The only reason I read A Dictionary of English Literature was the same reason I read a similar dictionary earlier this year:  to prepare for Jeopardy!  This dictionary is longer than the Dictionary of American Literature because England and Great Britain have about 1,000 more years of history than the U.S.  Just like that prior dictionary, we received it from our late acquaintance from the puzzle parties who used to prepare the L.A. Times Sunday crossword.  Also like the American version, this dictionary was published in the 1950’s, but different in that it was published by Barnes and Noble.  I didn’t know B&N were around in the 1950’s and that they published books.  As I stated, it’s longer than the American version, it has more entries for authors I hadn’t heard of, and it has separate sections for authors, anonymous works, literary terms, versification, and a timeline of the authors and events in English history.  In the preface, the dictionary compilers state that they “hope that this book will prove as readable as a good short history of English literature.”  I’m not so sure they exceeded since I found it long and tedious but I still learned some interesting things.
I learned about influential authors and poets that I believe would come up in Jeopardy! questions such as Spenser, the 16th century poet who wrote “The Faerie Queen”, Thackeray who wrote Vanity Fair, and Sterne who wrote about Tristam Shandy.  Some entries evoked memories of authors and poets I studied in my high school English classes many years ago such as Oliver Goldsmith who wrote She Stoops to Conquer, and Andrew Marvell who penned the flirtatious poem, To His Coy Mistress.  We had fun discussing that poem in 10th grade English.  I also learned some new words.  A “poetaster” is a writer of low quality verse.  The compilers describe some of the authors as poetasters.  The entry for Thomas Peacock describes how many of his novels have a formula where he “gathers a miscellaneous crew of crotcheteers.”  I couldn’t find the word “crotcheteer” in the dictionary but I did find “crotchet” that means an odd fancy or whimsical notion.  A crotcheteer must be someone who embodies this quality.

A couple of authors seemed familiar or had a connection for non literary reasons.  Though I hadn’t heard of the Wakefield Master, I am very familiar with the “Huntington Library in California” where the original manuscripts of this author were (and presumably still are) preserved.  The name of the poet and author Cecil Day-Lewis rang a bell and quick research revealed that he is indeed the late father of Oscar-winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis.  Unlike the Dictionary of American Literature, I wasn’t able to determine whether any of the authors mentioned in A Dictionary of English Literature are still alive today.

Like the version for American literature, many authors of English literature have humorous titles for their novels, poems, and other works.  Eliza Haywood wrote The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless.  The poet Thomas Gray penned the Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes.  There’s Stephen Peacock’s Plan to Relieve the Depression in Six Days, Remove it in Six Months, and Eradicate it in Six years that’s about the Great Depression of the 1930’s.  Thomas Fuller titled three of his works Good Thoughts in Bad Times, Good Thoughts in Worse Times, and Mixed Contemplations in Better Times.  Cuthbert Bede also wrote a series of works with funny titles: The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green, Oxford Freshman; The Further Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green, Oxford Undergraduate; and Mr. Verdant Green, Married and Done For.  The most humorous title is of a play by Henry Carey: The Tragedy of Chrononhotonthogos, being the most Tragical Tragedy that was ever Tragedized by a Company of Tragedians.

The authors have some humorous premises for their works.  David Garnett’s Lady into Fox is “the story of a woman’s metamorphosis into a red fox and her husband’s efforts of adjust to her vixenish temperament.”  Thomas Tomkis’ play Lingua is “a spiritual anatomical allegory in which the tongue argues against the five senses in defense of his right to qualify as a sixth.”  Then there is the guidebook of George and Richard Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, that includes a section on molding poems into pretty shapes such as eggs, lozenges, and pyramids.

When the authors’ works don’t provide humor, the dictionary compliers sometimes add it to their descriptions both intentionally and unintentionally.  They describe a work by Sir William Blackstone as a “reminder that some lawyers write clear, comprehensible prose.”  Thomas Chatterton has an entry because he tried to palm off his own works as literary antiques.  William Falconer wrote The Shipwreck, a narrative poem that has little reality to support that he actually experienced a shipwreck.  However, he later drowned in a real shipwreck.  About Martin Farquhar Tupper the compilers state, “So great is the gulf between the worth of (his) work and its appalling popularity among the Victorians that it has become trite to laugh at his triteness.”  Robert Montgomery is also not in the dictionary for his greatness but because the more famous author, Macaulay, wrote a bitter review of Montgomery’s poems calling them “inane” and describing one couplet as “the worst similitude in the world.”  In contrast, the compilers describe George Meredith as one of the most intellectual of Victorian poets and authors.  But more interesting is that while Meredith’s marriage to Mary Ellen Nichols was a great struggle for both of them, he used his experience to write great novels.  The compilers state, “From a literary point of view, their union was fruitful.”  After they divorced, Meredith remarried and was much happier but the subsequent books and poems he wrote were less interesting to the readers.

Other things I learned from A Dictionary of English Literature were that the names and people, groups, and things I know today were originally the names of other people, groups, and things.  Before “Erewhon” was the name of a health food store in West L.A., it titled the description of a satirical utopia by Samuel Butler who came up with the name as an anagram for “nowhere.”  Tom and Jerry weren’t originally a violent cartoon cat and mouse duo but the human protagonists of a popular sporting guide to London by Pierce Egan.  Before it was the name of a Norwegian New Wave band from the 1980’s who were very popular in the Philippines, Fra Lippo Lippi was a poem by Robert Browning about an Italian painter of the same name.  Chris McCandless, the main character of the recent film and nonfiction book, Into the Wild, adopted his nickname, Alexander Supertramp, from W.H. Davies’ memoir, The Autobiography of a Supertramp.  The 1970’s band Supertramp came up with their name independently.  Speaking of rock bands, in 1645, during the English civil war Parliament created a “New Model” army under the command of Oliver Cromwell long before the existence of the band New Model Army.

The most significant original name for a group of people was the term applied to a group of Romantic poets in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s.  The chief poets among them were William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the lesser-known Robert Southey.  They lived in Westmoreland and Cumberland, better known as the English Lake District.  Thus, there were know as the Lake School, the Lake Poets, and, most significantly, the Lakers.  I theorized that if we equate the chief poets of this group to the Showtime Lakers of the 1980’s based on the quality of their work, Wordsworth is Magic Johnson, Coleridge is Kareem Abdul Jabbar, and Southey is somewhere between Kurt Rambis and James Worthy.  Also interesting is that under the entries for the Scottish poet Thomas Campbell and the Scottish reviewer Francis Jeffrey, the dictionary mentions how they fought against and prosecuted that experimental poetry of the Lakers.  Scots are of Celtic ancestry implying that the Lakers-Celtics rivalry has been around for over 200 years.




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