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The Venerable Bede, in his monastery at Jarrow, completes his history of the English church and people
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In the Old English period, epic poetry, which began as an oral art, was exemplified in "Beowulf." The period is also known for its beautiful elegies, including "The Wanderer" and "The Seafarer." Old English poetry is alliterative, rather than rhyming, and is known for its use of the kenning, a compressed metaphor such as whale-road or night-stalker.
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Beowulf, the first great work of Germanic literature, mingles the legends of Scandinavia with the experience in England of Angles and Saxons
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The material of the Eddas, taking shape in Iceland, derives from earlier sources in Norway, Britain and Burgundy
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Duns Scotus, known as the Subtle Doctor in medieval times, later provides humanists with the name Dunsman or dunce
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William of Ockham advocates paring down arguments to their essentials, an approach later known as Ockham's Razor
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A narrator who calls himself Will, and whose name may be Langland, begins the epic poem of Piers Plowman
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The courtly poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight tells of a mysterious visitor to the round table of King Arthur
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Chaucer completes Troilus and Criseyde, his long poem about a legendary love affair in ancient Troy
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Chaucer begins an ambitious scheme for 100 Canterbury Tales, of which he completes only 24 by the time of his death
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Thomas Malory, in gaol somewhere in England, compiles Morte d'Arthur – an English account of the French tales of King Arthur
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Middle English gave way to modern English during the Middle Ages, and Britain produced many great authors during the 16th and 17th centuries.
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Erasmus and Thomas More take the northern Renaissance in the direction of Christian humanism
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William Tyndale studies in the university at Wittenberg and plans to translate the Bible into English
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The first version of the English prayer book, or Book of Common Prayer, is published with text by Thomas Cranmer
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Marlowe and Shakespeare are born in the same year, with Marlowe the older by two months
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The Book of Common Prayer and the New Testament are published in Welsh, to be followed by the complete Bible in 1588
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The 18-year-old William Shakespeare marries Anne Hathaway in Stratford-upon-Avon
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Marlowe's first play, Tamburlaine the Great, introduces the swaggering blank verse of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama
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English poet Edmund Spenser celebrates the Protestant Elizabeth I as The Faerie Queene
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After tentative beginnings in the three parts of Henry VI, Shakespeare achieves his first masterpiece on stage with Richard III
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Shakespeare's central character in Hamlet expresses both the ideals of the Renaissance and the disillusion of a less confident age
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James I commissions the Authorized version of the Bible, which is completed by forty-seven scholars in seven years
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Ben Jonson writes The Masque of Blackness, the first of his many masques for the court of James I
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The satirical voice of the English playwright Ben Jonson is heard to powerful effect in Volpone
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Shakespeare's sonnets, written ten years previously, are published
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Shakespeare's last completed play, The Tempest, is performed
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John Smith publishes A Description of New England, an account of his exploration of the region in 161
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John Donne, England's leading Metaphysical poet, becomes dean of St Paul's
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John Heminge and Henry Condell publish thirty-six Shakespeare plays in the First Folio
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George Herbert's only volume of poems, The Temple, is published posthumously
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John Milton's Lycidas is published in memory of a Cambridge friend, Edward King
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The poems of Massachusetts author Anne Bradstreet are published in London under the title The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America
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Devoted fisherman Izaak Walton publishes the classic work on the subject, The Compleat Angler
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On the first day of the new year Samuel Pepys gets up late, eats the remains of the turkey and begins his diary
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Paradise Lost is published, earning its author John Milton just £10
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Samuel Pepys ends his diary, after only writing it for nine years
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Part I of The Pilgrim's Progress, written during John Bunyan's two spells in Bedford Gaol, is published and is immediately popular
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Aphra Behn's novel Oroonoko makes an early protest against the inhumanity of the African slave trade
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John Locke publishes his Essay concerning Human Understanding, arguing that all knowledge is based on experience
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Were the growth of the essay and the satire and the earliest examples of the novel.
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The Augustan Age begins in English literature, claiming comparison with the equivalent flowering under Augustus Caesar
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The Tatler launches a new style of journalism in Britain's coffee houses, followed two years later by the Spectator
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25-year-old George Berkeley attacks Locke in his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
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Alexander Pope's Rape of the Lock introduces a delicate vein of mock-heroic in English poetry
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Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, with its detailed realism, can be seen as the first English novel
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Jonathan Swift sends his hero on a series of bitterly satirical travels in Gulliver's Travels
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David Hume publishes his Treatise of Human Nature, in which he applies to the human mind the principles of experimental science
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Samuel Richardson's Clarissa begins the correspondence that grows into the longest novel in the English language
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Henry Fielding introduces a character of lasting appeal in the lusty but good-hearted Tom Jones
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English poet Thomas Gray publishes his Elegy written in a Country Church Yard
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Samuel Johnson publishes his magisterial Dictionary of the English Language
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James Woodforde, an English country parson with a love of food and wine, begins a detailed diary of everyday life
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Laurence Sterne publishes the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy, beginning with the scene at the hero's conception
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Fingal, supposedly by the medieval poet Ossian, is a forgery in the spirit of the times by James MacPherson
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James Boswell meets Samuel Johnson for the first time, in the London bookshop of Thomas Davies
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English historian Edward Gibbon, sitting among ruins in Rome, conceives the idea of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
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A Society of Gentlemen in Scotland begins publication of the immensely successful Encyclopaedia Britannica
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17-year-old Thomas Chatterton, later hailed as a significant poet, commits suicide in a London garret
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Oliver Goldsmith's play She Stoops to Conquer is produced in London's Covent Garden theatre
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Encouraged by Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine emigrates to America and settles in Philadelphia
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English historian Edward Gibbon publishes the first volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
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Richard Brinsley Sheridan's second play, The School for Scandal, is an immediate success in London's Drury Lane theatre
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William Blake publishes Songs of Innocence, a volume of his poems with every page etched and illustrated by himself
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Anglo-Irish politician Edmund Burke publishes Reflections on the Revolution in France, a blistering attack on recent events across the Channel
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Scottish poet Robert Burns publishes Tam o' Shanter, in which a drunken farmer has an alarming encounter with witches
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English author Mary Wollstonecraft publishes a passionately feminist work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
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William Blake's volume Songs of Innocence and Experience includes his poem 'Tyger! Tyger! burning bright'
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Thomas Paine publishes his completed Age of Reason, an attack on conventional Christianity
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge says that while writing Kubla Khan he is interrupted by 'a person on business from Porlock'
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English poets Wordsworth and Coleridge jointly publish Lyrical Ballads, a milestone in the Romantic movement
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the Romantic movement, which emphasized nature and emotion, produced great poetry such as that of William Wordsworth, Lord Byron and John Keats.
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William Blake includes his poem 'Jerusalem' in the Preface to his book Milton
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William Blake includes his poem 'Jerusalem' in the Preface to his book Milton
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Walter Scott's poem Lady of the Lake brings tourists in unprecedented numbers to Scotland's Loch Katrine
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Percy Bysshe Shelley is expelled from Oxford university for circulating a pamphlet with the title The Necessity of Atheism
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The first two cantos are published of Byron's largely autobiographical poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, bringing him immediate fame
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Pride and Prejudice, based on a youthful work of 1797 called First Impressions, is the second of Jane Austen's novels to be published
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Percy Bysshe Shelley publishes probably his best-known poem, the sonnet Ozymandias
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Byron begins publication in parts of his longest poem, Don Juan an epic satirical comment on contemporary life
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English poet John Keats publishes Ode to a Nightingale, inspired by the bird's song in his Hampstead garden
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English poet John Keats dies in Rome at the age of twenty-five
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12-year-old Charles Dickens works in London in Warren's boot-blacking factory
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English author Frances Trollope ruffles transatlantic feathers with her Domestic Manners of the Americans, based on a 3-year stay
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24-year-old Charles Dickens begins monthly publication of his first work of fiction, Pickwick Papers (published in book form in 1837)
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Charles Dickens' first novel, Oliver Twist, begins monthly publication (in book form, 1838)
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English poet Robert Browning publishes a vivid narrative poem about the terrible revenge of The Pied Piper of Hamelin
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Ebenezer Scrooge mends his ways just in time in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol
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In his novel Coningsby Benjamin Disraeli develops the theme of Conservatism uniting 'two nations', the rich and the poor
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Friedrich Engels, after running a textile factory in Manchester, publishes The Condition of the Working Class in England
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Edward Lear publishes his Book of Nonsense, consisting of limericks illustrated with his own cartoons
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English author William Makepeace Thackeray begins publication of his novel Vanity Fair in monthly parts (book form 1848)
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Branwell, Emily and Anne Brontë die within a period of eight months
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Charles Dickens begins the publication in monthly numbers of David Copperfield, his own favourite among his novels
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Alfred Tennyson's elegy for a friend, In Memoriam, captures perfectly the Victorian mood of heightened sensibility
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London physician Peter Mark Roget publishes his dictionary of synonyms, the Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases
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Within six weeks of the Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimea, Tennyson publishes a poem finding heroism in the disaster
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In Tom Brown's Schooldays Thomas Hughes depicts the often brutal aspects of an English public school
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Samuel Smiles provides an inspiring ideal of Victorian enterprise in Self-Help, a manual for ambitious young men
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English author George Eliot wins fame with her first full-length novel, Adam Bede
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George Eliot publishes The Mill on the Floss, her novel about the childhood of Maggie and Tom Tulliver
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Mrs Henry Wood publishes her first novel, East Lynne, which becomes the basis of the most popular of all Victorian melodramas
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Oxford mathematician Lewis Carroll tells 10-year-old Alice Liddell, on a boat trip, a story about her own adventures in Wonderland
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English author Charles Kingsley publishes an improving fantasy for young children, The Water-Babies
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Lewis Carroll publishes Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, a development of the story he had told Alice Liddell three years earlier
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Algernon Swinburne scandalizes Victorian Britain with his first collection, Poems and Ballads
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The first volume of Das Kapital is completed by Marx in London and is published in Hamburg
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English author Matthew Arnold publishes Culture and Anarchy, an influential collection of essays about contemporary society
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George Eliot publishes Middlemarch, in which Dorothea makes a disastrous marriage to the pedantic Edward Casaubon
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Lewis Carroll publishes Through the Looking Glass, a second story of Alice's adventures
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English author Thomas Hardy has his first success with his novel Far from the Madding Crowd
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After spending much time in Europe in recent years, Henry James moves there permanently and settles first in Paris
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English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins develops a new verse form that he calls 'sprung rhythm'
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21-year-old Joseph Conrad, a Polish subject, goes to sea with the British merchant navy
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Henry James's story Daisy Miller, about an American girl abroad, brings him a new readership
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The Aesthetic Movement and 'art for art's sake', attitudes personified above all by Whistler and Wilde, are widely mocked and satirized in Britain
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Robert Louis Stevenson's adventure story, Treasure Island, features Long John Silver and Ben Gunn
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Oxford University Press publishes the A volume of its New English Dictionary, which will take 37 years to reach Z
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Explorer and orientalist Richard Burton begins publication of his multi-volume translation from the Arabic of The Arabian Nights
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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
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Sherlock Holmes features in Conan Doyle's first novel, A Study in Scarlet
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23-year-old Irish author William Butler Yeats publishes his first volume of poems, The Wanderings of Oisin
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Scottish anthropologist James Frazer publishes The Golden Bough, a massive compilation of contemporary knowledge about ritual and religious custom
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Thomas Hardy publishes his novel Tess of the Durbervilles, with a dramatic finale at Stonehenge
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Bernard Shaw's first play, Widowers' Houses, deals with the serious social problem of slum landlords
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Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book surrounds the child Mowgli with a collection of vivid animal guardians
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Oscar Wilde is sent to Reading Gaol to serve a two-year sentence with hard labour after being convicted of homosexuality
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English poet A.E. Housman publishes his first collection, A Shropshire Lad
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Somerset Maugham publishes his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, based on the London life he has observed as a medical student
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Henry James publishes The Turn of the Screw in a collection of short stories
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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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Joseph Conrad publishes his novel Lord Jim about a life of failure and redemption in the far East
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Saw the rise of modernism, a movement characterized by stylistic experimentation and the questioning of traditional values.
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Rudyard Kipling's experiences of India are put to good use in his novel Kim
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John Masefield's poem 'Sea Fever' is published in Salt-Water Ballads
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Henry James publishes The Ambassadors, the second of his three last novels written in rapid succession
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J.M Barrie's play for children Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up has its premiere in London
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Bernard Shaw has two new plays opening in London in the same year, Major Barbara and Man and Superman
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E. Nesbit publishes The Railway Children, the most successful of her books featuring the Bastable family
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Edmund Gosse publishes Father and Son, an account of his difficult relationship with his fundamentalist father, Philip Gosse
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The Welsh poet W.H. Davies has a success with The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, his account of life on the road and in dosshouses
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The heroine of H.G. Wells' novel Ann Veronica is a determined example of the New Woman
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Rudyard Kipling publishes If, which rapidly becomes his most popular poem among the British
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G.K. Chesterton's clerical detective makes his first appearance in The Innocence of Father Brown
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Walter De la Mare establishes his reputation with the title poem of his collection The Listeners
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D.H. Lawrence publishes a semi-autobiographical novel about the Morel family, Sons and Lovers
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American-born poet Thomas Stearns Eliot crosses the Atlantic to England, making it his home for the rest of his life
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D.H. Lawrence's novel about the Brangwen family, The Rainbow, is seized by the police as an obscene work
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Robert Graves publishes his first book of poems, Over the Brazier
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Jeeves and Bertie Wooster make their first appearance in P.G. Wodehouse's The Man with Two Left Feet
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Rebecca West publishes her first novel, The Return of the Soldier
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In The Economic Consequences of the Peace Maynard Keynes publishes a strong attack on the reparations demanded from Germany
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The Belgian detective Hercule Poirot features in Agatha Christie's first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles
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Ludwig Wittgenstein publishes his influential study of the philosophy of logic, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus
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American-born poet T.S. Eliot publishes The Waste Land, an extremely influential poem in five fragmented sections
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Bernard Shaw's play Saint Joan has its world premiere in New York
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E.M. Forster's novel A Passage to India builds on cultural misconceptions between the British and Indian communities
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English writer Ivy Compton-Burnett finds her characteristic voice in her second novel, Pastors and Masters
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Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore and the others make their first appearance in A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh
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Anglo-Irish author Elizabeth Bowen publishes her first novel, The Hotel
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Set in a World War I trench, the play Journey's End reflects the wartime experiences of its British author, R.C. Sherriff
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English author J.B. Priestley has an immediate success with his first novel, The Good Companions
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English author W.H. Auden's first collection of poetry is published with the simple title Poems
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Virginia Woolf publishes the most fluid of her novels, The Waves, in which she tells the story through six interior monologues
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British author C.S. Lewis publishes a moral parable, The Screwtape Letters, about the problems confronting a trainee devil
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In Down and Out in Paris and London English author George Orwell writes a sympathetic account of the people he meets on hard times
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In A Handful of Dust Evelyn Waugh sends his hero Tony Last to a disastrous fate, far away in the Amazon rain forest
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British publisher Allen Lane launches a paperback series to which he gives the name Penguin Books
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Terence Rattigan's first play, French without Tears, is performed in London
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George Orwell reveals the harsh realities of contemporary British life in The Road to Wigan Pier
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In Homage to Catalonia George Orwell describes his experiences fighting for the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War
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Irish author Flann O'Brien publishes his first novel, At Swim-Two-Birds
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Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman is rejected by numerous publishers before becoming, decades later, his best-known novel
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British author Rebecca West publishes an account of Yugoslavia, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
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English children's author Enid Blyton introduces the Famous Five in Five on a Treasure Island
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The separate poems forming T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets are brought together for the first time as a single volume, published in New York
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In George Orwell's fable Animal Farm a ruthless pig, Napoleon, controls the farmyard using the techniques of Stalin
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Titus Groan begins British author Mervyn Peake's trilogy of gothic novels
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J.B. Priestley challenges audiences with An Inspector Calls, a play in which moral guilt spreads like an infection
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Christopher Fry's verse drama The Lady's Not For Burning engages in high-spirited poetic word play
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George Orwell publishes Nineteen Eighty-Four, a novel set in a terrifying totalitarian state of the future, watched over by Big Brother
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British author Doris Lessing publishes her first novel, The Grass is Singing
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A Question of Upbringing begins Anthony Powell's 'A Dance to the Music of Time'
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Evelyn Waugh publishes Men at Arms, the first novel in the Sword of Honour trilogy based on his wartime experiences
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English author L.P. Hartley sets his novel The Go-Between in the summer of 1900
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Dylan Thomas's 'play for voices', Under Milk Wood, is broadcast on BBC radio, with Richard Burton as narrator
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Graham Greene's novel The Quiet American is set in contemporary Vietnam and foresees troubles ahead
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English poet Ted Hughes marries US poet Sylia Plath
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English author John Braine publishes his first novel, Room at the Top
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Harold Pinter's first play in London's West End, The Birthday Party, closes in less than a week
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Harold Pinter's second play in London's West End, The Caretaker, immediately brings him an international reputation
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Paul Scofield plays Thomas More in Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons
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British novelist Muriel Spark publishes The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, set in an Edinburgh school in the 1930s
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British author P.D. James's first novel, Cover Her Face, introduces her poet detective Adam Dalgleish
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English author John Le Carré publishes a Cold-War thriller The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
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English author A.S. Byatt publishes her first novel, Shadow of a Sun
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Irish poet Seamus Heaney wins critical acclaim for Death of a Naturalist, his first volume containing more than a few poems
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A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, by English dramatist Peter Nichols, has its premiere in London
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English biographer Michael Holroyd completes his two-volume life of Lytton Strachey
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English novelist John Fowles publishes The French Lieutenant's Woman, set in Lyme Regis in the 1860s
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English dramatist Caryl Churchill's first play, Owners, is produced in London
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British economist Ernst Friedrich Schumacher publishes an influential economic tract, Small is Beautiful
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German-born British art historian Nikolaus Pevsner completes his monumental 46-volume Buildings of England
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English author Ruth Prawer Jhabwala wins the Booker Prize with her novel Heat and Dust
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British author Ian McEwan publishes his first novel, The Cement Garden
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Peter Shaffer's play about Mozart, Amadeus, has its premiere in London
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Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children uses the moment of India's independence to launch an adventure in magic realism
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Michael Frayn's farce Noises Off opens in London's West end
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British economist Nicholas Kaldor attacks monetarism in The Economic Consequences of Mrs Thatcher
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English author Julian Barnes publishes a multi-faceted literary novel, Flaubert's Parrot
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British Rasta poet Benjamin Zephaniah publishes his second collection as The Dread Affair
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English poets John Fuller and James Fenton collaborate in a volume of satirical poems, Partingtime Hall
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British physicist Stephen Hawking explains the cosmos for the general reader in A Brief History of Time: from the Big Bang to Black Holes
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Racing Demon launches a trilogy on the British establishment by English playwright David Hare
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Alan Bennett's play The Madness of George III is performed at the National Theatre in London
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English poet Thom Gunn's The Man with Night Sweats deals openly with AIDS
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Scottish author Irvine Welsh publishes his first novel, Trainspotting
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Louis de Bernières publishes Captain Corelli's Mandolin, a love story set in Italian-occupied Cephalonia
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The poems forming Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters describe his relationship with Sylvia Plath
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Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen dramatizes the visit of Werner Heisenberg to Niels Bohr in wartime Denmark
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The Amber Spyglass completes Philip Pullman's trilogy, His Dark Materials
