On This Day

The most significant events in the history of books on the 9th of October

1906: Léopold Sédar Senghor is born. A Senegalese poet, he would become the first president of that country in 1960.

1938: John Sutherland is born. A retired Professor of English Literature, he has published extensively on Victorian fiction in particular, and is the author of Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives, a monumental and hugely entertaining book we’d heartily recommend. He is also the author of The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction, an invaluable and informative resource which every fan of Victorian literature cannot afford to be without. It contains information about famous and forgotten Victorian novelists and the books they wrote – everyone from Marie Corelli to Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charles Dickens to Charles Lever.

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The most significant events in the history of books on the 8th of October

1754: Henry Fielding dies. He had begun his career as a stage satirist poking fun at Robert Walpole – the first de facto Prime Minister of Britain – in the early 1730s, until the Licensing Act and theatre censorship put paid to that. Fielding turned instead to the novel, an emerging new literary form at the time, producing his masterpiece, the vast novel Tom Jones, in 1749. He also found time to set up the Bow Street Runners, the forerunners (as it were) to the Metropolitan Police Force in London.

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The most significant events in the history of books on the 7th of October

1576: John Marston, poet and playwright, is baptised. He wrote a number of plays for the London stage, the most famous of which is The Malcontent (1604), although perhaps he is more famous these days as the namesake of a character in the video game Red Dead Redemption. So it goes.

1577: Poet George Gascoigne dies. He was the first poet to praise Queen Elizabeth I in writing, at least a decade before Edmund Spenser did so in his epic The Faerie Queene. Gascoigne would also write the first sustained work of prose comedy written in English – a work that would later be used by William Shakespeare as the source material for his The Taming of the Shrew.

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The most significant events in the history of books on the 6th of October

1600: Jacopo Peri’s Euridice, the earliest surviving opera, premieres in Florence at the Palazzo Pitti. The opera is based on the Greek myth of Orpheus, and more specifically on the Roman poet Ovid’s retelling of it in his Metamorphoses.

1889: Thomas Edison shows his first motion picture. You can watch it here (the film begins at 2:22).

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