School Reading

 Recently I was watching a BBC4 programme about Persian history, and naturally the poetry of Ferdowsi – still a national hero – came up. When the presenter started talking about the tragic story of Rostam and Sohrab, part of Ferdowsi's epic Shahnameh, it rang a loud bell. I studied this tale at school – not in Ferdowsi's telling, but in the form of Matthew Arnold's long narrative poem 'Sohrab and Rustum'. I would have been about 13 or 14 at the time, I think, and in an 'ordinary' state grammar school. And this got me thinking... Surely it would be inconceivable that a teacher today, when excerpts seem to have replaced full texts in schools, should set a class to read a poem as long and challenging as 'Sohrab and Rustum'. And what else was I studying, either as directed reading, prescribed homework or set texts? I've been trawling the memory banks for a little while now, and I've come up with this list, which is surely not complete...

Milton's Comus, L'Allegro etc, Samson Agonistes and chunks of Paradise Lost,
Pope's Rape of the Lock,
Much Shakespeare, definitely including Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Henry IV pt 2 and Henry V, Richard III, Othello, Antony& Cleopatra, The Tempest, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Lyrical Ballads and a chunk of The Prelude.
Many poems by Tennyson, Browning, the Metaphysicals, T.S. Eliot, etc.
Silas Marner
Bleak House, Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
The Wind in the Willows
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Smollett's Humphrey Clinker(!)
H.G. Wells's Kipps(!)
Richard Jefferies' Bevis(!)
Tom Sawyer
Orlando 
A Passage to India
The School for Scandal(!)

As I say, I'm sure there was more. Admittedly I studied Eng Lit to A-level, but most of these titles were read before sixth form. I also stayed on an extra term to be prepped for Cambridge, so read a good deal more for that, including some Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Catullus, etc. 
I repeat: this was nothing unusual, it was standard for an 'ordinary' grammar school in the state system. And now, we are told, Eng Lit undergraduates are turning up at university unable to face the challenge of reading a big, unfamiliar novel. What happened? Well, we know what happened – let's not go there... But I wonder if readers have their own memories of what literature they studied at school, and if they find themselves similarly surprised and impressed?