History – Page 25 – Interesting Literature

October 3 in Literature: Edgar Allan Poe Found Delirious on Streets of Baltimore

The most significant events in the history of books on the 3rd of October

What events of historical note occurred today, October 3, in the worlds of literary history and the history of books? On the 3rd of October, an Elizabethan poet was born, and an important Victorian designer and writer died…

1554: Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke (or 1st Baron Brooke), is born. This English poet and statesman was a friend of Sir Philip Sidney, born the same year as Greville. Sidney would die in his early thirties, in 1586, while on a military campaign in the Netherlands. Greville would be Sidney’s biographer following his friend’s death. Greville’s own death, in 1628, has to be among the more dramatic author deaths in the annals of literary history.

1849: Edgar Allan Poe is found delirious on the streets of Baltimore, wearing somebody else’s clothes, by one Joseph J. Walker. Four days later he would be dead, at just forty years of age. He had helped to invent the detective story, and to define the genre of science fiction, among many other achievements. (Our selection of Poe’s greatest short stories gives a sense of his sheer variety.) ‘Those who dream by day’, he once observed, ‘are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.’

October 2 in Literature: The Twilight Zone Premieres

The most significant events in the history of books on the 2nd of October

What significant events in history occurred on October 2nd? In the world of literature and books, the 2nd of October saw the birth of a major British novelist and a major American poet, and the premiere of a classic US TV series…

1879: Poet Wallace Stevens is born. An important voice in twentieth-century American poetry, Stevenson would proclaim that ‘the poet is the priest of the invisible.’ One of his most celebrated, but enigmatic, poems is ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream’, which can be read here.

October 1 in Literature: Author of Children’s Classic Dies

The most significant events in the history of books on the 1st of October

What significant events in history occurred on October 1st? In the world of literature and books, the 1st of October saw the birth of an early Gothic novelist and the death of a classic American children’s author…

1760: William Beckford, author of Vathek, is born. Beckford wrote the bestselling Gothic novel Vathek in French in 1782, and left an the English translation up to someone else (it would be translated by a vicar four years later). Beckford, from a wealthy family of sugar plantation owners, was tutored in music by none other than Mozart. His family estate was at Fonthill, where Beckford had the famous Fonthill Abbey built.

The Origin of the Phrase ‘Goody Two-Shoes’

Where did the expression ‘Goody Two-Shoes’ come from? Its history is, in part, a literary one…

The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes was a story, published anonymously in 1765, about an orphan girl who goes through life wearing only one shoe. However, this wasn’t where the expression ‘goody two-shoes’ originally came from: the phrase is even older than that 1765 story. For instance, it’s found in Charles Cotton’s 1670 Voyage to Ireland in Burlesque:

Mistress mayoress complained that the pottage was cold;
‘And all long of your fiddle-faddle,’ quoth she.
‘Why, then, Goody Two-shoes, what if it be?
Hold you, if you can, your tittle-tattle,’ quoth he.

But it seems unclear exactly where the phrase originated.

A History of English Poetry in 8 Short Poems

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

English poetry is a broad field, so any attempt to tell its history in a short blog post is going to have to paint pretty broad brush strokes. But one way of avoiding too many sweeping generalisations about ‘big’ movements in poetic history can be minimised, perhaps, by looking only at a handful of specific short poems by famous poets.