Literary Timeline
731- The
Venerable Bede, in his monastery at Jarrow, completes his history of the
English church and people
c. 800 - Beowulf,
the first great work of Germanic literature, mingles the legends of Scandinavia
with the experience in England of Angles and Saxons
c. 950 - The material of the Eddas, taking shape
in Iceland, derives from earlier sources in Norway, Britain and Burgundy
c. 1300 - Duns Scotus, known as the
Subtle Doctor in medieval times, later provides humanists with the name Dunsman
or dunce
c. 1340 - William of Ockham advocates
paring down arguments to their essentials, an approach later known as Ockham's
Razor
c. 1367 - A narrator who calls himself
Will, and whose name may be Langland, begins the epic poem of Piers Plowman
c. 1367 - One of four new yeomen of the
chamber in Edward III's household is Geoffrey Chaucer
c. 1375 - The
courtly poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight tells of a mysterious visitor to
the round table of King Arthur
c. 1385 - Chaucer completes Troilus and
Criseyde, his long poem about a legendary love affair in ancient Troy
c. 1387 - Chaucer
begins an ambitious scheme for 100 Canterbury Tales, of which he completes only
24 by the time of his death
1469 - Thomas
Malory, in goal somewhere in England, compiles Morte d'Arthur – an English
account of the French tales of King Arthur.
1510 - Erasmus
and Thomas More take the northern Renaissance in the direction of Christian humanism
1524 - William
Tyndale studies in the university at Wittenberg and plans to translate the
Bible into English
1549 - The first version of the English
prayer book, or Book of Common Prayer, is published with text by Thomas Cranmer
1564 - Marlowe and Shakespeare are born in
the same year, with Marlowe the older by two months .
1567 - The
Book of Common Prayer and the New Testament are published in Welsh, to be
followed by the complete Bible in 1588.
1582 - The 18-year-old William Shakespeare
marries Anne Hathaway in Stratford-upon-Avon
1587 - Marlowe's
first play, Tamburlaine the Great, introduces the swaggering blank verse of
Elizabethan and Jacobean drama
1590 - English
poet Edmund Spenser celebrates the Protestant Elizabeth I as The Faerie Queene
1592 - After
tentative beginnings in the three parts of Henry VI, Shakespeare achieves his
first masterpiece on stage with Richard III
1601- Shakespeare's
central character in Hamlet expresses both the ideals of the Renaissance and
the disillusion of a less confident age
1604 - James I commissions the
Authorized version of the Bible, which is completed by forty-seven scholars in
seven years
1604 - William
Shakespeare's name appears among the actors in a list of the King's Men List of the King's Men.
1605 - Ben Jonson writes The Masque of Blackness, the
first of his many masques for the court of James I
1606 - The satirical voice of the
English playwright Ben Jonson is heard to powerful effect in Volpone Benjamin
Jonson, by van Blyenberch, c.1617 National Portrait Gallery, London
1609 - Shakespeare's
sonnets, written ten years previously, are published
c. 1611 - Shakespeare's last completed
play, The Tempest, is performed
1616 - John
Smith publishes A Description of New England, an account of his exploration of
the region in 1614
1616 - William Shakespeare dies at New
Place, his home in Stratford-upon-Avon, and is buried in Holy Trinity Church
1621 - John
Donne, England's leading Metaphysical poet, becomes dean of St Paul's
1623 - John
Heminge and Henry Condell publish thirty-six Shakespeare plays in the First
Folio
1633 - George
Herbert's only volume of poems, The Temple, is published posthumously
1637 - John Milton's Lycidas is published
in memory of a Cambridge friend, Edward King
1650 - The
poems of Massachusetts author Anne Bradstreet are published in London under the
title The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America
1653 - Devoted
fisherman Izaak Walton publishes the classic work on the subject, The Compleat
Angler
1660 - On the first day of the new year
Samuel Pepys gets up late, eats the remains of the turkey and begins his diary.
1667 - Paradise
Lost is published, earning its author John Milton just £10
1669 - Samuel Pepys ends his diary, after
only writing it for nine years
1678 - Part I of The Pilgrim's Progress,
written during John Bunyan's two spells in Bedford Gaol, is published and is
immediately popular
1680 - John Bunyan publishes The Life and Death of
Mr Badman, an allegory of a misspent life that is akin to a novel
1688 - Aphra
Behn's novel Oroonoko makes an early protest against the inhumanity of the African
slave trade
1690 - John Locke publishes his Essay
concerning Human Understanding, arguing that all knowledge is based on
experience
1702 - The
Augustan Age begins in English literature, claiming comparison with the
equivalent flowering under Augustus Caesar
1709 - The Tatler launches a new style of
journalism in Britain's coffee houses, followed two years later by the
Spectator
1710 - 25-year-old
George Berkeley attacks Locke in his Treatise Concerning the Principles of
Human Knowledge
1712 - Alexander
Pope's Rape of the Lock introduces a delicate vein of mock-heroic in English
poetry
1719 - Daniel
Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, with its detailed realism, can be seen as the first
English novel
1726 - Jonathan
Swift launches his hero on a series of bitterly satirical adventures in
Gulliver's Travels
1739 - David
Hume publishes his Treatise of Human Nature, in which he applies to the human
mind the principles of experimental science
1747 - Samuel
Richardson's Clarissa begins the correspondence which grows into the longest
novel in the English language
1749 - Henry
Fielding introduces a character of lasting appeal in the lusty but good-hearted
Tom Jones
1751 - English poet Thomas Gray publishes
his Elegy written in a Country Church Yard
1755 - Samuel
Johnson publishes his magisterial Dictionary of the English Language
1758 - James
Woodforde, an English country parson with a love of food and wine, begins a
detailed diary of everyday life
1759 - Laurence Sterne publishes the first
two volumes of Tristram Shandy, beginning with the scene at the hero's
conception
1762 - Fingal, supposedly by the medieval
poet Ossian, is a forgery in the spirit of the times by James MacPherson
1763 - James Boswell meets Samuel Johnson
for the first time, in the London bookshop of Thomas Davies
1764 - English historian Edward Gibbon,
sitting among ruins in Rome, conceives the idea of Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire
1764 - English author Horace Walpole
provides an early taste of Gothic thrills in his novel Castle of Otranto
1768 - A Society of Gentlemen in Scotland
begins publication of the immensely successful Encyclopedia Britannica
1770 - 17-year-old Thomas Chatterton,
later hailed as a significant poet, commits suicide in a London garret
1773 - Oliver
Goldsmith's play She Stoops to Conquer is produced in London's Covent Garden
theatre
1773 - Samuel Johnson and James Boswell
undertake a journey together to the western islands of Scotland
1774 - Encouraged
by Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine emigrates to America and settles in Philadelphia
1776 - English historian Edward Gibbon
publishes the first volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
1776 - Scottish
economist Adam Smith analyzes the nature and causes of the Wealth of Nations
1777 - Richard
Brinsley Sheridan's second play, The School for Scandal, is an immediate
success in London's Drury Lane theatre
1789 - William
Blake publishes Songs of Innocence, a volume of his poems with every page
etched and illustrated by himself
1789 - In his Principles Jeremy Bentham
defines 'utility' as that which enhances pleasure and reduces pain
1790 - Anglo-Irish
politician Edmund Burke publishes Reflections on the Revolution in France, a
blistering attack on recent events across the Channel
1791- Scottish poet Robert Burns publishes
Tam o' Shanter, in which a drunken farmer has an alarming encounter with
witches
1791 - Thomas
Paine publishes the first part of The Rights of Man, his reply to Burke's
Reflections on the Revolution in France
1792 - English
author Mary Wollstonecraft publishes a passionately feminist work, A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman
1792 - Thomas
Paine moves hurriedly to France, to escape a charge of treason in England for
opinions expressed in his Rights of Man
1794 - William
Blake's volume Songs of Innocence and Experience includes his poem 'Tyger!
Tyger! burning bright'
1795 - Thomas
Paine publishes his completed Age of Reason, an attack on conventional
Christianity
1797- Samuel
Taylor Coleridge says that while writing Kubla Khan he is interrupted by 'a
person on business from Porlock'
1798 - English
poets Wordsworth and Coleridge jointly publish Lyrical Ballads, a milestone in
the Romantic movement
1798 - Samuel
Taylor Coleridge's poem 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' is published in
Lyrical Ballads
1804 - William
Blake includes his poem 'Jerusalem' in the Preface to his book Milton
1805 - Walter Scott publishes The Lay of the Last Minstrel, the long romantic poem that first brings him fame
1810 - Walter
Scott's poem Lady of the Lake brings tourists in unprecedented numbers to
Scotland's Loch Katrine
1811 - Percy
Bysshe Shelley is expelled from Oxford university for circulating a pamphlet
with the title The Necessity of Atheism
1811 - English
author Jane Austen publishes her first work in print, Sense and Sensibility, at
her own expense
1812 - The
first two cantos are published of Byron's largely autobiographical poem Childe
Harold's Pilgrimage, bringing him immediate fame
1813 - Pride
and Prejudice, based on a youthful work of 1797
called First Impressions, is the second of Jane Austen's novels to be published
1818 - Percy
Bysshe Shelley publishes probably his best-known poem, the sonnet Ozymandias
1818- Two of Jane Austen's novels,
Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, are published in the year after her death
1818- Mary Shelley publishes Frankenstein,
or the Modern Prometheus, a Gothic tale about giving life to an artificial man
1819 - William Cobbett brings back to England the
bones of Thomas Paine, who died in the USA in 1809
1819 - Byron begins publication in
parts of his longest poem, Don Juan an epic satirical comment on contemporary
life
1819 November
22 Mary Anne Evans (known now as George Eliot) is born in the parish of
Chilvers Coton in Warwickshire
1819 - Walter Scott publishes Ivanhoe,
a tale of love, tournaments and sieges at the time of the crusades
1820 - English poet John Keats
publishes Ode to a Nightingale, inspired by the bird's song in his Hampstead
garden
1820- English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley
publishes Ode to the West Wind, written mainly in a wood near Florence
1821- English
author Thomas De Quincey publishes his autobiographical Confessions of an
English Opium-Eater
1821- English
poet John Keats dies in Rome at the age of twenty-five
1821- English radical
William Cobbett begins his journeys round England, published in 1830 as Rural
Rides
1821- English
author William Hazlitt publishes Table Talk, a two-volume collection that
includes most of his best-known essays
1824 - 12-year-old
Charles Dickens works in London in Warren's boot-blacking factory
1832 - English
author Frances Trollope ruffles transatlantic feathers with her Domestic
Manners of the Americans, based on a 3-year stay
1836 - 24-year-old Charles Dickens
begins monthly publication of his first work of fiction, Pickwick Papers
(published in book form in 1837)
1837 - Charles Dickens' first novel,
Oliver Twist, begins monthly publication (in book form, 1838)
1842 - English poet Robert Browning
publishes a vivid narrative poem about the terrible revenge of The Pied Piper
of Hamelin
1842 - English
author Thomas Babington Macaulay publishes a collection of stirring ballads,
Lays of Ancient Rome
1843 - Ebenezer
Scrooge mends his ways just in time in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol
1844 - In his
novel Coningsby Benjamin Disraeli develops the theme of Conservatism uniting
'two nations', the rich and the poor
1845 - Friedrich Engels, after running a
textile factory in Manchester, publishes The Condition of the Working Class in
England
1846 - Edward
Lear publishes his Book of Nonsense, consisting of limericks illustrated with
his own cartoons
1846 - Mary Anne Evans' translation from
the German of David Friedrich Strauss's controversial Life of Jesus is
published anonymously
1846 - After
marrying secretly, the English poets Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett go
abroad to live in Florence
1846 - The
three Brontë sisters jointly publish a volume of their poems and sell just two
copies
1847 - English author William Makepeace Thackeray
begins publication of his novel Vanity Fair in monthly parts (book form 1848)
1847 - Charlotte becomes the first of the
Brontë sisters to have a novel published — Jane Eyre
1847 - Emily
Brontë's novel Wuthering Heights follows just two months after her sister
Charlotte's Jane Eyre
1848 - Branwell, Emily and Anne Brontë die
within a period of eight months
1849 - Charles
Dickens begins the publication in monthly numbers of David Copperfield, his own
favourite among his novels
1850 - Alfred Tennyson's elegy for a
friend, In Memoriam, captures perfectly the Victorian mood of heightened
sensibility
1852 - London physician Peter Mark Roget
publishes his dictionary of synonyms, the Thesaurus of English Words and
Phrases
1854 - Within six weeks of the Charge of
the Light Brigade in the Crimea, Tennyson publishes a poem finding heroism in
the disaster
1855 - Tennyson
publishes a long narrative poem, Maud, a section of which ('Come into the
garden, Maud') becomes famous as a song
1855 - English author Anthony Trollope
publishes The Warden, the first in his series of six Barsetshire novels
1857 - In Tom
Brown's Schooldays Thomas Hughes depicts the often brutal aspects of an English
public school
1859 - Charles Darwin puts forward the theory of
evolution in On the Origin of Species, the result of 20 years' research
1859 – February English author George
Eliot wins fame with her first full-length novel, Adam Bede
1859 - In On Liberty John Stuart Mill
makes the classic liberal case for the priority of the freedom of the
individual
1859 - Samuel Smiles provides an inspiring
ideal of Victorian enterprise in Self-Help, a manual for ambitious young men
1859 - Tennyson publishes the first part of Idylls
of the King, a series of linked poems about Britain's mythical king Arthur
1859 - Charles Dickens publishes his French
Revolution novel, A Tale of Two Cities
1859 - Edward
FitzGerald publishes The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, romantic translations of the
work of the Persian poet
1860 - Charles Dickens begins serial
publication of his novel "Great Expectations" (in book form 1861)
1860 - George Eliot publishes The Mill on
the Floss, her novel about the childhood of Maggie and Tom Tulliver
1861 - Mrs Henry Wood publishes her first
novel, East Lynne, which becomes the basis of the most popular of all Victorian
melodramas
1862 - Oxford mathematician Lewis Carroll
tells 10-year-old Alice Liddell, on a boat trip, a story about her own
adventures in Wonderland
1863 - English
author Charles Kingsley publishes an improving fantasy for young children, The
Water-Babies
1865 - Lewis
Carroll publishes Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, a development of the story
he had told Alice Liddell three years earlier
1866 - Algernon Swinburne scandalizes
Victorian Britain with his first collection, Poems and Ballads
1867 - The
first volume of Das Kapital is completed by Marx in London and is published in
Hamburg
1869 - English
author Matthew Arnold publishes Culture and Anarchy, an influential collection
of essays about contemporary society
1871 - George
Eliot publishes Middlemarch, in which Dorothea makes a disastrous marriage to
the pedantic Edward Casaubon
1872 - Lewis
Carroll publishes Through the Looking Glass, a second story of Alice's
adventures
1874 - English
author Thomas Hardy has his first success with his novel Far from the Madding
Crowd
1875 - After
spending much time in Europe in recent years, Henry James moves there
permanently and settles first in Paris
1875 - Henry
James's early novel Roderick Hudson is serialized in the Atlantic Monthly and
is published in book form in 1876
1876 - William
Gladstone's pamphlet Bulgarian Horrors, protesting at massacre by the Turks,
sells 200,000 copies within a month
1876 - Henry
James moves to London, which remains his home for the next 22 years
c. 1876 - English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins develops a
new verse form that he calls 'sprung rhythm'
1876 - Lewis
Carroll publishes The Hunting of the Snark, a poem about a voyage in search of
an elusive mythical creature
1878 - 21-year-old
Joseph Conrad, a Polish subject, goes to sea with the British merchant navy
1879 - Henry
James's story Daisy Miller, about an American girl abroad, brings him a new
readership
1881- The
Aesthetic Movement and 'art for art's sake', attitudes personified above all by
Whistler and Wilde, are widely mocked and satirized in Britain
1883 - Robert
Louis Stevenson's adventure story, Treasure Island, features Long John Silver
and Ben Gunn
1884 - Oxford
University Press publishes the A volume of its New English Dictionary, which
will take 37 years to reach Z
1885 - Explorer and orientalist Richard
Burton begins publication of his multi-volume translation from the Arabic of
The Arabian Nights
1886 - Robert Louis Stevenson introduces a
dual personality in his novel The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
1886 - Thomas Hardy publishes his novel
The Mayor of Casterbridge, which begins with the future mayor, Michael Henchard
selling his wife and child at a fair
1886 - Joseph Conrad becomes naturalized
as a British subject and continues his career at sea in the far East
1887 - Sherlock
Holmes features in Conan Doyle's first novel, A Study in Scarlet
1889 - 23-year-old Irish author William
Butler Yeats publishes his first volume of poems, The Wanderings of Oisin
1889 - The Fabian Society publishes Essays
in Socialisman influential volume of essays edited by Bernard Shaw
1890 - Scottish anthropologist James Frazer
publishes The Golden Bough, a massive compilation of contemporary knowledge
about ritual and religious custom
1890 - 9-year-old Daisy Ashford imagines an adult
romance and high society in The Young Visiters
1891 - A Gaelic pressure group, the
Highland Association, is founded to preserve the indigenous poetry and music of
Scotland
1891 - Oscar Wilde publishes his novel The Picture of
Dorian Gray in which the ever-youthful hero's portrait grows old and ugly
1891 - Thomas
Hardy publishes his novel Tess of the Durbervilles, with a dramatic finale at
Stonehenge
1892 - Oscar
Wilde's comedy Lady Windermere's Fan is a great success with audiences in
London's St. James Theatre
1892 - W.B. Yeats founds the National
Literary Society in Dublin, with Douglas Hyde as its first president
1892 - W.B. Yeats publishes a short play
The Countess Cathleen, his first contribution to Irish poetic drama
1892 - Bernard Shaw's first play,
Widowers' Houses, deals with the serious social problem of slum landlords
1892 - Mr Pooter is the suburban anti-hero
of the The Diary of a Nobody, by George and Weedon Grossmith
1894 - French-born
artist and author George du Maurier publishes his novel Trilby
1894 - Rudyard
Kipling's The Jungle Book surrounds the child Mowgli with a collection of vivid
animal guardians
1895 - Oscar Wilde's most brilliant
comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest is performed in London's St. James
Theatre
1895 - Oscar Wilde loses a libel case that
he has brought against the marquess of Queensberry for describing him as a
sodomite
1895- Oscar Wilde is sent to Reading Gaol to serve a
two-year sentence with hard labour after being convicted of homosexuality
1895 - H.G. Wells publishes The Time
Machine, a story about a Time Traveller whose first stop on his journey is the
year 802701
1896 - English poet A.E. Housman publishes
his first collection, A Shropshire Lad
1897 - Somerset Maugham publishes his
first novel, Liza of Lambeth, based on the London life he has observed as a
medical student
1897 - English author Bram Stoker
publishes Dracula, his gothic tale of vampirism in Transylvania
1898 - Henry James moves from London to
Lamb House in Rye, Sussex, which remains his home for the rest of his life
1898 - H.G. Wells publishes his
science-fiction novel The War of the Worlds, in which Martians arrive in a
rocket to invade earth
1898 - Henry James publishes The Turn of
the Screw in a collection of short stories
1899 - E.
Nesbit publishes The Story of the Treasure Seekers, introducing the Bastable
family who feature in several of her books for children
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