By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Often you hear, fifth-hand, someone say, ‘Shakespeare gave us the word puking’ or ‘Milton coined the word dreary’. The problem with this is, of course, that we cannot be sure that those writers actually invented these words – they may merely have written the texts containing the earliest surviving record of the words in question.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Essays: we’ve all written them, whether as school projects or as university assignments. (For those going through esay trauma, we’ve even compiled a list of some of our favourite tips for writing a good English Literature essay.)
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
One of the most celebrated pubs for writers is the Eagle and Child in Oxford. This public house on St Giles’, known informally as the ‘Bird and Baby’, was the place where the Inklings met during the mid-twentieth century. The ‘Inklings’ were a group of writers living in Oxford who would meet on a weekly basis to read and discuss each other’s work.
The word ‘catchphrase’ first appears in print around 1850 (according to the OED), and so the birth of the phenomenon of the catchphrase (at least as a labelled and understood term) coincides somewhat with Charles Dickens’s own career as a writer. One of the biggest catchphrases of the 1830s and 1840s, when Dickens was starting out as a novelist, was the following enigmatic Cockneyism: ‘Has your mother sold her mangle?’
In a previous post, we spoke of Horace Walpole’s 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto as, effectively, ‘the forgery that began Gothic literature’. Another important forgery from the 1760s was the work of an adolescent, Thomas Chatterton.