-
410
Beginning of the history of English literature
English literature begins with the old English period, when the Romans withdrew from Britain, leaving the Germanic and Scandinavian settlers. -
450
Old English
-
731
The Venerable Bede
Completes his history of the English church and people -
800
Beowulf
The first great work of Germanic literature, mingles the legends of Scandinavia with the experience in England of Angles and Saxons -
950
The material of the Eddas
Taking shape in Iceland, derives from earlier sources in Norway, Britain and Burgun -
1300
Duns Scotus
Known as the Subtle Doctor in medieval times, later provides humanists with the name Dunsman or dunce -
1367
Begins the epic poem of Piers Plowman
A narrator who calls himself Will, and whose name may be Langland -
1367
Geoffrey Chaucer
One of four new yeomen of the chamber in Edward III's household -
1375
Mysterious visitor to the round table of King Arthur
The courtly poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight tells -
1385
Chaucer completes Troilus and Criseyde
His long poem about a legendary love affair in ancient Troy -
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
Compiles Morte d'Arthur – an English account of the French tales of King Arthur -
1510
Erasmus and Thomas
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
Is published with text by Thomas Cranmer -
1564
Marlowe and Shakespeare
Born in the same year -
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 -
Marlowe's first play,
Tamburlaine the Great, introduces the swaggering blank verse of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama -
English poet Edmund Spenser
celebrates the Protestant Elizabeth I as The Faerie Queene -
After tentative beginnings in the three parts of Henry VI
Shakespeare achieves his first masterpiece on stage with Richard III -
Shakespeare's central character in Hamlet
Expresses both the ideals of the Renaissance and the disillusion of a less confident age -
James I commissions the Authorized version of the Bible
Which is completed by forty-seven scholars in seven years -
William Shakespeare's name appears among the actors in a list of the King's Men
-
Ben Jonson
Writes The Masque of Blackness, the first of his many masques for the court of James I -
Ben Jonson
The satirical voice of the English playwright is heard to powerful effect in Volpone -
Shakespeare's sonnets
Written ten years previously, are published -
Shakespeare's last completed play
The Tempest, is performed -
John Smith publishes
A Description of New England, an account of his exploration of the region in 1614 -
William Shakespeare dies
At New Place, his home in Stratford-upon-Avon, and is buried in Holy Trinity Church -
John Donne
England's leading Metaphysical poet, becomes dean of St Paul's -
John Heminge and Henry Condell
Publish thirty-six Shakespeare plays in the First Folio -
George Herbert's
Only volume of poems, The Temple, is published posthumously -
John Milton's Lycidas
Is published in memory of a Cambridge friend, Edward King -
The poems of Massachusetts author Anne Bradstreet
Are published in London under the title The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America -
Devoted fisherman Izaak Walton
Publishes the classic work on the subject, The Compleat Angler -
On the first day of the new year
Samuel Pepys gets up late, eats the remains of the turkey and begins his diary -
Paradise Lost is published
Earning its author John Milton just £10 -
Samuel Pepys ends his diary
After only writing it for nine years -
Is published and is immediately popular
Part I of The Pilgrim's Progress, written during John Bunyan's two spells in Bedford Gaol -
Aphra Behn's nove
Makes an early protest against the inhumanity of the African slave trade -
John Locke publishes his Essay concerning Human Understanding
Arguing that all knowledge is based on experience -
The Augustan Age begins in English literature
Claiming comparison with the equivalent flowering under Augustus Caesar -
The Tatler launches a new style of journalism in Britain's coffee houses
Followed two years later by the Spectator -
25-year-old George Berkeley
Attacks Locke in his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge -
Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe
With its detailed realism, can be seen as the first English novel -
Jonathan Swift
Sends his hero on a series of bitterly satirical travels in Gulliver's Travels -
David Hume publishes his Treatise of Human Nature
In which he applies to the human mind the principles of experimental science -
Samuel Richardson's Clarissa
Begins the correspondence that grows into the longest novel in the English language -
Henry Fielding
Introduces a character of lasting appeal in the lusty but good-hearted Tom Jones -
English poet Thomas Gray
Publishes his Elegy written in a Country Church Yard -
Samuel Johnson
Publishes his magisterial Dictionary of the English Language -
James Woodforde
An English country parson with a love of food and wine, begins a detailed diary of everyday life -
Laurence Sterne
Publishes the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy, beginning with the scene at the hero's conception -
Fingal, supposedly by the medieval poet Ossian
Is a forgery in the spirit of the times by James MacPherson -
James Boswell
Meets Samuel Johnson for the first time, in the London bookshop of Thomas Dav -
English historian Edward Gibbon
Sitting among ruins in Rome, conceives the idea of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empir -
English author Horace Walpole
Provides an early taste of Gothic thrills in his novel Castle of Otranto -
A Society of Gentlemen
Begins publication of the immensely successful Encyclopaedia Britannica -
17-year-old Thomas Chatterton
Later hailed as a significant poet, commits suicide in a London garret -
Oliver Goldsmith's play She Stoops to Conquer
Is produced in London's Covent Garden theatre -
Samuel Johnson and James Boswell
undertake a journey together to the western islands of Scotland -
Encouraged by Benjamin Franklin
Thomas Paine emigrated to America and settles in Philadelphia -
English historian Edward Gibbon
Publishes the first volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire -
Scottish economist Adam Smith
Analyzes the nature and causes of the Wealth of Nations -
Richard Brinsley Sheridan's second play
The School for Scandal, is an immediate success in London's Drury Lane theatre -
William Blake
Publishes Songs of Innocence, a volume of his poems with every p -
Scottish poet Robert Burns publishes
Tam o' Shanter, in which a drunken farmer has an alarming encounter with witches -
Thomas Paine publishes the first part of The Rights of Man
His reply to Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France -
English author Mary Wollstonecraft publishes
A passionately feminist work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman -
Thomas Paine moves hurriedly to France
To escape a charge of treason in England for opinions expressed in his Rights of Man -
William Blake's volume
Songs of Innocence and Experience includes his poem 'Tyger! Tyger! burning bright' -
Thomas Paine publishes his completed Age of Reason
An attack on conventional Christianity -
English poets Wordsworth and Coleridge jointly publish
Lyrical Ballads, a milestone in the Romantic movement -
Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem
'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' is published in Lyrical Ballads -
William Blake
Includes his poem 'Jerusalem' in the Preface to his book Milton -
Walter Scott publishes
The Lay of the Last Minstrel, the long romantic poem that first brings him fame -
Walter Scott's poem
Lady of the Lake brings tourists in unprecedented numbers to Scotland's Loch Katrine -
Percy Bysshe Shelley is expelled from Oxford university
University for circulating a pamphlet with the title The Necessity of Atheism -
English author Jane Austen publishes
Her first work in print, Sense and Sensibility, at her own expense -
The first two cantos are published of Byron's
Largely autobiographical poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, bringing him immediate fame -
Pride and Prejudice, based on a youthful work of 1797 called First Impressions
Is the second of Jane Austen's novels to be published -
Percy Bysshe Shelley publishes
Probably his best-known poem, the sonnet Ozymandias -
Two of Jane Austen's novels
Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, are published in the year after her death -
Mary Shelley publishes
Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, a Gothic tale about giving life to an artificial man -
William Cobbett
Brings back to England the bones of Thomas Paine, who died in the USA in 1809 -
Byron begins publication in parts of his longest poem
Don Juan an epic satirical comment on contemporary life -
Walter Scott publishes Ivanhoe
A tale of love, tournaments and sieges at the time of the crusades -
English poet John Keats publishes Ode to a Nightingale
Inspired by the bird's song in his Hampstead garden -
English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley publishes Ode to the West Wind
Written mainly in a wood near Florence -
English radical William Cobbett begins his journeys round England
Published in 1830 asRural Rides -
English author Thomas De Quincey publishes
His autobiographical Confessions of an English Opium-Eater -
English poet John Keats
Dies in Rome at the age of twenty-five -
English author William Hazlitt publishes Table Talk
A two-volume collection that includes most of his best-known essays -
12-year-old Charles Dickens
Works in London in Warren's boot-blacking factory -
English author Frances Trollope
Ruffles transatlantic feathers with her Domestic Manners of the Americans, based on a 3-year stay -
24-year-old Charles Dickens
Begins monthly publication of his first work of fiction, Pickwick Papers (published in book form in 1837) -
Charles Dickens' first novel, Oliver Twist
Begins monthly publication (in book form, 1838) -
English poet Robert Browning publishes
A vivid narrative poem about the terrible revenge ofThe Pied Piper of Hamelin -
English author Thomas Babington Macaulay publishes
A collection of stirring ballads, Lays of Ancient Rome -
Ebenezer Scrooge
Mends his ways just in time in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol -
In his novel Coningsby Benjamin Disraeli
Develops the theme of Conservatism uniting 'two nations', the rich and the poor -
Friedrich Engels
After running a textile factory in Manchester, publishes The Condition of the Working Class in England -
Edward Lear publishes
His Book of Nonsense, consisting of limericks illustrated with his own cartoons -
After marrying secretly
The English poets Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett go abroad to live in Florence -
The three Brontë sisters jointly publish
A volume of their poems and sell just two copies -
English author William Makepeace Thackeray begins publication
Of his novel Vanity Fair in monthly parts (book form 1848) -
Charlotte
Becomes the first of the Brontë sisters to have a novel published — Jane Eyre -
Emily Brontë's novel Wuthering Heights
Follows just two months after her sister Charlotte's Jane Eyre -
Branwell, Emily and Anne Brontë
Die within a period of eight months -
Charles Dickens begins the publication
In monthly numbers of David Copperfield, his own favourite among his novels -
Alfred Tennyson's elegy for a friend
In Memoriam, captures perfectly the Victorian mood of heightened sensibility -
London physician Peter Mark Roget
Publishes his dictionary of synonyms, the Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases -
Within six weeks of the Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimea
Tennyson publishes a poem finding heroism in the disaster -
Tennyson publishes a long narrative poem
Maud, a section of which ('Come into the garden, Maud') becomes famous as a song -
English author Anthony Trollope publishes The Warden
The first in his series of six Barsetshire novels -
In Tom Brown's Schooldays
Thomas Hughes depicts the often brutal aspects of an English public school -
Charles Darwin
Puts forward the theory of evolution in On the Origin of Species, the result of 20 years' research -
In On Liberty John Stuart Mill
Makes the classic liberal case for the priority of the freedom of the individual -
Samuel Smiles
Provides an inspiring ideal of Victorian enterprise in Self-Help, a manual for ambitious young men -
Tennyson publishes
The first part of Idylls of the King, a series of linked poems about Britain's mythical king Arthur -
Charles Dickens publishes
His French Revolution novel, A Tale of Two Cities -
Edward FitzGerald publishes
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, romantic translations of the work of the Persian poet -
English author George Eliot
Wins fame with her first full-length novel, Adam Bed -
Charles Dickens begins serial publication
Of his novel "Great Expectations" (in book form 1861) -
George Eliot publishes
Publishes The Mill on the Floss, her novel about the childhood of Maggie and Tom Tulliver -
Mrs Henry Wood publishes her first novel
East Lynne, which becomes the basis of the most popular of all Victorian melodramas -
Oxford mathematician Lewis Carroll tells 10-year-old Alice Liddell
On a boat trip, a story about her own adventures in Wonderland -
English author Charles Kingsley publishes
An improving fantasy for young children, The Water-Babies -
Lewis Carroll publishes Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
A development of the story he had told Alice Liddell three years earlie -
Algernon Swinburne
Scandalizes Victorian Britain with his first collection, Poems and Ballads -
The first volume of Das Kapital
Is completed by Marx in London and is published in Hamburg -
English author Matthew Arnold publishes
Culture and Anarchy, an influential collection of essays about contemporary society -
George Eliot publishes Middlemarch
In which Dorothea makes a disastrous marriage to the pedantic Edward Casaubon -
Lewis Carroll publishes
Through the Looking Glass, a second story of Alice's adventures -
English author Thomas Hardy
Has his first success with his novel Far from the Madding Crowd -
After spending much time in Europe in recent years
Henry James moves there permanently and settles first in Paris -
Henry James's early novel Roderick Hudson
Is serialized in the Atlantic Monthly and is published in book form in 1876 -
William Gladstone's pamphlet Bulgarian Horrors
Protesting at massacre by the Turks, sells 200,000 copies within a month -
Henry James moves to London
Which remains his home for the next 22 years -
Lewis Carroll publishes The Hunting of the Snark
A poem about a voyage in search of an elusive mythical creature -
21-year-old Joseph Conrad, a Polish subject
Goes to sea with the British merchant navy -
Henry James's story Daisy Miller
About an American girl abroad, brings him a new readership -
The Aesthetic Movement and 'art for art's sake'
Attitudes personified above all by Whistler and Wilde, are widely mocked and satirized in Britain -
Robert Louis Stevenson's adventure story
Treasure Island, features Long John Silver and Ben Gunn -
Oxford University Press publishes
The A volume of its New English Dictionary, which will take 37 years to reach Z -
Sherlock Holmes
Features in Conan Doyle's first novel, A Study in Scarlet -
23-year-old Irish author William Butler Yeats publishes
His first volume of poems, The Wanderings of Oisin -
The Fabian Society publishes
Essays in Socialisman influential volume of essays edited by Bernard Shaw -
Scottish anthropologist James Frazer publishes
The Golden Bough, a massive compilation of contemporary knowledge about ritual and religious custom -
9-year-old Daisy Ashford
Imagines an adult romance and high society in The Young Visiters -
A Gaelic pressure group
The Highland Association, is founded to preserve the indigenous poetry and music of Scotland -
Oscar Wilde publishes
His novel The Picture of Dorian Gray in which the ever-youthful hero's portrait grows old and ugly -
Thomas Hardy publishes
His novel Tess of the Durbervilles, with a dramatic finale at Stonehenge -
Oscar Wilde's comedy
Lady Windermere's Fan is a great success with audiences in London's St. James Theatre -
W.B. Yeats founds the National Literary Society in Dublin
With Douglas Hyde as its first president -
Bernard Shaw's first play, Widowers' Houses
Deals with the serious social problem of slum landlords -
Mr Pooter is the suburban anti-hero of the The Diary of a Nobody
By George and Weedon Grossmith -
French-born artist and author George du Maurier publishes
His novel Trilby -
Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book
Surrounds the child Mowgli with a collection of vivid animal guardians -
H.G. Wells publishes The Time Machine,
A story about a Time Traveller whose first stop on his journey is the year 802701 -
Oscar Wilde's most brilliant comedy
The Importance of Being Earnest is performed in London's St. James Theatre -
Oscar Wilde
Loses a libel case that he has brought against the marquess of Queensberry for describing him as a sodomite -
English poet A.E. Housman publishes
His first collection, A Shropshire Lad -
E. Nesbit publishes
The Story of the Treasure Seekers, introducing the Bastable family who feature in several of her books for children -
Joseph Conrad publishes
His novel Lord Jim about a life of failure and redemption in the far East -
Beatrix Potter publishes
At her own expense The Tale of Peter Rabbit -
Rudyard Kipling publishes
His Just So Stories for Little Children -
The play Cathleen ni Houlihan
By W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, fosters Irish nationalism -
The Tale of Peter Rabbit is published
Commercially, a year after being first printed by Beatrix Potter at her own expense -
John Masefield's poem
'Sea Fever' is published in Salt-Water Ballads -
Joseph Conrad publishes
A collection of stories including Heart of Darkness, a sinister tale based partly on his own journey up the Congo -
Conan Doyle's
The Hound of the Baskervilles begins publication in serial form -
Henry James publishes
The first of his three last novels, The Wings of the Dove -
Erskine
Childers has a best-seller in The Riddle of the Sands, a thriller about a planned German invasion of Britain -
Henry James
Publishes The Ambassadors, the second of his three last novels written in rapid succession -
British philosopher G.E. Moore publishes
Principia Ethica, an attempt to apply logic to ethics -
Joseph Conrad publishes
His novel Nostromo, about a revolution in South America and a fatal horde of silver -
Henry James publishes
His last completed novel, The Golden Bowl -
The Bloomsbury Group
Gathers for informal evenings at the family home of Virginia and Vanessa Stephens (later Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell) -
Oscar Wilde's De Profundis,
A letter of recrimination written in Reading Gaol to Lord Alfred Douglas, is published posthumously -
H.G. Wells publishes Kipps
The story of a simple soul, a comic novel about a bumbling draper's assistant -
Bernard Shaw has two new plays opening in London in the same year
Major Barbara and Man and Superman -
The first volume of the inexpensive Everyman's
Library is issued by Joseph Dent, a London publisher -
E. Nesbit publishes The Railway Children
The most successful of her books featuring the Bastable family -
John Galsworthy publishes The Man of Property
The first of his novels chronicling the family of Soames Forsyte -
J.M. Synge's Playboy of the Western World
Provokes violent reactions at its Dublin premiere -
Patrick Abercrombie publishes
The Preservation of Rural England, calling for rural planning to prevent the encroachment of towns -
T.E. Lawrence publishes privately
His autobiographical Seven Pillars of Wisdom, describing his part in the Arab uprising -
Hugh MacDiarmid writes his long poem
A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle in a revived version of the Lallans dialect of the Scottish borders -
Richard Hughes publishes
His first novel, A High Wind in Jamaica -
Blind Fireworks is Ulster writer
Blind Fireworks is Ulster writer Louis MacNeice's first collection of poems -
English author J.B. Priestley
Has an immediate success with his first novel, The Good Companions -
English author W.H. Auden's first collection
Of poetry is published with the simple titlePoems -
Noel Coward and Gertrude
Lawrence star in the West End in Private Lives, Coward's comedy of marital complications -
Irish author Flann O'Brien publishes
His first novel, At Swim-Two-Birds -
Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman
Is rejected by numerous publishers before becoming, decades later, his best-known novel -
British author Rebecca West publishes
an account of Yugoslavia, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon -
Evelyn Waugh publishes
Brideshead Revisited, a novel about a rich Catholic family in England between the wars -
British author Roald Dahl publishes
A novel for children, James and the Giant Peach -
English biographer Michael Holroyd completes
His two-volume life of Lytton Strachey -
English novelist John Fowles publishes
The French Lieutenant's Woman, set in Lyme Regis in the 1860s -
English poet James Fenton publishes
His first collection, Terminal Moraine -
British economist Ernst Friedrich Schumacher publishes
An influential economic tract, Small is Beautiful -
German-born British art historian Nikolaus Pevsner
Completes his monumental 46-volume Buildings of England -
British economist Nicholas Kaldor attacks
Monetarism in The Economic Consequences of Mrs Thatcher -
English author Julian Barnes publishes
A multi-faceted literary novel, Flaubert's Parrot -
English poets John Fuller and James
Fenton collaborate in a volume of satirical poems,Partingtime Hall -
Racing Demon launches a trilogy on the British
Establishment by English playwright David Hare -
English novelist Sebastian Faulks publishes
Birdsong, set partly in the trenches of World War I -
Vikram Seth publishes
His novel A Suitable Boy, a family saga in post-independence India -
Scottish author Irvine Welsh publishes
His first novel, Trainspotting -
Louis de Bernières publishes
Captain Corelli's Mandolin, a love story set in Italian-occupied Cephalonia -
The poems forming Ted Hughes's Birthday
Letters describe his relationship with Sylvia Plath -
A schoolboy wizard performs his first tricks in J.K.
Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone -
Michael Frayn's
Play Copenhagen dramatizes the visit of Werner Heisenberg to Niels Bohr in wartime Denmark -
Ayatollah Khomeini declares
A fatwa against Salman Rushdie for his Satanic Verses -
The Amber Spyglass completes Philip Pullman's trilogy
His Dark Materials