The most significant events in the history of books on the 17th of October
1586: Sir Philip Sidney dies. The poet and courtier who wrote the long prose romance Arcadia (which some regard as an early example of the English novel) as well as one of the first sonnet sequences in English (Astrophil and Stella), Sidney died from wounds he received in the military campaign at Zutphen in the Netherlands. Sidney also invented the girls’ name Pamela.
The most significant events in the history of books on the 16th of October
1758: Noah Webster is born. A lexicographer best known for compiling Webster’s Dictionary, the first great dictionary of American English, Webster was also T. S. Eliot‘s great-uncle.
1847: Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre is published by Smith, Elder & Co. in London, under the pen name ‘Currer Bell’. We have some interesting facts about the Brontë siblings here. Our favourite is Charlotte’s connection to the Wild West…
1854: Oscar Wilde is born Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde. He is probably better known for his personality than his works, and above all is perhaps best known for his quip at customs when he arrived in America in 1882. Asked if he had anything to declare, Wilde replied, ‘Only my genius.’ Or did he? There is some doubt as to whether he ever uttered this famous line. Check out some of Wilde’s best lines here and some of Wilde’s funniest anecdotes here.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Futility’ was one of just five poems by Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) that were published before his death, aged 25, on 4 November 1918. Like all of his best-known work it’s a war poem, a brief lyric that focuses on a group of soldiers standing over the dead body of a fallen comrade. Below is Owen’s ‘Futility’ followed by a brief analysis of some of its linguistic features and its imagery.
The most significant events in the history of books on the 15th of October
An exciting day in the annals of literary (and cinematic) history, October the 15th saw the birth of a classical poet, a master of the comic novel, and the release of an historic new science fiction film…
1764: Hearing a group of friars singing in the Temple of Jupiter in Rome, Edward Gibbon is inspired to write The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, his landmark work of historical scholarship.
70 BC: Roman poet Virgil is born. The Latin phrase round the edge of a UK £1 coin, decus et tutamen, means ‘an ornament and a safeguard’ and is taken from Virgil’s epic poem the Aeneid.
A short introduction to the Shakespeare play Hamlet, in the form of five interesting facts
1. In the first printed copy, the play’s most famous line was somewhat different. Most editions of Hamlet which we read nowadays are slightly different from each other: there is no definitive text of Hamlet. This is because we have several sources for the original play-text: two quarto texts (a ‘quarto’ was a large sheet of paper folded into quarters, hence the name) published in the early 1600s, and the ‘Folio’ text, from the 1623 First Folio, the first published collection of Shakespeare’s plays. There are significant differences between, say, the first quarto (known as the ‘bad quarto’, which wasn’t rediscovered until 1823) and the Folio text, and Hamlet’s celebrated line, ‘To be or not to be: that is the question‘, which begins his famous soliloquy in which he muses on the point of life and contemplates suicide, is rendered quite differently – as ‘To be or not to be, I there’s the point’. It also appears at a different point in the play, just after Polonius – who is called ‘Corambis’ in this version – has hatched the plot to arrange a meeting between Hamlet and Polonius’ (sorry, Corambis‘) daughter, Ophelia.