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 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 (including Enoch Arden), 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?
That all takes me back. And yes we had real reading. As James Marriott pointed out in The Times, literacy these days does not necessarily involve reading 'difficult' stuff.
ReplyDeleteI think our teachers held to the quaint notion that it might be about something more than literacy.
DeleteI have little doubt that some recent American Ph.D. holders (in English) have read fewer standard works than you did in secondary schools. My wife mentioned the excitement of a graduate student working on a Ph.D. in English who was excited because she was going to be reading her first Dickens novel.
ReplyDeleteYes, it's incredible, isn't it? I also remember hearing a woman in her 80s who'd belatedly taken a PhD in English. Some of her fellow students had never even heard of Keats and Shelley, let alone read them.
DeleteThat's a great question and one I can't answer. I began to record all the books I read halfway through my first year of college and have kept this up for over 50 years; but I would be able to specify very few novels etc. from high school. I wish I remembered them all. I don't think the were very many at all, so I had loads of time to read the stuff I liked at the time -- Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, Lord Dunsany, et al.
ReplyDeleteI keep remembering more titles from my schooldays – the latest Shaw's Three Plays for Puritans! Well done on keeping up your reading list, Wurmbrand.
DeleteYeah, what about Sheets and Kelly, as we knew them? Or Wild Bill Yeats? Or the Odd'un?
ReplyDeleteOr the essays of Steele and Addison? Burns and Wordsworth? Robert Herrick? Andrew Marvell?
Or that unforgettable shiver-maker, King Lear?
Or pre-Shakeshaft e.g. Dunbar? Or, harder work, yer G Chaucer?
Yes, I'd forgotten that we 'did' Lear at school. No Steele or Addison, but some Essays of Elia. No Burns, happily, and no Chaucer till university, mercifully.
ReplyDelete"No Burns, happily, and no Chaucer till university, mercifully." Sissies.
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