HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW

Dear Students,

The purpose of this course is to encourage you to gain an

insight into, and broad awareness of, the development of

English literature from its perceived origins in the

ninth century until the end of the nineteenth century.

Attention will be paid not only to influential writers

and movements, but to themes such as the influence of

Greek mythology, religion, politics, and the rôle of

Ireland. Some writers, poets and playwrights considered

are Langland, Chaucer, Malory, Marlowe, Shakespeare,

Pope, Swift, Wordsworth, Keats, Byron and Dickens. I

apologise to the many superb but deceased writers whom I

cannot include in this all too brief summary, and even to

those whom I have included, for treating them somewhat

summarily.

The course takes the form of a series of lectures, which

form but the tip of the iceberg, providing you with a

door to your own research and study. You are encouraged

to share the results of your studies, helping not only

your fellow students, but the lecturer. We are, after

all, in the same boat, even if I am at the helm.

Evaluation will be by unseen short written essays. I

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shall provide some examples of examination questions at

the end of this hopefully helpful guide.

The course kicks off by considering English literature’s

fairly late entry into the world of writing, a fact

explained by the destruction of Roman Britain by barbaric

German tribes, and a series of subsequent invasions that

made it difficult to standardise the language and create

high-level writing until the late Fourteenth Century.

Naturally, once the area later to be known as England

began to settle down during the reign of Alfred, priests

began to translate Latin texts into Anglo-Saxon/Old

English. Churchmen had an advantage, since they were

literate. Gildas, born around 500, wrote The Destruction and

Conquest of Britain in Latin, while Bede (who died in 735)

wrote the Eclesiastical History of the English People, also in Latin.

They cannot therefore be included as writers using Old

English exclusively, although their works were later

translated into Old English. Although the story of

Beowolf is the longest known epic poem in Old English, it

is a Scandinavian tale dating from the Eighth Century.

English literature begins to define itself more clearly

following the Norman invasion, which resulted in a minor

transmogrification, with the importation of thousands of

French words. By 1150, we can therefore identify the

result, known as ‘Middle English’. Here we have two

superb works, one by the poorish priest, William Langland

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(1332-1400), Vision of William concerning Piers the Ploughman, which

is a religious journey through morality, mentioning the

seven Deadly Sins of sloth, avarice, anger, gluttony,

lust, envy and pride, concluding that it is better to be

good than rich. In contrast, his counterpart, Geoffrey

Chaucer (1343-1400), was well off, working in senior

government and as a diplomat, going on various European

trips. He is said to have met Petrarch or Boccaccio.

Certainly, his renowned Canterbury Tales seems to betray

elements of Boccaccio in its earthiness and methodology.

He wrote several works, including Troilus and Cressida, and The

Legend of Good Women.

The next well-known piece of work with which we deal is

Mallory's (c. 1405-1471) Morte d’Arthur, extrapolated from

old French and some English tales, and written in early

modern English. One can truly say that it has been

impregnated in the British national consciousness. Many

scholars think that Arthur was a Romanised Briton who

fought against the German invaders. He probably was, but

in the centuries of literary Chinese Whispers since then,

the tale has probably been considerably embellished.

Before now moving into the Sixteenth Century, let us

mention that the invention of printing, which was taken

up by William Caxton in 1476, had a big impact on

literature, in that it became more widespread among the

ordinary population. Edmund Spenser’s (1552-1599) Faerie

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Queen is an example. Notwithstanding criticism that he

wrote it to gain favour with Queen Elisabeth (he was

awarded some good positions), it is a thrilling piece of

work, as the following shows:

‘The steely head stucke fast till in his flesh,

Till with his cruell clawes he snatcht the wood,

And quite asunder broke. Forth flowed fresh

A gushing river of blacke goarie blood,

That drowned all the land, whereon he stood;

The streame thereof would drive a water-mill.’

Spenser was educated at the Merchant Taylors’ School

(which my school, St. Pauls, founded in 1509, used to

beat at rugger) and Cambridge, living most of his

professional life in Ireland, where he was Secretary to

the Lord Deputy. His home was burnt down in the 1598

rebellion, so at least some of his life was exciting. One

is inclined to wonder whether the Celtic throb of Ireland

influenced, and stimulated, his writing.

And then of course we come to William Shakespeare (1564-

1616), prolific writer of plays and sonnets, son of a

dealer in gloves and wool, who had his own theatre

company. He was well versed in the classics, having

attended Stratford Grammar School. It was indeed the

introduction of Grammar Schools during the reign of Henry

VIII that had stimulated literature and learning, as well

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as the influence of the Renaissance, already visible in

Chaucer. Consider this, from the Merchant of Venice:

‘All that glisters is not gold;

Often have you heard that told:

Many a man his life hath sold

But my outside to behold:

Gilded tombs do worms unfold.’

Shakespeare, so very influenced by classical Greece and

Rome (as were many before and after) invented thousands

of new words and phrases such as ‘tower of strength’ and

‘assassination’. It was not until the German Romantics

elevated him to an almost godlike literary status that he

was to become known world-wide. He has generated

controversy as well as fame. Samuel Johnson wrote:

‘Shakespeare is so much more careful to please than to

instruct that he seems to write without any moral

purpose’, while the great Tolstoy wrote of ‘repulsion,

weariness and bewilderment’. Strangely, no original work

by Shakespeare is known to have survived. Some even think

that he may not have existed.

Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) is hewn from the same

literary stone as Shakespeare, even having contributed to

some of the latter’s plays. A sort of literary version of

Caravaggio, he was stabbed to death at the age of twenty

nine, not long after the issuing of an arrest warrant,

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possibly for blasphemy. It is possible that, had he lived

longer, he would have been at least as well known as his

homologue Shakespeare. Consider this, from his Dr. Faustus:

‘Was this the face that launched a thousand ships,

And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?

Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.

Her lips suck forth my soul: see where it flies!’

It is not difficult to see why, with writers such as

Marlowe and Shakespeare, the Sixteenth Century was that

of the dramatists.

As we move on to the end of the Sixteenth Century and

into the Seventeenth, we come to Ben Jonson (1572-1637

(not to be confused with Samuel Johnson).Although he was

a pupil at Westminster School, he managed to be a

bricklayer for a time, like his father, as well as a

soldier. He is best known for his masques, which induced a

gay atmosphere of humour, costume, dancing and music.

Drama then went into decline, owing to the rise of

Cromwellian Puritanism. In the meantime, the essay had

begun to flourish as a literary form, in the guise of,

inter alia, Francis Bacon (1561-1626), also considered to be

an early empiricist philosopher. Although this senior

government figure, awarded a lordship, was considered by

some to be a bit of a toady, like Spenser, he really was

rather good. His most famous essay is The Advancement of

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Learning. He seems to have believed that knowledge is

power.

Now we bring in Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), who studied at

Oxford. His most well-known epithet is that Man’s life is

solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short, and his

‘Leviathan’ is a good treatise on political philosophy.

He has been claimed, unfortunately in my view, by many

international relations theorists to have been a promoter

of political realism/power politics, when in fact his

main interest was in how to best run a country at

national level. He was a true intellectual, translating

Thucydides’ Peloponnesian Wars, and the Iliad and Odyssey. Like

so many English literary people, he was almost helplessly

influenced by Greece.

We now come to a spot of poetry (although Shakespeare’s

sonnets surely also qualify as such). Let us sum up John

Donne, an ex-Roman Catholic, Cambridge man and lawyer,

(1572-1631) with the following:

‘Tis time, ‘tis day; what though it be?

O wilt thou therefore rise from me?

Why should we rise because ‘tis light?

Did we lie down because ‘twas night?

Love, which in spite of darkness brought us hither,

Should despite of light keep us together.’

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Then along came the ‘Cavalier poets’, one of whom, Robert

Herrick, wrote Counsel to Girls:

‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,

Old time is still a-flying.

And this same flower that smiles today

Tomorrow will be dying.’

These gay and carefree chaps had a hard time during the

Cromwellian dictatorship.

Old Pauline poet John Milton (1608-1674), a Cambridge

man, thrice married, torn between freedom and convention,

is perhaps best known for Paradise Lost. Like many a well-

heeled Englishman, he went on the ‘Grand Tour’ of Europe,

even meeting Galileo. His works are clearly influenced by

Greece. Like Chaucer and Spenser, he held senior

positions, but was caught in the crossfire of Puritanism

(he worked for Oliver Cromwell) and the Restoration. Let

us sum up this sensitive and perhaps tortured man with

the closing words of one of his sonnets, in which he

describes a dream about one of his dead wives:

‘Her face was veil’d; yet to my fancied sight

Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shined

So clear, as in no face with more delight,

But oh! As to embrace me she inclined,

I waked – she fled – and day brought back my night.’

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He clearly loved her and missed her.

You will probably have begun to see that there is often a

relationship between politico-religious developments and

literature. Milton, for example, was imprisoned for a

while at the Restoration, for having been close to the

despised Cromwell, while the poet John Dryden

(Westminster and Cambridge) also lost his stipend under

William of Orange, for having converted to Roman

Catholicism.

Now we move to prose and the diary writers, the most

famous of whom is Samuel Pepys (1633-1703), whose

description of the Fire of London in 1666, as well as

life in the Seventeenth Century is realistic. But let us

not forget John Evelyn, who wrote a much longer diary.

Now we come to a quintessential English book, by Isaac

Walton (1593-1683), The Compleat Angler, one of the best

books about angling ever written. It is somehow about

much more than angling, about the pleasures of leading a

contemplative life, as can be seen from its alternative

title.

John Bunyan (1628-1688) was a very different kettle: the

son of a tinker, he had a meagre schooling, and learnt to

write thanks mainly to the Bible. Because he was a bit of

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a Christian fundamentalist (a Baptist) and preacher, he

was imprisoned for twelve years at the Restoration. His

most well-known work is The Pilgrim’s Progress, full of

morality, but also humour.

So we now leave the Seventeenth Century, and come to

another of the giants of English literature, Jonathan

Swift (1667-1745), born in Dublin of English parents, a

man influenced by religion, politics and Ireland, and

even women. He was a trained priest, spending much of his

life in Ireland, ending up as a champion of freedom for

Ireland. He was a superb political satirist, making the

political pamphlet almost an art form. He is best known

for Gulliver’s Travels, a scathing attack on political

hypocrisy.

Edmund Burke (1729-1797) is our next choice. He was an

important political philosopher, and is considered to be

the founder of English Conservatism. Although a supporter

of Irish and American independence, he turned against the

French Revolution, because of its excesses. His

contemporary, Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) was a

professional writer (he also married a rich widow) and a

witty man, writing for example, that he who made a beast

of himself got rid of the pain of being a man. Another

very witty literary chap was Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

who, as a Roman Catholic, was not allowed to vote or hold

public office. His best known work is the poetic Essay on

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Man, a sensitively written moral tract on how Man should

accept God’s mysterious ways. As regards Pope’s

pithiness, consider this:

‘A little learning is a dang’rous thing;

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring’.

We can see from this, that like so many writers, he was

influenced by ancient Greece. He also translated the

Odyssey.

Let us mention (I wish that we had more space) the group

of poets known as the ‘Transition Poets’, such as James

Thompson, Thomas Grey, William Collins and William Blake.

They tended to concentrate on Nature and the

metaphysical. As for the amazing Scotsman, Robert Burns,

he is not easy to categorise, but certainly he was of a

Romantic bent, and usually wrote his poetry with Scottish

pronunciation. Several of his poems were used as lyrics

for songs.

Drama was popular: the Irishman Richard Sheridan (1751-

1816), for example, wrote The Rivals, which includes a

character by the name of Mrs.Malaprop, who had problems

with finding the correct word. Thus today, ‘saying

‘alligator’ instead of ‘allegory’ (because one does not

really know!) is a ‘malapropism’.

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The novel was now coming into being, the seeds having

been sown by the likes of Bunyan and Swift. Daniel

Defoe’s (1660-1731) Robinson Crusoe (based on a true story,

as are many novels), about a castaway, is still very

popular. He wrote various other, more fictional, novels,

as well as various pamphlets. He was also a journalist.

Another good novelist of the time was Henry Fielding

(1710-1768), with his somewhat naughty and bawdy Tom

Jones, about a young servant being wooed by his lady

employer. It is nevertheless a good reflection of life at

the time.

The Industrial Revolution then began to make its social

impact on the country. Factories were being built, coal

mine mines dug, and people dragooned into working

mechanically for hours on end, with a good deal of

exploitation of women and children. The so-called

‘Protestant work ethic’ ran rampant. The Seven Years’ War

had resulted in an enormous and expanding British Empire.

For many, greed became the order of the day. It is now

that the Romantics came to the fore. Romanticism probably

has its origins in the Sturm und Drang movement, which was

a reaction to the excesses of the Enlightenment, with its

over-interpreted Classical forms, and the Age of Reason,

which lacked wild and free spirituality in its

scientific, rational pedantry. Some of the ideas behind

the French Revolution helped. Most of the British

Romantics traveled in Europe, and were clearly heavily

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influenced by Greek mythology. In Britain, it also

manifested itself as a reaction to the greed of the

Industrial Revolution. William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was

surely one, but more conservative and controlled in

nature than some of his homologues, such as Byron. He was

a Cumbrian who loved nature, and a Cambridge man

attracted by the ideas of the French Revolution, who was

good enough in his day to become Poet Laureate. Consider

this (if you feel like it):

‘She dwelt among the untrodden ways

Beside the springs of Dove

A maid who there were none to praise

And very few to love.

A violet by a mossy stone

Half hidden from the eye!

- Fair as a star, when only one

is shining in the sky.

She lived unknown, and few could know

When Lucy ceased to be;

But she is in her grave, and, oh,

The difference to me!’

William’s friend, Samuel Coleridge (1772-1834) was also

rather good, and is best known for The Ancient Mariner. Here

is an extract:

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‘Day after day, day after day,

We stuck, no breath nor motion;

As idle as a painted ship

Upon a painted ocean.

Water, water everwhere,

And all the boards did shrink;

Water, water everywhere,

Nor any drop to drink.’

Our next three Romantics all died young, and not exactly

naturally, in their good time, the fate of many a fast

liver. John Keats (1795-1821) had women problems,

nevertheless qualifying as - what one would think would

be a down-to-earth - ) apothecary-surgeon. Here are two

lines from Ode to a Nightingale:

‘My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk.’

The poem is laden with references to Greek things. He is

also well-known for Ode to a Grecian Urn. His father died when

falling off a horse when Keats was eight, and his mother

when he was fourteen.

Percy Shelley (1792-1822), who supported freedom for the

Irish, managed to struggle on until he was thirty, then

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drowning in a sailing accident in Italy. Like several

Romantics, he left the – for them – intellectually

stifling shores of England for Italy. He had various

colourful relationships with women (one of whom drowned

herself). Here are two of his lines:

‘ Drive my dead thoughts over the universe

Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!’

And so we come to Lord Byron (1788-1824), educated at

Harrow and Cambridge. He was the epitomy of freedom, a

scourge of the hypocritical part of the English

Establishment, and was loved more in Europe than England.

He found England too insular and was an embarrassment to

bigots and the small-minded. Leading a very colourful

life with women, he divorced, but managed to sire a

daughter. Known for, inter alia, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and Don

Juan, some of his scintillating lines are:

‘I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs,

A palace and a prison on each hand:

I saw from out the wave her structures rise

As from the stroke of the enchanter’s wand:

A thousand years their cloudy wings expand

Around me, and a dying glory smiles.’

Apart from infuriating the English Establishment with an

attack on the barbaric removal of the ‘Elgin Marbles’

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from the Parthenon (see The Curse of Minerva), he died of a

violent fever fighting for Greek independence. It was not

until 1969 that his remains were buried in Poets’ Corner

of Westminster, an example of considerable pettiness on

the part of the tawdry part of the Establishment.

You may by now have noticed that no females have been

mentioned. This is because women do not appear to have

been that hot at writing, for many socio-economic

reasons. Mind you, let us not forget the inimitable

Sappho! Jane Austin (1775-1817) is surely one of the

greatest English writers, with her Pride and Prejudice, Sense

and Sensibility, Emma, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion. Her expertise

was in handling rough and passionate topics, usually

about relationships between men and women in the higher

classes, with tact and delicacy. I think that she managed

to combine precision with lightness, a rare gift. Pride and

Prejudice begins:

‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man

in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a

wife.

However little known the feelings or views of such a

man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, the

truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding

families, that he is considered as the rightful property

of some or other of their daughters.’

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The Bronte sisters, Charlotte (1816-1855), Emily (1818-

1848 and Anne (1820-1849) were influenced by Byron, and

managed to slightly shock the Establishment, with their

passionate descriptive writing about, inter alia, love

affairs. Charlotte is best known for Jane Eyre, Emily for

Wuthering Heights, and Anne for Agnes Grey. They were

veritable pace-setters, since there are today a number of

female writers who concentrate on stories of romances,

albeit not at the same high literary level as the three

sisters.

Moving well into the Victorian Age, we come to (Lord)

Alfred Tennyson, famous for his epic The Charge of the Light

Brigade, a depiction of a bad military decision in the

Crimean war. Here is an extract:

‘Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon in front of them

Volleyed and thundered;

Stormed at with shot and shell,

Into the jaws of death,

Into the mouth of hell

Rode the six hundred.’

We begin to end this overview with a monument, Charles

Dickens (1812-1870), an amazing fellow, who even spent

some time when a boy in the workhouse, while his father

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was in debtors’ gaol. The experience left a lasting

impression, and he was most critical of the affects of

the Industrial Revolution. Like many writers of the day,

his novels were often serialized in cheap magazines,

which meant a wide readership. He was an expert in

description, especially of people. George Orwell was to

write that he seemed to have succeeded in attacking

everybody and antagonizing nobody. It could be that his

sometimes humorous approach helped. He did however

irritate the Americans with his American Notes and Martin

Chuzzlewit, by mentioning their lawlessness and rapacity.

He was a prolific writer: who has not heard of Oliver Twist,

Great Expectations, David Copperfield and A Tale of Two Cities? Consider

this extract, from Hard Times:

‘It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would

have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but

as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and

black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of

machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable

serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever,

and never got uncoiled.’

Penultimately, we have Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), of

Jungle Book fame. It is he who spoke of ‘the White Man’s

burden’ (meaning black and maybe brown people), thus

attracting accusations of racism many years later. But

that’s the way it was in those days when Britain was on

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top of the world, and when various rational types, such

as Buffon and Darwin, had rather strongly suggested that

black chaps were inferior to white ones. I am unsure as

to their views on whether the same applied to women.

We end with the ‘Pre-Raphaelites’, a group of writers led

by the Anglicised Italian Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-

1882), influenced by early Sixteenth Century Italian

painting and literature.

That, students, is the end of our brief glimpse at the

history of English Literature. Clearly, knowing about

developments in Britain throughout the period with which

we have dealt will help you to see the relationship

between political, religious, social and cultural life.

My Britain: Country and Culture courses should help there. One

thing to remember is that the vast majority of writers

read other writers, and that in a sense they are often

influenced, perhaps without realising it.

Beware of over-categorisation: if we escape from it, we

may spot traces of romanticism far earlier than the main

movement began: ‘I walked along a stream for pureness

rare’, wrote Marlowe, while Donne wrote: ‘A teardrop that

encompasses and drowns the world’.

Typical questions from my past examination papers have

been:

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‘ “English Literature of the Sixteenth to Nineteenth

Centuries cannot be understood except in the light of

Greek mythology.” Explain this contention.’

‘What, in your view, were the chief characteristics of

the Romantics, and why did they have such

characteristics?’

‘What do you think influenced Jonathan Swifts work?’

‘Was Lord Byron the same kind of Romantic as Wordsworth?’

It goes without saying, almost, that merely learning the

above few pages, parrot-fashion, will not be sufficient

to pass the examination: they represent only a skeletal

outline. I shall immediately see through any examination

paper that appears to rely only on this brief guide. Most

marks will be awarded for evidence of originality and

thinking, as well as of knowledge. Have fun!

Yours faithfully,

William Mallinson

28 October 2011, in the year of our Lord.

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