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StillnessLiterature

The proper study of mankind is man.

This line opens the second part, or epistle, of Pope's An Essay on Man (1733–34). The full couplet reads: ‘Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; / The proper study of Mankind is Man.’ Pope's advice: rather than prying into God's plans, which lie beyond us, study human nature. ‘Know thyself’ echoes the words inscribed at Apollo's temple at Delphi. Alexander Pope (1688–1744) also gave English ‘to err is human, to forgive divine’ and ‘a little learning is a dangerous thing’.

Alexander Pope, "An Essay on Man" (1734)Read card

DriveLiterature

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear — not absence of fear.

This maxim opens Chapter 12 of Mark Twain's novel Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894). Each chapter begins with a saying from ‘Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar’, the joke almanac kept by David Wilson, a clever lawyer whom his Missouri town dismisses as a fool, or ‘pudd'nhead’. The entry goes on to say that calling a creature brave only makes sense if it is partly a coward: otherwise the flea, which attacks people asleep or awake whatever their size, would be the bravest animal alive. Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Clemens (1835–1910).

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WonderLanguage

'Clue' comes from 'clew', an old word for a ball of thread. It took on the meaning of a hint because of the Greek myth in which Ariadne gives Theseus a ball of thread to find his way out of the Labyrinth.

In the myth, King Minos of Crete kept the Minotaur, a monster that was half man and half bull, in a maze built by the craftsman Daedalus. Theseus, a prince of Athens, came to kill it. Minos's daughter Ariadne gave him a ball of thread, which he tied at the entrance and unwound as he went in, so he could follow it back out. English writers came to speak of the 'clew' that guides a person through any maze or puzzle, and by the 1620s the word meant anything that points the way. The spelling 'clue' had appeared in the 1400s. Sailors still keep the old spelling: the clew is the lower corner of a sail. Turkish tells the same story in one word: ipucu literally means 'the end of the thread'.

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DrivePhilosophy

Men at some time are masters of their fates: / The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

Cassius speaks these lines in Act 1 of Julius Caesar, written by Shakespeare in 1599. He tells Brutus that nothing in the heavens made Caesar great and them his underlings: they allowed it. Many people then believed the stars shaped a person's fate. Today the line is quoted as a call to take charge of your life, and it gave John Green's novel The Fault in Our Stars its title. In the play it is flattery with a purpose: Cassius is drawing Brutus into the plot to kill Caesar.

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WonderHistory

The Rosetta Stone carries the same decree three times: in hieroglyphs, in Demotic, an everyday Egyptian script, and in ancient Greek. Scholars could still read Greek, so they could compare it with the Egyptian versions line by line. In 1822 the French scholar Jean-François Champollion used it to crack the hieroglyphic script.

Hieroglyphs had been unreadable for more than 1,400 years: the last known inscription was carved in AD 394, and later scholars wrongly assumed that every sign stood for an idea. The breakthrough came through names. Royal names are written inside oval frames called cartouches, and from 1814 the English scientist Thomas Young matched the cartouche on the stone with the Greek name Ptolemy and worked out some of its sounds. Champollion knew Coptic, the last stage of the Egyptian language, still used in the Coptic Church. In September 1822, in a letter to the secretary of the French Academy of Inscriptions, he announced that many hieroglyphs stood for sounds, and by 1824 he had shown that the script combines signs for sounds with signs for meanings. Over the following decades, texts from more than 3,000 years of Egyptian history became readable again.

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WonderLiterature

Shakespeare's plays are the earliest known written source for many English words and phrases, from “star-crossed” to “green-eyed monster”. But being first found in Shakespeare is not the same as being invented by him, and many such words turn out to have been used by others first.

The popular figure of about 1,700 words invented by Shakespeare rests largely on the Oxford English Dictionary, whose first edition cited him as the earliest user of many words. The scholar Jonathan Hope has pointed out why: the Victorian readers who collected quotations for the dictionary read Shakespeare more thoroughly than any other writer, so he often got the credit for words that can also be found in others. Later research, helped by searchable collections of early printed books, has found older examples of many of them. What remains is still remarkable. He turned nouns into verbs, added prefixes and suffixes freely and joined words in new ways, and dozens of his phrases, such as “salad days” and “sea change”, are still in everyday use more than four hundred years later.

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WonderLiterature

The Tale of Genji, written in Japan in the early 1000s by Murasaki Shikibu, a lady-in-waiting at the imperial court, is often called the world's first novel. Its 54 chapters follow the life and loves of Genji, an emperor's son, and then the generation after him.

Murasaki Shikibu is not her real name, which is unknown. She served Empress Shōshi in Heian-kyō, today's Kyoto, and wrote the tale between about 1000 and 1012, probably in instalments passed around among the women of the court. She wrote mostly in hiragana, the Japanese phonetic script, because Chinese, the language of government and prestige, was then considered men's business. Her own manuscript is lost; the tale survives in some 300 later copies that differ from one another, and the oldest illustrated scrolls date from the 12th century. Whether it is the “first” novel depends on the definition, since Greek and Roman prose stories are older, but its large cast, inner lives and characters who grow old give it much of what we expect of a novel. Arthur Waley's English translation of 1925 to 1933 made it famous in the West.

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WonderLiterature

Mary Shelley began Frankenstein in the summer of 1816, when she was 18, after a ghost-story contest with Lord Byron and Percy Shelley by Lake Geneva. The novel was published anonymously in London on 1 January 1818, when she was 20.

That summer is remembered as the Year Without a Summer: the huge eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia the year before had cooled the world, and cold rain kept the friends indoors at the Villa Diodati, which Byron had rented. After an evening of reading German ghost stories, Byron proposed that each of them write one. Mary struggled for days until the image of a scientist horrified by the creature he had brought to life came to her. Byron's doctor, John Polidori, wrote The Vampyre in the same contest. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus first appeared in three volumes, just 500 copies, with a preface by Percy. Her name was first printed on it in a French translation of 1821 and, in Britain, in the second edition of 1823. It is often called one of the first science-fiction novels.

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WonderLiterature

Agatha Christie is the best-selling novelist of all time, according to Guinness World Records, with an estimated two billion copies sold. She wrote 66 detective novels, many of them featuring Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple.

Christie was born in Torquay in 1890. During the First World War she worked in a hospital dispensary, where she learned about the poisons that appear in so many of her plots, and her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, introduced Poirot in 1920. About half her sales are in English and half in translation, and UNESCO's Index Translationum lists her as the most translated individual author. And Then There Were None has sold about 100 million copies, and her play The Mousetrap, which opened in London in 1952, holds the world record for the longest initial run of any play. The popular claim that only the Bible and Shakespeare have sold more cannot be checked, since nobody has reliable totals for either.

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WonderLiterature

J.R.R. Tolkien, a professor at Oxford, had been inventing languages since boyhood. He later said the languages came first, and that he made Middle-earth, the world of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, partly to give them a place to live.

Tolkien was a philologist, a scholar of how languages change over the centuries. After the First World War his first job was on the Oxford English Dictionary, tracing the history of words beginning with W, and from 1925 he was professor of Anglo-Saxon, or Old English, at Oxford. His two main Elvish languages have real models: Quenya draws on Finnish and Latin, and Sindarin on Welsh. He gave them grammars, sound changes and long histories, so the names in his books sound as if they had grown over thousands of years. He set out the idea in a 1955 letter to his American publisher, Houghton Mifflin. Some scholars, such as Dimitra Fimi, think the mythology and the languages grew up together, since his first poem of the mythology came a few months before his first Elvish language.

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WonderLiterature

George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949, gave English terms still used for surveillance and propaganda: Big Brother, the Thought Police, Newspeak and doublethink, the habit of believing two contradictory things at once. The adjective “Orwellian” came later.

Orwell wrote most of the novel on Jura, a remote Scottish island, while seriously ill with tuberculosis. It was published on 8 June 1949, and he died seven months later, aged 46. Its hero, Winston Smith, works at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting old newspapers so that the past always agrees with the Party. Newspeak is the Party's shrunken language, designed to make rebellious thoughts impossible to express, and Big Brother is the leader whose face watches from every poster. The earliest known use of “Orwellian” is by the American writer Mary McCarthy in 1950; the word now describes any system built on surveillance, propaganda and the denial of plain facts. Big Brother also gave its name to a reality television show, first broadcast in the Netherlands in 1999.

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WonderLiterature

Arthur Conan Doyle killed Sherlock Holmes in 1893, sending him over the Reichenbach Falls with his enemy Professor Moriarty. Readers were so upset that The Strand Magazine reportedly lost more than 20,000 subscribers, and ten years later Doyle brought the detective back.

Doyle had grown tired of Holmes and wanted time for the historical novels he considered his serious work. The story, “The Final Problem”, appeared in The Strand in December 1893. Angry letters followed; one woman reportedly began hers “You brute”. The famous tale of Londoners wearing black mourning bands is probably a legend: the earliest known mention of it dates from 1949. Doyle held out for eight years. The Hound of the Baskervilles, serialised in 1901 and 1902, was set before Holmes's death, and in 1903 “The Adventure of the Empty House” revealed that Holmes had faked his fall. Doyle went on writing Holmes stories until 1927.

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WonderLiterature

Jane Austen's name never appeared on her novels while she was alive. Sense and Sensibility (1811) was credited only to “A Lady”, and her later novels, such as Pride and Prejudice, to “the Author of” her earlier books.

Austen published four novels in her lifetime, all without her name: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma. Anonymous novels were common at the time; Walter Scott published Waverley without his name in 1814. For a clergyman's daughter it was also a way to keep her privacy. The secret still spread: the Prince Regent admired her novels, kept a set in each of his residences, and Emma was dedicated to him. She earned £140 from Sense and Sensibility and sold the copyright of Pride and Prejudice for £110. Austen died in July 1817, aged 41. Months later, her brother Henry wrote a biographical notice for the posthumous Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, which named her publicly as the author for the first time.

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WonderLiterature

The Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne, first published as Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, names most readers took to be men's. Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey all appeared under these names in 1847, and few people knew who had written them.

The sisters grew up in the parsonage at Haworth, a village on the Yorkshire moors. They chose the pen names for their first book, Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell (1846), keeping their own initials; it sold only two copies. In 1850 Charlotte explained that they had not wanted to take clearly male names, but did not want to be known as women either, because they sensed that critics judged women writers with prejudice. Guessing soon began, and some thought all the books were by one man. In July 1848 Charlotte and Anne travelled to London to show Charlotte's publisher, George Smith, that they were two different people; Emily refused to go. Within a year Emily and Anne had both died, and Charlotte later told their story under their real names.

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WonderLiterature

Before he died in 1924, Franz Kafka asked his closest friend, Max Brod, to burn his diaries, letters and unpublished manuscripts unread. Brod ignored the request and published them, including the novels The Trial and The Castle.

Kafka died of tuberculosis at 40, in a sanatorium near Vienna, and was little known outside Prague. He was harsh on his own work: by some estimates he destroyed about 90% of what he wrote, helped by his last companion, Dora Diamant, who nevertheless secretly kept some notebooks that the Gestapo later seized. Brod said he had told Kafka long before that he would never carry out such an order. He published The Trial in 1925, The Castle in 1926 and Amerika in 1927. In 1939, as the Nazis occupied Prague, he left for Palestine with a suitcase of Kafka's papers. A long legal fight over those papers ended in 2016, when Israel's Supreme Court awarded them to the National Library of Israel.

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StillnessLiterature

Emily Dickinson wrote nearly 1,800 poems, yet only about ten were printed in her lifetime, all without her name and most altered by editors. After her death in 1886, her sister Lavinia found the rest, many copied into small hand-sewn booklets.

Dickinson spent almost all her life in Amherst, Massachusetts, and in her later years rarely left the family home. Between 1858 and 1865 she copied about 800 poems into 40 booklets, now called fascicles, and no one knew they existed. The first selection was published in 1890 by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, but they reshaped her poems to suit the taste of the time, changing words and replacing her many dashes with ordinary punctuation. Her rhymes were unusual too: she often used slant rhymes, words that almost but not quite rhyme, such as “room” and “storm”. Only in 1955 did Thomas H. Johnson publish all her poems close to the way she wrote them.

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DriveLiterature

Ernest Hemingway's iceberg theory holds that a writer who knows a subject well can leave much of it out, and readers will still feel it. He compared good prose to an iceberg: only one-eighth shows above the water, and the hidden part gives it its weight.

Hemingway set out the idea in Death in the Afternoon (1932), his book on Spanish bullfighting: if a writer truly knows the material, he can omit things and the reader will sense them as strongly as if they had been stated. The habit began early. As a young reporter at the Kansas City Star in 1917, he followed a style sheet that asked for short sentences and plain, vigorous English, and he later trimmed his stories in the same way. A well-known example is 'Hills Like White Elephants' (1927): a couple waiting for a train in Spain argue about an operation that is never named, yet the reader understands what is at stake. The method, also called the theory of omission, shaped much of 20th-century fiction, and Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.

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WonderLiterature

The Epic of Gilgamesh, from ancient Mesopotamia (today's Iraq), is one of the oldest surviving works of literature; the first poems about its hero were written down about 4,000 years ago. It follows Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, whose grief at the death of his friend Enkidu sends him in search of eternal life.

The first Gilgamesh poems were written in Sumerian around 2100 BC, and by about 1800 BC they had been joined into one story in Akkadian, the language of Babylon. The best-known version fills twelve clay tablets in cuneiform, a script of wedge-shaped marks pressed into wet clay. In it, Gilgamesh finds Utnapishtim, the man who survived a great flood, and wins a plant that restores youth, but a snake steals it while he bathes. He goes home to Uruk and takes pride in its great walls, the work that will outlast him. The epic was forgotten once cuneiform fell out of use. Tablets turned up in 1853 in the ruins of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal's library at Nineveh, and in 1872 George Smith of the British Museum caused a sensation when he deciphered its flood story, so close to Noah's.

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Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote, published in Spain in two parts in 1605 and 1615, is often called the first modern novel. Its hero, a country gentleman, reads so many tales of knights that he loses his wits and sets out to become one, with the farmer Sancho Panza as his squire.

Cervantes (1547–1616) had fought at the naval battle of Lepanto in 1571, where he lost the use of his left hand, and spent five years as a captive in Algiers before he wrote the book. He meant it as a parody of the chivalric romances, long tales of knights and giants that were bestsellers in Spain. What made it new was its interest in ordinary life and in how people see the world through what they read. In 1614 another writer, hiding behind the name Avellaneda, published a fake sequel. Cervantes answered in Part Two, where characters have read Part One and mock the impostor. The book is one of the most translated in the world, and a 2002 poll of writers from more than 50 countries, organised in Norway, named it the greatest work of fiction ever written.

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WonderLiterature

Most of Charles Dickens's novels first appeared in instalments, in cheap monthly parts or in weekly magazines, before they came out as books. He often ended a part at a moment of suspense, so readers would buy the next one.

Dickens's serial career began with The Pickwick Papers, sold in 19 illustrated monthly parts in 1836 and 1837. At a shilling a part, a novel became affordable to readers who could never pay for a whole book at once, and Pickwick made Dickens famous at 24. Later novels such as David Copperfield and Bleak House followed the same monthly pattern, while The Old Curiosity Shop, Hard Times and Great Expectations ran weekly in magazines. Writing only a few parts ahead, Dickens could respond to readers' letters and to sales. The Old Curiosity Shop, whose young heroine Little Nell dies at the end, gripped readers on both sides of the Atlantic. The popular story of New Yorkers crowding the docks to ask arriving sailors whether Nell was dead is probably a legend.

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WonderLiterature

Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' (1841) is often called the first modern detective story. Its hero, C. Auguste Dupin, solves a baffling Paris crime by pure reasoning, decades before Sherlock Holmes.

Poe (1809–1849), an American poet and critic, called his Dupin stories 'tales of ratiocination', an old word for methodical reasoning. When he wrote the first one, the word 'detective' was not yet in use. In three stories, 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue', 'The Mystery of Marie Rogêt' (1842) and 'The Purloined Letter' (1844), he set out much of the pattern later writers followed: an eccentric genius, a friend who narrates, baffled police, a crime in a room locked from the inside, and an explanation that comes only at the end. Arthur Conan Doyle, who created Sherlock Holmes in 1887, openly credited Poe as the father of the detective story. The Mystery Writers of America still call their annual prizes the Edgar Awards.

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WonderLiterature

Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, published in seven volumes between 1913 and 1927, runs to more than a million words. Early on, the narrator tastes a madeleine cake dipped in tea, and memories of his childhood come flooding back.

Proust (1871–1922) was a Parisian writer who spent his last years mostly in bed, working to finish the book. Publishers turned down the first volume, Swann's Way, among them the respected Nouvelle Revue Française on the advice of André Gide, so Proust paid Grasset to publish it in 1913. He died in 1922, and the last three volumes appeared after his death, edited by his brother Robert. In the madeleine scene, the taste brings back Sunday mornings in the village of Combray, when his aunt Léonie gave him a piece of madeleine dipped in her tea. Proust called this 'involuntary memory': the past returning through the senses rather than by effort. Psychologists now call vivid memories set off by a smell or taste the 'Proust effect', and Guinness World Records lists the book as the longest novel.

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StillnessLiterature

A haiku is a very short Japanese poem that captures a single observed moment, often tied to a season. The classical form has 17 sound units in three phrases of 5, 7 and 5.

Haiku grew out of the hokku, the opening verse of renga, a long chain poem that several poets wrote together, taking turns. Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694) raised that opening verse to an art of its own; his best-known poem, from 1686, shows an old pond and the sound of a frog jumping in. The name haiku was made popular in the late 19th century by the poet Masaoka Shiki, who treated it as a poem in its own right. Japanese counts on, short sound units that do not match syllables in other languages: the name Nippon (Japan), for example, is four on (ni-p-po-n) but only two syllables. A classical haiku usually includes a kigo, a word that signals the season, and a kireji, a 'cutting word' that creates a pause. For this reason many poets in other languages write short lines rather than counting 5–7–5 exactly.

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WonderLiterature

Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851) opens with one of the most famous lines in fiction: 'Call me Ishmael.' The narrator, a young sailor, goes on to tell of Captain Ahab's obsessive hunt for the white whale that took his leg.

Melville (1819–1891) drew on his own time aboard the whaler Acushnet, on which he sailed in January 1841, and on the true story of the Essex, a whaleship sunk by a sperm whale in the Pacific in 1820. The opening line is often read as a hint. In the Bible, Ishmael, a son of Abraham, is sent away into the desert, so the name suggests a wanderer and an outsider, and the narrator never says it is his real name. The novel appeared in London as The Whale in October 1851 and in New York as Moby-Dick a month later. Sales were poor, and it was out of print when Melville died in 1891. Its reputation rose only after the centenary of his birth in 1919, and it is now counted among the great American novels.

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