English Literary History in a Nutshell

[More nonsense. This is likely Part I of II.]

Prehistory

Scratches in tree bark, soft stone and dried mud.

Roman Britain

Army ledgers. The poetry of names and strategy.

731 A.D. Ecclesiastical History of the English People

For the benefit of legions of young military-age men educated in monasteries and elsewhere, the Venerable Bede produces a history "textbook," a literary genre designed to bore school-persons into submission and in this case thereby to reduce resistance to Christianity.

1000 A.D. Beowulf

A baying wolf from Sweden goes on an epic rampage against an early teatotaller and his mother in Denmark, and decades later dies when he attempts in vain to remove a fire hazard from his kingdom. After this tragic incident, possibly pure fiction, Swedish children were taught to "stop, drop and roll" and the first fire trucks — wheelbarrows and rainwater — were constructed.

end of 14th cent. Canterbury Tales

In a court unsettled by the Hundred Years' War, Geoffrey Chaucer wrote bedtime stories for the beleaguered nobility much as Giovanni Boccaccio had done in his Decamerone in Florence.

1589-1613ish William Shakespeare's Plays and Sonnets

A cabal of English Literature professors at Oxford University decides to write plays plagiarized from ancient and newer sources to establish an authorship controversy whose resolution would procure funding for their successors in perpetuity. William Shakespeare is the hapless tool who must produce the plays and pretend to be the figurehead of the thing.

1611 King James Bible

As the head of the Anglican Church King James I considers it infra dignitas to have it known that he has read a Puritan translation of the Bible, and reading it in ancient Greek or Hebrew or the Vulgate is a drag, so he commissions his very own.

1667 Paradise Lost

"A smalle whyte dogge by the name of Paradys has been loste on the road twixt Southampton and Dover. Any kind sirs having knowleddge of his presente lodgynges please to despatche a messengere to J. Milton, 34 Hay Roade, Chalfont St. Giles Bucks."

1671 Paradise Regained

Hiding in hay-cart all along.

1712 Rape of the Lock

A consortium of millowners is highly wrought after the Leafley river is reconstituted into a canal and the old lock above the juncture to the Finch tributary is demolished. They turn to Alexander Pope to tear into the enterprise with a sarcastic editorial using his preferred weapon, heroic couplets.

1722 A Journal of the Plague Year

Six decades after an unspeakably horrid year in dress fashions, pamphleteer Daniel Defoe bravely broaches the collective trauma of English society and describes the monstrosities in lace and velvet which lurched and broddled through Whitehall.

1729 A Modest Proposal

After a bitter babysitting experience a young policy-maker in the Foreign Office advocates cannibalism, only to be sternly told that he must evince greater sensitivity to the public and obtain knowledge in the art of child care through apprenticeship in a nursery. Later in his career it transpires that it was he who (under the influence of hallucinogens) had anonymously published (1726) a highly spurious account of his travels in lands for example where horses reign (known afterwards by the name of hippocracy, sometimes spelled hypocrisy). It offends so many diplomatic missions who read it as ridicule of their own nations that the War of the Austrian Succession two decades after is but an extension of childish insults by other means. Yet the authorship has come as no surprise to his superiors in the Foreign Office, who have placed no great reliance upon his dispatches after the first; their initial panic after reports of Rose-coloured Pachyderms preying upon the docks of Marseilles proved greatly unfounded.

1794 The Mysteries of Udolpho

England discovers southern France and Italy only to be shocked by the depravity of the upper classes and surprised by the similarity of its scenery to paintings by Watteau and etchings by china-manufacturers. As Mrs. Ann Radcliffe reported in this and later works, Italian marquesses are greatly prone to killing off their families and conspiring with clergymen.

1813 Pride and Prejudice

A naive and unobservant young novelist, daughter of a rural parson, suggests that one should marry for love rather than rank, money, or suave manners. Her work unleashes a firestorm of denunciation which, particularly among women, inspires animosity against her and her works to this day.

1814-29 Waverley Novels

Sir Walter Scott uncovers a similar vein of depravity in England and Scotland. Brides stabbing unwanted husbands, Scots stabbing unwanted English, Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert trying not to execute unwanted love interests, etc., and everyone from astrologers to highlanders conspiring against everybody else.

1836-7 Pickwick Papers

An inventory of the finances of a small town outside of London by name of Pickwick. Followed by Oliver Twist, a monograph on an obscure Elizabethan poet; A Tale of Two Cities, contrasting the street waste disposal methods of Paris and London; Great Expectations, predicting a stark rise of the gross domestic product in London and outlying towns between 1862-5; Little Dorrit, a comparison of the types and quantities of fish which were caught off a tiny Dorsetshire port in 1857; and Nicholas Nickleby, a philosophical look at the relative merits of hempen and wood-fibre paper as described in the diary of a 17th-century scrivener. Charles Dickens was a minor and dry writer with a profoundly limited insight into the realities of human interaction and greater social problems, and so despite an impassioned reevaluation in the 20th century he never truly acquired influence.

1847 Jane Eyre

In an investigative report the Yorkshire freelance writer Charlotte Brontë concludes that it is best for well-born but poor women not to become governesses except if the surname of their employer is Rochester, and finds at the same time that any woman in an engagement should secure her footing in the eyes of the law before the ceremony by inspecting the betrothed gentleman's house from roof to cellar to ferret out concealed dependents.

1847-8 - Vanity Fair

Having consumed too much cotton candy, the writer William Makepeace Thackeray indicts a rambling denunciation of society and the sugar industry at large, and the sugar industry at street carnivals in particular, concluding that the brief surge of energy is in the end a hollow good.

1891 - Salome

The great playwright Oscar Wilde suffers fraught relations with other personages of high society. Pushed past the powers of endurance by one particular grande dame, he decides to spoil her appetite for dinner by putting in theatrical form a Biblical tale of a young lady who, on a momentous occasion, orders not a salad, not a soup, not a proper met of any sort, but the head of a prophet on a platter.

Et cetera.