The most significant events in the history of books on the 13th of December
1784: Samuel Johnson dies. Among the books he planned to write, but died before he got a chance to undertake them, Dr Johnson listed a cookbook set out ‘upon philosophical principles’ and a history of his melancholy. He did, of course, manage to complete his groundbreaking Dictionary of the English Language (1755), a book that is often very funny, as well as being informative, scholarly, and educational.Â
The most significant events in the history of books on the 12th of December
1731: Erasmus Darwin is born. This natural philosopher, scientist, and poet was the grandfather of Charles Darwin. One of his poems, The Botanic Garden, anticipates the Big Bang theory when it describes an explosion, a ‘mass’ which ‘starts into a million suns’. He was also a restless inventor, devising both a copying machine and a speaking machine to impress his friends, though neither design ever received a patent.
The most significant events in the history of books on the 11th of December
1918: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is born. This Russian novelist wrote a number of important works of fiction which reflect life in the Soviet Union, including One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), Cancer Ward (1968), August 1914 (1971), and The Gulag Archipelago (1973). He was allowed to publish only one of his novels, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, in the Soviet Union, with the rest of his novels being published elsewhere. Solzhenitsyn was eventually expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974.
The most significant events in the history of books on the 10th of December
1824: George MacDonald is born. His fantasy novels are important precursors to the more famous work of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, both of whom knew his novels, which include Lilith (1895), a Christian fantasy novel about a man who steps through a portal into another world. MacDonald’s two-word poem ‘The Shortest and Sweetest of Songs’ – probably the shortest poem in the entire canon of Victorian poetry – is discussed in our article about how to close-read a poem.
The most significant events in the history of books on the 9th of December
1608: John Milton is born. The author of Paradise Lost (1667), one of the greatest epic poems in the English language, about the Fall of Man (brought about by fallen angel Satan). Milton is credited with being the first (or one of the first) to use a number of popular words, among them enjoyable, terrific, dismissive, satanic, unaided, and debauchery. Milton also coined the word ‘pandemonium’, as the name for the capital of Hell.