The most significant events in the history of books on the 20th of October
1822: Thomas Hughes, author of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, is born. The character of school bully Flashman would prove so popular with generations of readers that George Macdonald Fraser would make him the antihero of a whole series of novels, beginning with Flashman in 1969.
The life of Dr Johnson, told through five pieces of biographical trivia
1. Samuel Johnson was known to drink up to 25 cups of tea in one sitting. Johnson (1709-84) took his eating and drinking seriously, as his prodigious tea habit testifies. According to his first – and still most celebrated – biographer, James Boswell, ‘Doctor’ Johnson (he only acquired the first of his honorary doctorates in 1765, ten years after his famous dictionary was published) would refuse to listen to anyone else at the dinner table until he had satisfied his appetite, ‘which was so fierce, and indulged with such intenseness, that while in the act of eating, the veins of his forehead swelled, and generally a strong perspiration was visible.’ Johnson is reckoned to have been an alcoholic, too. These days, we might say he had an addictive personality: addicted to drink (possibly), to eating, to reading (ever since he first read and fell under the spell of Hamlet as an eight year-old, while living above his father’s bookshop in Lichfield), and – above all – to work. He also collected orange peel, possibly for some (unknown) medicinal remedy. (When Boswell pressed him for more details, the good doctor replied, ‘Nay, Sir, you shall know their fate no further.’)
The most significant events in the history of books on the 19th of October
1605: Sir Thomas Browne is born. Responsible for coining the word ‘misconception’ (or at any rate, providing the dictionary with its earliest known use in print), Browne took the seventeenth-century world to task in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica, which examined and endeavoured to correct many misconceptions and ‘vulgar errors’ of the day. He was, if you like, a sort of Early Modern version of QI or Mythbusters. He would also die on this day, in 1682 – his 77th birthday.
The most significant events in the history of books on the 18th of October
1785: Thomas Love Peacock is born. He was the author of several satirical novels such as Headlong Hall (1815) and Nightmare Abbey (1818), and was also the father-in-law of the fascinating Victorian writer, George Meredith. Peacock also provides us with the first recorded use of the word ‘kakistocracy’, which means ‘government by the worst citizens’.
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.