To the Sons of Burns after visiting their Father’s Grave’ (‘Be independent, generous, brave! Your Father such example gave’). His real tribute to Burns’s example lies, however, in his own poetry of place, of character, and of relationships. Although Wordsworth’s contribution to Lyrical Ballads (1798) consisted chiefly of his use of ballad form and in remoulding its traditional subjects, he also strove, as he later argued in the celebrated Preface, to find an appropriate language. He had chosen to describe ‘humble and rustic life’, he claimed, because in that condition ‘the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity’ and because they ‘speak a plainer and more emphatic language’. Burns’s vernacular poems drew their strength from the very vigour of a living dialect. For Wordsworth, no such alternative to ‘standard’ English seemed appropriate to poetry, however radical his desire to break with the artificialities of the tradition he had inherited from the poets of the eighteenth century.

• Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) was one of the most famous and prolific poets of the Victorian period, with a career spanning four decades. Elizabeth Barrett Browning inherited her ideas about what poetry could do principally from the poets of the Romantic period – in particular William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and her great love, George Gordon, Lord Byron. It was from these figures that she gained a strong belief that poetry had the power to influence social and political thinking.

• Elizabeth Barrett Browning's influential poem 'The Cry of the Children' was written in response to the dire state of child labour in Britain. A year earlier, in 1842, Barrett Browning had read the official parliamentary reports of the terrible conditions and expolitation faced by working children in mines and factories. Although sentimental, the poem is a powerful and moving protest against the cruelty and injustice of such a system.

• The poem was first published, as shown here, in the August 1843 issue of Blackwood's Edinburgh, a magazine which enjoyed a large readership. It has been credited as rousing greater public support for reforms surrounding child labour.

• In 1858 The Royal Commission on the state of popular education in England, under the chairmanship of the Duke of Newcastle, was appointed 'To inquire into the state of public education in England and to consider and report what measures, if any, are required for the extension of sound and cheap elementary instruction to all classes of the people.

• The Commissioners commented that infant schools for children up to the age of seven were 'of great utility': they were places of security as well as of education, since they were the only means of keeping children of poor families off the streets in town, or out of the roads and fields in the country. They distinguished two types of infant schools: the public infant schools, which often formed a department of the ordinary day school; and the private or 'dame' schools, which were very common in both town and country but were frequently little more than nurseries in which 'the nurse collected the children of many families into her own house instead of attending upon the children of some one family'

• It is important to recognize the achievements that resulted from the 1870 Act. The figures for the final decades of the century show the almost complete elimination of illiteracy as measured from parish registers. The gains were greater for women than men. Had it not been for the 1870 Act progress in literacy would have slowed down simply because illiteracy was concentrated in those classes and regions that were hardest to provide for under the voluntary system. The 1870 Act was responsible for the mopping-up operation by providing more school places and improvements in attendance and length of school life. There were certainly improvements in attendance but by 1897 it was still only just over 80%. Legislation helped but machinery of enforcement was necessary.

• The main pressure was that of the attendance officer (commonly called the ‘board man’) and ultimately a summons. This did not always prove effective and authorities were often unwilling to prosecute or convict parents especially in rural areas where cheap child labor was essential for farmers and parents. The Agricultural Children Act 1873 was intended to improve attendance, but fines were so low if imposed at all. The quality of literacy was governed by things other than directly educational ones. The factory legislation of the late 1860s and 1870s encompassed children in industries not covered before. From the 1870s, future patterns of leisure and holidays began to take rudimentary form. New skilled and semi-skilled occupations were being created and white-collar occupations were expanding. Literacy was essential in all of these areas. The impact on literature of the Education Act of 1870, which made elementary schooling compulsory the emergence of a mass literate population at whom a new mass-produced literature could be directed.

• The disconcertions and anomalies of early Victorian Britain are nowhere more trenchantly examined than in the pamphlets, essays, lectures, and books of its most noisy and effective critic, Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881). Carlyle was a late product of the Scottish Enlightenment, and of the culture which had made the Edinburgh Review (founded in 1802) an intellectual force to be reckoned with beyond the borders of Scotland. The power and effect of his own writings do not, however, derive exclusively from the classical rationality of late eighteenth-century Edinburgh philosophy. Carlyle’s fundamental debt to the rhythms and the confident, prophetic utterance of the Bible is profound, as is his sense of himself as a latter-day Jeremiah, endowed with the urgent accents of a Presbyterian pulpit. He was also exceptionally well read in modern German thought which was already exerting a powerful cerebral influence over the literatures of other European nations. His own Life of Schiller was published in the London Magazine in 1823-4 and his translation of Goethe’s seminal novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship appeared in 1824.

• Elizabeth Barrett Browning's influential poem 'The Cry of the Children' was written in response to the dire state of child labour in Britain. A year earlier, in 1842, Barrett Browning had read the official parliamentary reports of the terrible conditions and expolitation faced by working children in mines and factories. Although sentimental, the poem is a powerful and moving protest against the cruelty and injustice of such a system.

• The poem was first published, as shown here, in the August 1843 issue of Blackwood's Edinburgh, a magazine which enjoyed a large readership. It has been credited as rousing greater public support for reforms surrounding child labour.

• John Donne's standing as a great English poet, and one of the greatest writers of English prose, is now assured. However, it has been confirmed only in the early 20th century. The history of Donne's reputation is the most remarkable of any major writer in English; no other body of great poetry has fallen so far from favor for so long and been generally condemned as inept and crude. In Donne's own day his poetry was highly prized among the small circle of his admirers, who read it as it was circulated in manuscript, and in his later years he gained wide fame as a preacher.

• For some 30 years after his death successive editions of his verse stamped his powerful influence upon English poets. During the Restoration his writing went out of fashion and remained so for several centuries. Throughout the 18th century, and for much of the 19th century, he was little read and scarcely appreciated. Commentators followed Samuel Johnson in dismissing his work as no more than frigidly ingenious and metrically uncouth. Some scribbled notes by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Charles Lamb's copy of Donne's poems make a testimony of admiration rare in the early 19th century. Robert Browning became a known (and wondered-at) enthusiast of Donne, but it was not until the end of the 1800s that Donne's poetry was eagerly taken up by a growing band of avant-garde readers and writers. His prose remained largely unnoticed until 1919.

• In the first two decades of the 20th century Donne's poetry was decisively rehabilitated. Its extraordinary appeal to modern readers throws light on the Modernist movement, as well as on our intuitive response to our own times. Donne may no longer be the cult figure he became in the 1920s and 1930s, when T. S. Eliot and William Butler Yeats, among others, discovered in his poetry the peculiar fusion of intellect and passion and the alert contemporariness which they aspired to in their own art. He is not a poet for all tastes and times; yet for many readers Donne remains what Ben Jonson judged him: "the first poet in the world in some things." His poems continue to engage the attention and challenge the experience of readers who come to him afresh. His high place in the pantheon of the English poets now seems secure.