Literature: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 7

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Shakespeare and Cervantes share a traditional death date, 23 April 1616, but they did not die on the same day. Spain had adopted the new Gregorian calendar while England still used the older Julian one, so Shakespeare in fact died 11 days after Cervantes.

Pope Gregory XIII introduced the Gregorian calendar in 1582 to correct the old Julian calendar, which had drifted ten days behind the seasons. Catholic Spain switched at once, but Protestant England kept the Julian calendar until 1752. Cervantes died in Madrid on 22 April 1616 and was buried the next day, and 23 April became his traditional date. Shakespeare died in Stratford-upon-Avon on 23 April by the English calendar, which was 3 May by Spain's. The shared date still has a legacy: in 1995 UNESCO chose 23 April for World Book and Copyright Day, partly in memory of both writers and of the Peruvian author Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, who is also recorded as dying on that date in 1616.

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Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) is told through a collection of documents: diaries, letters, telegrams, a ship's log and newspaper cuttings. The characters themselves gather these papers to piece together the Count's plan.

Stoker (1847–1912) was an Irish writer who worked for many years as business manager of London's Lyceum Theatre for the actor Henry Irving. He researched the novel for several years, and his working notes are now held at the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia. Telling a story through documents is called the epistolary form, and reviewers compared the book with Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1859), which also uses several witnesses. Stoker filled it with the new technology of his day: Mina Harker takes notes in shorthand and types up everyone's accounts, and Dr Seward keeps his diary on a phonograph, an early sound recorder. Dracula himself has no diary or account of his own; apart from a few letters, readers see him only through the eyes of the people he threatens. The novel has never been out of print.

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J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was turned down by about a dozen publishers before Bloomsbury accepted it. It came out in 1997 with a first print run of just 500 hardback copies.

Rowling finished the book in Edinburgh while bringing up her young daughter alone. Her agent, Christopher Little, spent about a year sending it out, and many publishers thought it too long for a children's book at around 90,000 words. At Bloomsbury the editor Barry Cunningham liked it, and the chief executive, Nigel Newton, gave the first chapter to his eight-year-old daughter, Alice, who read it and asked for more. Bloomsbury paid an advance of £2,500 and published the book on 26 June 1997; 300 of the first 500 copies went to libraries. In April 1997, before it was even out in Britain, the American publisher Scholastic bought the US rights for $105,000, a remarkable sum for a children's book. The series became one of the best-selling in history.

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Six publishers turned down Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Peter Rabbit, so in 1901 she had 250 copies printed at her own expense. A year later Frederick Warne published it in colour, and it became one of the best-selling children's books of all time.

The story began in 1893 as an illustrated letter Potter wrote to Noel Moore, the five-year-old son of her former governess, while he was recovering from scarlet fever. It told of four little rabbits, and Peter was named after her own pet rabbit, Peter Piper. Potter (1866–1943) was a keen naturalist who drew animals from life, and she wanted a small book that a child could hold. Warne agreed to publish it if she redrew the pictures in colour, and its colour edition of October 1902 had sold 50,000 copies by the end of 1903. Total sales are now put at more than 45 million. Potter went on to write 23 tales, patented a Peter Rabbit doll in 1903 and used her earnings to buy farmland in the Lake District, leaving over 4,000 acres to the National Trust.

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The Iliad and the Odyssey, the ancient Greek epics credited to Homer, grew out of a tradition of oral poetry. Singers performed tales of the Trojan War from memory for generations, and the poems were written down no earlier than the 8th century BC, after the Greeks had adopted the alphabet.

In the late 1920s the American scholar Milman Parry showed why the poems are full of repeated phrases such as “rosy-fingered Dawn” and “swift-footed Achilles”. Each is a ready-made formula that fits a particular place in the six-foot line of Greek epic, called dactylic hexameter, so a singer could compose fluently while performing. To test the idea, Parry and his assistant Albert Lord recorded epic singers in Yugoslavia in 1933–35. Many of these singers could not read, yet they performed poems thousands of lines long, never quite the same way twice. One of them, Avdo Međedović, sang an epic of about 13,000 lines over several days, close to the length of the Odyssey. Lord set out the theory in The Singer of Tales (1960). Whether a single poet called Homer ever existed is still debated.

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Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Clemens, and it came from the Mississippi. On steamboats, a crewman measuring the depth called out “mark twain” when the water was two fathoms, about 3.7 metres, deep: just enough for a boat to pass safely.

Clemens (1835–1910) grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi. As a young man he trained for more than two years under an experienced pilot and was licensed as a steamboat pilot in 1859. On the river a crewman called the leadsman dropped a weighted line with marks on it to measure depth; twain is an old word for two, so “mark twain” meant the second mark, two fathoms, which was safe water. The American Civil War cut river traffic in 1861 and ended his piloting career. He went west to Nevada, and on 3 February 1863 first signed a newspaper piece “Mark Twain” in the Territorial Enterprise of Virginia City. He later described his river years in Life on the Mississippi (1883), and the river runs through his best-known novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

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James Joyce's novel Ulysses, published in 1922, takes place in Dublin on a single day, 16 June 1904. It follows the advertising salesman Leopold Bloom and the young teacher and would-be writer Stephen Dedalus from morning into the small hours, in episodes loosely modelled on Homer's Odyssey.

Joyce chose the date because it was the day of his first outing with Nora Barnacle, who later became his wife. The novel has 18 episodes, each echoing part of the Odyssey: Bloom is a modern Odysseus, Stephen plays Telemachus and Bloom's wife Molly is Penelope. Joyce changes style from chapter to chapter, including long passages of stream of consciousness, which follows a character's thoughts as they come rather than in tidy sentences. Parts appeared in the American magazine The Little Review from 1918 to 1920, until an obscenity case in 1921. Sylvia Beach's Paris bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, published the whole book on 2 February 1922, Joyce's 40th birthday; in the United States it stayed banned until a court ruling in 1933. Since 1954 readers have celebrated 16 June as Bloomsday, retracing the characters' routes through Dublin.

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In October 1964 the French philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and he turned it down. He said he refused all official honours, because a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution.

Sartre (1905–1980) was the best-known voice of existentialism, the philosophy that people are free and must give their lives meaning through their own choices. The Swedish Academy praised his work as rich in ideas and filled with the spirit of freedom. A week before the prize was announced on 22 October 1964, Sartre had written to ask not to be chosen, but the decision had already been made. In a statement to the press he explained that he had also refused the Légion d'honneur, France's highest award, in 1945: a writer who accepts such honours becomes tied to the institution that gave them. The Academy replied that his refusal did not change the award, so he is still listed as a laureate, but no presentation took place. Only one other person has voluntarily declined a Nobel Prize: the Vietnamese politician Lê Đức Thọ, in 1973.

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Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language, published in London on 15 April 1755, defined 42,773 words. Johnson wrote the definitions himself; his six assistants mainly copied out the quotations he had marked in books.

A group of London booksellers commissioned the dictionary in June 1746 for 1,500 guineas. Johnson promised to finish in three years. Told that the 40 members of the Académie française had taken 40 years over their French dictionary, Johnson joked that forty times forty made sixteen hundred, so an Englishman was to a Frenchman as three to sixteen hundred. It appeared nearly nine years after the contract. His great innovation was to show words in use, with some 114,000 quotations from around 500 writers, above all Shakespeare, Milton and Dryden. A few definitions are famously personal: a lexicographer is 'a harmless drudge', and oats are a grain given to horses in England but that feeds the people in Scotland. Johnson liked to tease the Scots, yet five of his six assistants were Scots. His remained the leading English dictionary until the Oxford English Dictionary was completed in 1928.

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On the night of 3 December 1926 Agatha Christie left her home in Berkshire and vanished. Her car was found abandoned in Surrey, and a nationwide search began. Eleven days later she was found at a hotel in Harrogate, Yorkshire, where she had signed in under another name.

Christie was 36 and already known for The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, published that year. Her mother had died in April, and in August her husband, Archie, had told her he was in love with another woman, Nancy Neele; on 3 December, after a bitter quarrel, he asked for a divorce. Several hundred police officers, by some accounts more than a thousand, joined the search, along with thousands of volunteers. Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, even gave one of her gloves to a medium. At the Swan Hydropathic Hotel in Harrogate she had registered as Teresa Neele, from Cape Town. Two doctors said she had lost her memory. Her autobiography never mentions the episode, and biographers still disagree: some believe she was in a fugue state, a rare loss of memory and identity brought on by severe stress; others think she planned it to embarrass her husband.

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The Voynich manuscript is a hand-written, illustrated book from the early 1400s, filled with drawings of unknown plants and pages of text in a script that no one has been able to read.

It is named after Wilfrid Voynich, a Polish book dealer who bought it in 1912. In 2009 researchers at the University of Arizona used radiocarbon dating, which measures slowly decaying carbon, to date its calfskin pages to between 1404 and 1438, making a modern forgery very unlikely. About 240 pages survive, with sections on plants, stars, bathing women and medicines. A letter written in 1665 or 1666 claims that the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II once paid 600 ducats for it. The text runs left to right in 20 to 25 recurring characters, and some of its patterns resemble those of real languages, yet leading codebreakers, including William and Elizebeth Friedman, failed to read it. Suggestions range from an unknown language or a cipher to an elaborate hoax; none has been proven. Since 1969 it has been kept at Yale University, which has put every page online.

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George Eliot, author of Middlemarch, was really Mary Ann Evans. From 1857 she wrote under a man's name so that her novels would be taken seriously rather than dismissed as light 'lady novels', and to keep her private life out of the reviews.

Evans (1819–1880) grew up in Warwickshire, where her father managed a country estate. Before writing fiction she was a respected translator and an editor of the Westminster Review, a leading London journal. In an 1856 essay, 'Silly Novels by Lady Novelists', she mocked the far-fetched plots of much fiction by women, and she wanted her own work judged on its merits. There was also her private life: she lived openly with the writer George Henry Lewes, who was still married to someone else. She later explained that George was Lewes's first name and that Eliot was 'a good mouth-filling, easily pronounced word'. Her first stories, Scenes of Clerical Life, appeared in Blackwood's Magazine in 1857, and many readers assumed a country parson had written them. After Adam Bede (1859) became a hit and a man named Joseph Liggins claimed to be its author, she let her identity be known.

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In 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death, two of his fellow actors published 36 of his plays in one large book, now called the First Folio. Eighteen of them, including Macbeth and The Tempest, had never been printed before and might otherwise have been lost.

The editors, John Heminges and Henry Condell, had acted alongside Shakespeare for years in the King's Men, London's leading theatre company. Plays then belonged to the company, and only about half of Shakespeare's had appeared in cheap, small editions called quartos, some of them garbled. Heminges and Condell gathered the best texts they could find. The book was a folio, the largest format, made by folding each printed sheet only once, and a bound copy cost up to £1, nearly two months' pay for a skilled worker. Among the plays it saved are Twelfth Night, Julius Caesar and Measure for Measure. Of perhaps 750 copies printed, 235 are known to survive; the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., holds 82 of them. The book also gave us Martin Droeshout's engraved portrait, one of only two images of Shakespeare accepted as genuine.

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Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) was an English statesman who rose to Lord Chancellor, and a philosopher who argued that knowledge should be built on observation and experiment. His Essays, first published in 1597, brought to English the short essay form that Montaigne had pioneered in France. 'Of Studies' appeared in that first edition and was enlarged in 1625, the version quoted here. 'Conference' meant conversation and debate. Bacon then explains the three parts: someone who writes little needs a great memory, someone who talks little needs a quick wit, and someone who reads little needs cunning to seem to know what they do not. The same essay gives his advice that some books are to be tasted, others swallowed, and some few chewed and digested.

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Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.

Shakespeare wrote Measure for Measure around 1603–04, and it was first printed in the First Folio of 1623. In Vienna, the strict deputy ruler Angelo has sentenced a young man, Claudio, to death for making his fiancée, Juliet, pregnant before their wedding. Claudio's friend Lucio hurries to a convent to find Claudio's sister Isabella, a novice nun, and urge her to plead with Angelo. When Isabella says she doubts she has any power to help, Lucio answers with these lines. It is telling that such sound advice comes from Lucio, a flippant gossip. Isabella goes, and her pleading drives the rest of the play. The title echoes a line in the Gospel of Matthew: the measure you use on others will be used on you.

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StillnessLiterature

The readiness is all.

Hamlet says this to his friend Horatio in the last scene of Shakespeare's tragedy, written around 1599–1601. He has agreed to a fencing match with Laertes but feels uneasy, and Horatio offers to call it off. Hamlet refuses: if death does not come now, it will come later, so what matters is to be ready. He does not know the match is a trap set by King Claudius, with a poisoned blade and poisoned wine. By the end of the scene Hamlet, Laertes, the king and the queen are dead.

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There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others.

Elizabeth Bennet says this in chapter 31 of Pride and Prejudice (1813), at Rosings, home of Darcy's aunt Lady Catherine de Bourgh. While she plays the piano, Darcy stands where he can watch her face. She turns and teases him: if he means to frighten her, he will fail, because her courage always rises with every attempt to intimidate her. It is playful, but sums up her character: she will not be cowed by rank or wealth. A few chapters later Darcy proposes, and she turns him down.

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I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.

Jane says these words to herself in chapter 27 of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847). Her wedding to Mr Rochester has just been stopped in church: he already has a wife, Bertha, hidden at Thornfield Hall. Rochester begs Jane to go abroad and live with him as his wife in all but law. She loves him, and an inner voice asks who would be hurt if she agreed. This is her answer. She leaves Thornfield before dawn with almost nothing and nearly starves before strangers take her in.

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Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.

Victor Frankenstein thinks this near the end of Mary Shelley's novel, published in 1818. The creature he made and then abandoned has carried out its threat to be with him on his wedding night: his bride, Elizabeth, has been killed at Evian, on Lake Geneva. Rowing back to Geneva, Victor sees fish playing in the water, just as Elizabeth had watched them a few hours before. The lake is unchanged, yet nothing looks the same to him. Mary Shelley (1797–1851) began the book at 18, in the summer of 1816.

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What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?

Dorothea Brooke, the idealistic heroine of Middlemarch, says this in chapter 72. A young doctor, Lydgate, is caught up in the disgrace of the town's banker, Bulstrode, and many suspect he was paid to cover up a death. The vicar advises caution, but Dorothea wants to stand by Lydgate, who advised her in her own trouble. George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans (1819–1880). The novel appeared in 1871–72, and Virginia Woolf called it one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.

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StillnessLiterature

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.

This is the best-known sentence of Walden (1854), from its second chapter, 'Where I Lived, and What I Lived For'. From 4 July 1845, Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) spent two years, two months and two days in a one-room cabin he built beside Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts. The sentence goes on: he wanted to learn what life had to teach, and not find, when he came to die, that he had not lived. He was never cut off from the world; he walked into town every day or two.

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Resist much, obey little.

The words come from 'To the States', a poem of just three lines in Leaves of Grass, the book Walt Whitman (1819–1892) first printed at his own expense in 1855 and kept expanding all his life. The next lines give the reason: a people that obeys without question becomes fully enslaved, and once that happens no nation, state or city ever regains its liberty. In the Civil War Whitman nursed wounded soldiers in Washington's hospitals. He saw democracy as something citizens keep alive by using their own judgement.

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Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.

The line comes from the third act of Lady Windermere's Fan, which opened at the St James's Theatre in London on 20 February 1892. Late at night in Lord Darlington's rooms, men trade witty remarks. Cecil Graham teases Lord Augustus, known as Tuppy, saying that experience is the name Tuppy gives to his mistakes; Dumby widens the joke to everyone. Wilde had used the idea before, in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) was an Irish writer whose plays mocked the polite hypocrisy of London society.

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No one is useless in this world who lightens the burden of it for any one else.

In Our Mutual Friend (1864–65), the last novel Dickens completed, John Rokesmith says this to Bella Wilfer in book 3, chapter 9. They have just come from the funeral of Betty Higden, a poor old woman so afraid of dying in the workhouse that she fled to the countryside when she fell ill. Shaken, Bella says she feels useless in the world. Rokesmith disagrees, and when she protests that she lightens no one's burden, he asks: not even her father's? The line is often quoted in a shortened form.

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