I would end by announcing my plan to read all the still-unread titles in the series in 2024.
Such optimism!
Looking back, it is funny – to me at least – to see how some of my ongoing work patterns came about. My partner is constantly amused/appalled at how much time I devote, when working on some project or other, to reading absolutely everything. For example, This Is Not A Science Fiction Textbook (forthcoming) contains 51 lists of 5 recommended books. I had already read about 140 of them so was confident they were appropriate examples for the multiple dimensions/agendas of the project. But none of the other 115, regardless of their critical reception, made it onto a list until I’d read it to ensure it did what we wanted it to do. Which of course also involved reading and rejecting some titles and then reading alternatives. Add in the reading to select books for the contributor chapters, and the reading for the chapters I wrote, and in total, I read 200 or so books for this one project . Which is part of the reason it took a year and half to complete, rather than the six months I’d imagined. (There are also 35 lists of 5 recommended films or TV shows, but that only involved needing to watch 11 things.)
Next year I am giving several talks on climate fiction, but at least I’ve had the good sense to look specifically at short fiction. Although not enough sense to come up with a promised sample size of less than 200 stories.
When I’m caught up in such obviously mad behaviour, I tend to think of it as doing due diligence. But really it is a kind broken-ness rooted in class anxiety. The need to feel not a sham. (I think this also explains the earnest tone of much that I write, and the flippancy with which I tend to present my work. Constantly trying to prove I’ve earned my stripes, desperately trying to please.)
(Academic friends, I might sometimes be the dreaded reader 2, I’m sorry, but at least I will have (re)read and/or (re)watched your primary texts before writing my report recommending changes that directly contradict everything reader 1 said.)
***
As I looked back over all those years of reading, I thought I would find myself wishing that it had been easier to find my way. And for sure, there are some things I would rather not have gone through (and I don’t just mean Henry James’s later novels, though they are on the list).
But then I think of all the moments (and days and weeks and years) of kindness and generosity I would have missed out on from all those (often somewhat bemused) teachers, librarians, friends, bookstore workers…
(And all those moments of absurdity, too. I mean, who reads Sir Charles Grandison when there’s no pressure on them to do so? Who contemplates getting inked with a Moby-Dick barcode? (My professorial inaugural lecture, which should finally happen late next spring, will climax with the utterly inappropriate unveiling of a far more visible and even more absurd tattoo. Just need to work out the fanfare music. (I’ll definitely enter like a boxer through dry ice and dancing spotlights to Rollins Band’s ‘Shine’.) Just need to schedule getting the ink done at the right time once the date of the lecture is finalised.))
Part of my motivation as a teacher and my commitment to working in the less privileged parts of the sector has been to try to make it easier for working class and other marginalised students to find their feet at university, to navigate institutions not designed for them and cultures that are new to them, and to become confident about their own worth. (Although the long war on HE makes that harder every year, as of course has my own becoming-middle-classness and, ironically enough, the cultural capital it entails. Oh, and getting old and being perpetually exhausted by the job.)
On some level, of course, this commitment and motivation is inspired by that Oxford interview wanker. No one should have to go through that sort of thing. But it is much more rooted in the actions of those who, with no obligation to care, cared.
I just read an interview with my friend (and, as this quote suggests, a role model to strive and fail and strive to live up to) Tom Moylan, in which he says
First and foremost, I’ve always considered my primary role to be that of a teacher (with research and writing necessary for good teaching) and not that of an alienated ‘academic’. I consider teaching to be a matter of imparting knowledge in the context of facilitating with compassion a learning process that helps each individual break with their normative development and come to see the world freshly in order to develop a responsible sense of their place and path in that world.
Could you imagine if universities were actually organised to encourage and support us to do that? Rather than making us squeeze it in around all the bullshit?
***
But I guess the real reason you’ve hung around this long – if you have, which of course you have otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this bit – is to find out whether I will read those last 22 titles next year.
The answer was a definite ‘yes’ back when I started thinking about The Great Writers, but now it is more of a ‘probably’.
I’m not sure I want to spend much more of my life grinding through unrewarding books. But the only way to find out if they are unrewarding is to give them a go, and I do already have copies of ten of them (though one is in a box somewhere and thus not in this picture).
Monmouthshire libraries can provide another eight, and my university library another one on top of that.
Which means I’d only have to buy three books:
Greene’s The Comedians, which is fine with me,
but,
oh
for
fuck’s
sake,
James’s Portrait of a Lady and Waugh’s Vile Bodies?
Lurching towards, but not quite achieving, a conclusion But there are still 26 titles unaccounted for…
As I mentioned right at the start, this year – by chance – I read two of them, so Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle (1839) and Mansfield’s Bliss, and Other Stories (1920) are quickly disposed of. See – I’m moving right along. (I’d intended to read all of Mansfield’s short fiction this year, but Clarice Lispector shoved her aside and got right up in my face demanding attention. Maybe next year.) Two others, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Kipling’s Kim (1900–1) I read as background for writing about the ongoing perpetuation of colonial adventure fiction narratives in Science Fiction: The Routledge Film Handbook (2012).
Which leaves 22 titles, five of which I’m surprised by.
Anthology of Fear collects twenty ghost stories originally published between 1824–1914. I have no memory of this book being in the series; if it had been, I would have read it. I can only return to the anomaly of a partwork magazine having 54 rather than 52 issues. Did I miss bonus issues? Did they have to adjust the length of the year to make up for an excess of Daylight Saving or something?
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900) This is utterly mystifying to me. I read Heart of Darkness (1899) and The Secret Agent (1907) for the first time in my mid-teens, and was completely swept away by the latter. It is one of the few occasions I recall being utterly gripped by suspense (was it Stevie who got blown up?). Although Conrad’s posthumously published unfinished final novel was called Suspense (1925), I’m pretty certain he had little actual interest in suspense and that I was applying the wrong reading protocols, but everyone should have that intense an experience the first time they read Conrad. At university, I also read Nostromo (1904) and Under Western Eyes (1911), and since then Almayer’s Folly (1895) and The Inheritors (1901), co-written with Ford Madox Ford. Which is an embarrassingly short list for someone who’s spent 40 years thinking of himself as a Conrad admirer. So maybe it’s not so utterly mystifying after all. Maybe it’s time to bring the others into the rotation – one a year and I’ll be done by the time I’m 70.
(The only other time I can recall being caught up by that kind of suspense was reading Verne’s The Mysterious Island. Could the mysterious helper-figure be Captain Nemo? Surely not, but what if it is?)
George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860) This is nearly as mysterious. I did not read Eliot until university, when I was blown away by Middlemarch (1871) and only a little less by Daniel Deronda (1876). But then I read nothing else by her for decades. In the last few years, she has been in the rotation: Silas Marner (1861), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), The Lifted Veil (1859) and a re-read of Middlemarch. So I am kind of halfway there.
yes, i know
Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford (1851–3) I’m not a fan but I do I find her I-know-best philanthropic condescension of the working class and her terror of organised labour almost as hilarious as it is painful as it is fascinating. I first read Mary Barton (1848) as very distant background for a piece I wrote about Gwyneth Jones in 2005. Gwyneth once described sf as ‘the green lung of the city of science’ so I started thinking about the industrial/rural hinterlands of Manchester, where she was born and grew up and where Gaskell lived, and went looking for representations of that landscape. I’m pretty certain I also read North and South (1854–5) for the same reason so I have no idea why I didn’t also read Cranford.
More recently, I read Sylvia’s Lovers (1863) because it is about whaling. Only it isn’t. Not really.
John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga (1906–21) A decade or more ago, I bought my housemate the DVD boxset of the 1967 BBC adaptation. It was unexpectedly compelling. And perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the 26-episode series is the way it manages to utterly transform your feelings towards Soames Forsyte, from despising him for his marital rape of Irene to the moment when you realise (many episodes later) that he has become far-and-away the most sympathetic character amongst all these dreadful people. I immediately wanted to see whether (and how) Galsworthy pulls it off. Every second-hand omnibus volume of the much longer The Forsyte Chronicles has since sat in a box unread.
Which leaves 17 titles. Some are easy to explain.
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859) I have read just under half of Dickens’s novels, some of them more than once: The Pickwick Papers (1836–7), A Christmas Carol (1843), Dombey and Son (1846–8), David Copperfield (1849–50), Bleak House (1852–3), Hard Times (1854), Great Expectations (1860–1), Our Mutual Friend (1864–5), The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870; with the Leon Garfield conclusion). Mostly, it has been for purposes of study. My least favourite module at university was the compulsory (!) ‘Dickens and Wordsworth’ – it was the only one for which I did not receive a first class grade and I hated it so much I’ve always been quite pleased with that.
Drood I read on my own recognisance, back in my teens, because I’d heard there was spontaneous human combustion in it! Simpler times. (And as a kid, I’d loved Leon Garfield’s Smith (1967) and Black Jack (1968)).
Bleak House I read about a decade ago. My partner, who likes Dickens but no one’s perfect, had to go back to the States for a couple of months, so she bought me a copy to read, a chapter a day, while she was away. In return, I gave her Robert Tressell’s The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists (1914) – remember, I’m given to big romantic gestures.
She’s never quite forgiven me for sending her off on her own with such a devastating book; and I’ve never forgiven her for giving me a book in which the most interesting character, the London fog, turns out to be just a fucking metaphor.
She so got the better part of that deal.
Of them all, Hard Times is the one I came closest to liking. Not just because it’s short, although that helps, but because the weekly publishing schedule completed screwed with Dickens’ rhythms and forced him into producing something interestingly different.
So the reason I’ve never read A Tale of Two Cities is that I really don’t like Dickens. He’s such a chore, even when he is not literally so.
The reason I have not read the following three books is their authors’ close association – in my head, if not necessarily in reality – with Dickens:
William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1847–8) Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers (1857) Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1860) – although I did recently crack and read The Moonstone (1868) and The Frozen Deep (1874) and am prepared to forgive Collins his real or imagined association with Dickens,
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1880–1) While I’m not convinced of its genius, I have read The Turn of the Screw (1898) maybe half a dozen times, most recently this summer as background for that chapter on horror and class with which these musings began. I quite liked Washington Square (1880) and The Bostonians (1886) – which were on my American Lit module and all right as far that kind of realist novel goes. So I was quite looking forward to reading more by him on The Novel module. So naïve! What Maisie Knew (1897) was a baffling mess: not that I couldn’t see what he was trying to do, but that he should botch it so very badly. Maybe, I thought, The Ambassadors (1903) would be better. Quit laughing at the back.
The Ambassadors seminar was one of those excruciating ordeals. Clearly no one else had read it. Years later, I discovered from his own confession that that included the tutor.
There is not a barge pole long enough with which not to touch Henry James again.
DH Lawrence, The Virgin and the Gypsy, and Other Stories (1930) That bleeding module on The Novel. They also made us read Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915) and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). I hated the whole night-blooming tumescent bunch of them.
I’d already read The Fox (1923) and The Virgin and the Gypsy (1930) at secondary school, but not ‘the Other Stories’, so by the end of the sixth/final post you will appreciate how fucking virtuous I am being by not lying about it here.
EM Forster, A Passage to India (1924) I’ve only read two things by Forster, but I have read both of them several times: ‘The Machine Stops’ (1909), which seems a little less remarkable with each go, and the first two-thirds of the first chapter of A Passage to India, which is so fucking irritating I can’t ever get any further than that. Does this make me a bad person? Perhaps. Does it make me want to try something else by him instead? Hell, no.
Wrong Tortilla Flat
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939) I guess I’m still suffering Red Pony trauma after all these years, although I did read Of Mice and Men (1937) for my brother’s CSE coursework. I’ve had a copy of In Dubious Battle (1936) lying around unread since I was writing The Cinema of John Sayles (2009), intended as background for the Matewan chapter. And I’ve been to Tortilla Flat, the oldest operating stagecoach town in Arizona, but have not read Tortilla Flat (1935), and not just because it isn’t actually set there (which doesn’t stop them selling copies).
Graham Greene, The Comedians (1966) I very occasionally pick up something by Greene – Brighton Rock (1938), The Heart of the Matter (1948), The Third Man (1949), The End of the Affair (1951), Our Man in Havana (1958) – and like all right-minded folk prefer his ‘entertainments’ to his ‘novels’. I guess I’ll get to this one eventually, or maybe not, who knows, but I do have a copy of The Ministry of Fear (1943) kicking around somewhere, so I should read that first.
Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) I loved about two-thirds of The First Forty-Nine Stories (1938), The Old Man and the Sea (1952) and the admittedly not-great To Have and To Have Not (1937). I loved the first half of A Farewell to Arms (1929), and the first quarter of The Sun Also Rises (1926). I do not love the law of diminishing returns.
Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (1820) Late in my teens, I got myself a dirt cheap, second hand, almost complete, 20-or-so-volume hardback edition of the complete Waverley novels. Faded blue, well musty and water stained, it looked grand all lined up on a shelf. Proper handsome. Never read a one of them. Years later, for something or other I was writing (thinking about historical narrative for the John Sayles book?), I read, I think, Waverley (1814), Rob Roy (1817) and one other – I cannot remember which for they all made very little impression on me.
Peveril of the Peak
I sometimes ponder reading The Bride of Lammermoor (1819) since I have a fond attachment to Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, the first opera I ever saw, and when my partner was living in Manchester I was sometimes tempted by Peveril of the Peak (1823) since it shared its name with our favourite city centre pub, but on the other hand it is Scott’s longest novel…
Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh (1903) I’ve read Erewhon (1872) and Erewhon Revisited (1901) and bear their author no ill-will so I really cannot explain not having read this as well.
Robert Graves, I, Claudius (1934) I’ve read Seven Days in New Crete/Watch the North Wind Rise (1949) and bear its author ill-will so that’s that cleared that up.
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1868) I’m not American, so it just really doesn’t loom that large. (Also male, so ditto.)
W Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage (1915) I’m British, but it just really doesn’t loom that large.
HE Bates, Love for Lydia (1952) I’m as surprised as you to see Bates considered a ‘great writer’. But since I’ve not read anything by him, who am I to say.
Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies (1930) Towards the end of 1981, the whole world it seemed was a-flutter over Granada’s 11-part TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited (1945). Desperate for cultural capital, I tuned in faithfully each week on the black-and-white 12-inch portable upstairs (no one else in the house was remotely interested so no chance of seeing it on the 24-inch black-and-white in the living room). But try as I might, I simply could not figure out what all the fuss was about. Sometime the following year, I got hold of the library’s tie-in (but fancy B-format) paperback and made my way through the dreadful thing. Utterly lamentable stuff.
But someone somewhere recommended the Sword of Honour Trilogy (1952–61) – probably Anthony Burgess, who lists it and Brideshead in his Ninety-nine novels – as the culmination of the mature Waugh. That might be true since it is certainly long and tiresome.
There was a copy of Scoop (1938) lying around in the book cupboard at the back of our sixth-form English classroom which, bored one day, I picked up (the book, not the cupboard). It rises at times to the mildly amusing. In 1990, BBC2’s Moviedrome season, hosted by Alex Cox, screened Tony Richardson’s 1965 adaptation of The Loved One (1948), which was all right (though I’d much rather Luis Buñuel or especially Elaine May had succeeded in making their versions), which led me to give Waugh one last go.
Bottom line: no fucking way is Evelyn Waugh a great writer.
Here endeth the sound and the fury; tune in tomorrow (or sometime soon anyway) to see if it signifies anything.
This spring and summer, I spent several months reading for and writing a chapter on ‘Class and Horror’ for the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Horror. It was the first time I’ve dived deep into critical/theoretical work on class for probably the best part of twenty years. One key shift is the now general acceptance of the need to incorporate Bourdieu (or Bourdieu-like) work into models of class, which meant I found myself thinking a lot more about social and cultural capital. The other key trend was hardly new: marginalising/excluding Marxist traditions of work on economic class, often in favour of Weberian or neo-Weberian approaches, which is odd given how very little Weber actually said about class, but also for other very obvious reasons not remotely odd.
I also found myself baffled (i.e., not remotely baffled but fascinated) by social scientists who present social mobility as an absolutely incontrovertible good (even if the only argument they can muster is that it improves GDP) but are at the same time appalled by the notion of absolute social mobility. Even though it is the obvious end-point of their social mobility enthusiasm, they devote absolutely no words/time/energy to imagining what meaningful equality might look like. Instead, they just brandish terrifying (that is, hilariously clichéd) images of totalitarian states. Harrison Bergeron, eat your heart out! It’s almost as if their main interest is maintaining a slightly tweaked and marginally more palatable status quo (and securing future research income streams from similarly committed funding bodies).
Anyway, the point is, I found myself engaged in autobiographical ponderings about social capital, cultural capital and autodidactism.
I come from a dirt-poor West Midlands working-class family. I was born in Staffordshire but we moved to Devon when I was four years old, which further limited the already negligible social capital to be derived from my now attenuated extended kinship network.
My parents were Methodists (which is why I have absolutely no idea how to gamble although I did, after no struggle whatsoever, overcome teetotalism). And they were aspirational, at least to the extent of wanting a better life for me and my brother and of taking on a crippling mortgage to own a home rather than rent a house (they were so ripe, sadly, for Thatcher). Their new circle of church friends – middle class folks from the wealthier parts of the village – obviously lived in a different world to us and, despite many kindnesses, were defensive of their relative privilege. While my dad left school aged 15 and with no qualifications, they were mostly graduates from middle class families. Thus they had higher levels of economic, social and cultural capital, the latter of which was often deployed against my ‘uneducated’ dad. Especially when he did things like trying seriously to discuss with them that bit in Acts about the early church sharing all things in common. They were really not up for that! (In this mid-1970s context, my dad was quite radical in trying to square a Co-op/Labour upbringing with the evangelicalism into which he had fallen, which was only just then turning from a vaguely countercultural centrism to the pronounced right-wing attitudes that now define it – and which shifted my parents’ politics: they cried when Callaghan lost in 1979 but have voted Conservative ever since, albeit with growing disillusionment over the last decade of unignorable Tory corruption and incompetence.)
So I grew up with no economic capital to speak of, and very little social or cultural capital. But my parents’ aspirationalism bought into the post-war promise of social mobility (I am old enough to have benefitted from those limited openings, which have in real terms been whittled down to nothing since the 1980s) and thus they insisted on the importance of education and of reading. However, the latter, amply supported by school and especially public libraries, took place in something of a vacuum: limited cultural capital meant I had little idea of what to read.
Which I only really began to realise in my mid-teens, thanks to Rob. An extremely middle class friend met through church stuff, he was a couple of years older than me, went to a grammar school and was the most flamboyantly camp person I’d ever met: he ‘simply adored Dickens’ and, he declared, flaunting a Penguin paperback of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880), was ‘reading the Russians now’. How did he know about these things? They were simply part of the atmosphere in which he grew up, at home and in school. (He urged Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers (1981) on me, and something green-covered from Grove Press, but it only very slowly dawned on me that this was a kind of courtship: that he was using books – and cultural capital – to hit on me. Last I heard of him, he moved to South Africa at the turn of the 90s to become a croupier at – unforgivably – Sun City.)
In the absence of such social and institutional networks for inheriting the kinds of cultural capital Rob enjoyed, the only real alternative for me was autodidactism, with all its perils and pitfalls – and potentials for embarrassment: at some point in my mid-teens I asked Plymouth Central Library if they had a copy of ‘Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago’ (1973) – I’d read, rather than heard, about it somewhere so only knew how to pronounce one of those five words. (It took a couple of decades before I could start to enjoy mispronouncing ‘archipelago’ as if it were a kind of sausage.)
Plymouth Central Library, the location of my chipolata embarrassment
Autodidactism took many forms:
Discovering Anthony Burgess’s Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939 – A Personal Choice (1984) and trying with the aid of the library to work through its list of titles. A quick google of the contents page shows there there are still forty-odd of them I’ve not read. Andrea remains constantly appalled at me for never having read John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), as now does my mate Dan since she blabbed to him this summer. But I did finally read Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny (1952) last year in Brazil in the old densely-packed A-format paperback that had travelled tens of thousands of miles in my luggage over the years as my emergency back-up should I be ever stranded in an airport or train station with nothing to read.
Watching The Great Philosophers (1987) on TV and reading Brian Magee’s book version and then finally finishing that copy of Betrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy I’d got bogged down in a couple of years earlier.
Randomly picking up second-hand Penguin classics (or the usually cheaper imported American paperbacks of the same titles).
Seeing a Vincent Price movie and setting out to read all of Poe.
Hearing Apocalypse Now was based on Heart of Darkness so starting to read Conrad.
Watching The Modern World: Ten Great Writers (1988), reading Malcolm Bradbury’s book version and turning them into reading lists….
Lists. All the time lists. And following up those leads in libraries and second-hand bookstores. (New books were things you received as gifts.)
Just in case any of this makes me sound adorably (or agonisingly or absurdly) precocious (or dunderheaded), let me be clear: I had not exactly left childish things behind.
I still regularly re-read my full set of The Incredible Hulk Weekly and my stack of movie novelisations (though some passages in Arthur Byron Cover’s Flash Gordon (1980) were definitely not intended for the younger reader).
And although I stopped buying second-hand Doctor Who novelisations with number 68, Terrance Dicks’s An Unearthly Child (1981), I carried on rereading my until-then complete set. And reading the new ones until, I think, number 113, Terence Dudley’s Black Orchid (1986), even though that entailed humiliating returns to the kids’ section of the library I’d eagerly abandoned half a dozen years earlier (and even though I’d freakishly stumbled upon, read and had the veil of illusion torn away by John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado’s Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text (1983), the first proper academic book I’d encountered).
I was also, like every adolescent male I knew, although perhaps more assiduously, reading James Herbert and Richard Allen and Sven Hassel, and exercising an even less discerning penchant for Patrick Lee’s Six-Gun Samurai (1981–82) novels and Guy N. Smith (probably more for the knee-tremblers in alleys and doorways than the slime beasts and giant crabs). I’d given up on Agatha Christie after reading all the Marples I could find (I never liked Poirot) but was starting to read Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett by about 1983. I discovered Mick Norman and Mick Farren, as well as Michael Moorcock (except Elric, could never get into Elric) and grumpy oddball Peter Van Greenaway. Curiously, although my mate Stewart was a huge fan, I never got into Stephen King, and I still find his fiction utterly unengaging. But I did get totally into JRR Tolkien in 1980. And out again completely by 1984 or thereabouts, after many re-reads, even of the appendices and The Silmarillion (1977). I gave up on David Eddings and Raymond Feist by 1985, the year I also ditched Frank Herbert: I was sufficiently loyal to slog through Chapterhouse: Dune (1985) but had been bored since at least God Emperor of Dune (1981). But the overlapping and intertwined story of my autodidactic route through sf and fantasy – similarly thrilling-yet-full-of-pathos – is something for another day.
Such omnivorous reading – more accurately described, in my case at least, as flailing around – is I think, characteristic of the autodidact. (By chance this morning, I read Michael Moorcock’s 2011 memoir-essay ‘A Child’s Christmas in the Blitz’ and recognised a little something of my own childhood in his ‘I learned from reading and not knowing what was respectable literature and what was not. I read everything.’) But it also resembles the ability to access both high and low culture now often attributed to middle class privilege, so perhaps this is not a story of autodidactism and cultural capital after all, but of ‘How I Became A Class Traitor’.
My local library was located just across the park on the top floor of Pounds House
The strange thing is, the sense of being an autodidact has never gone away, even though I’ve been in formal education, as student or teacher, every year since the age of five. Apart, that is, from 1987–88, when I took a year off between A-levels and university (because I was so disgusted by what I witnessed during my Oxford interview, but that too is another story). For about 14 months, I toiled as a motor insurance claims handler for the Co-op Insurance Service and the Cornish Mutual Association. I was less than mediocre. I never got beyond processing windscreen claims, and every day I hated that my job mostly consisted of getting claimants to use language that implied their broken windscreen was made of toughened rather than laminated glass, which meant they were liable for the cost of the replacement’s upgrade in quality, even if there hadn’t actually been one (not that this was how my role was described to me). As careers go, it was clearly not for me.
And all these years later, I still don’t drive. Which would have probably undermined my prospects for advancement.
Around that time, Marshall Cavendish published the Great Writers partwork. It was an image-heavy magazine, with broad brush historical context and biographical commentary on that issue’s author(s), accompanied by a hardback edition of a novel or collection or other book-length work. The books came, with no apparent rhyme or reason, in red, navy blue, bright blue, black, brown or green covers. Each bore a vaguely illustrative image and ever so slightly embossed fancy gold writing. They were cheaply produced in Spain. I can’t remember whether it was published weekly for a year or fortnightly for two (either way, there seems to have been 54, rather than 52, issues). I purchased it – but did not read it – diligently.
The magazines and later the books were discarded years ago, during the many moves between rented accommodation familiar to any student and early career academic. But by chance this year I read two of the books included in the series for the first time – Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle (1839) and Katherine Mansfield’s Bliss, and Other Stories (1920) – which started me wondering how many of the 54 volumes I’d actually read during the intervening 35 years.
Here, as far as I can reconstruct it, is the complete list of The Great Writers (not in order of publication). As you will see, ‘greatness’ is largely a function of having been dead long enough for your work to be in the public domain (although that does not explain the Bates, Forster, Greene, Hemingway, Huxley, Maugham, Steinbeck, Waugh, Wells or Woolf titles).
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1868)
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
HE Bates, Love for Lydia (1952)
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (1847)
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights (1847)
John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678)
Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh (1903)
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland (1865)
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (1387–1400)
Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1860)
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900)
Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (1839)
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843)
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861)
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892)
George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860)
Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (1794)
F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
EM Forster, A Passage to India (1924)
John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga (probably just The Man of Property (1906)
Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford (1851–3)
Robert Graves, I, Claudius (1934)
Graham Greene, The Comedians (1966)
Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874)
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891)
Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932)
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1880–1)
Rudyard Kipling, Kim (1900–1)
DH Lawrence, The Virgin and the Gypsy, and Other Stories (1930)
Katherine Mansfield, Bliss, and Other Stories (1920)
W Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage (1915)
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys (1825)
Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher, and Other Stories (1830s/1840s)
Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (1820)
William Shakespeare, Comedies (1590s–1600s)
William Shakespeare, Tragedies (1590s–1600s)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818)
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (1883)
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1847–8)
Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers (1857)
Mark Twain, Adventures ofHuckleberry Finn (1885)
Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies (1930)
HG Wells, The War of the Worlds (1898)
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)
Anthology of Romantic Poets (early 1800s)
Anthology of the War Poets (1914–8)
Anthology of Fear (twenty ghost stories from 1824–1914)
Mark Bould 