50 Fun Facts About English Literature

What did William Shakespeare leave his wife Anne Hathaway in his will, in the document's only bequest to her?

The second-best bed, 'with the furniture', was added to the will on 25 March 1616, a month before Shakespeare died; scholars still argue whether it was a snub or the marital bed.

Which diarist buried his wine and a Parmesan cheese in his garden to save them from the Great Fire of London?

Samuel Pepys dug the hole with his neighbour 'Pen' as the flames spread, and wrote his whole diary in shorthand so that no contemporary could read it.

Which novelist's ashes lie in Poets' Corner while his heart was buried in his first wife's grave at Stinsford?

Thomas Hardy had asked to be buried whole in the Stinsford churchyard, and the split was a compromise between his family and those who insisted on a Westminster Abbey funeral.

Which crime writer vanished for eleven days, surfacing at a Harrogate hotel under her husband's mistress's surname?

Agatha Christie signed in as 'Mrs Tressa Neele', Neele being the name of the woman her husband Archie wanted to leave her for, and was found there on 14 December 1926.

At which Swiss waterfall did Arthur Conan Doyle send Sherlock Holmes to his apparent death, a killing he later undid?

Reichenbach Falls, above Meiringen, is where Holmes and Moriarty grapple in 'The Final Problem'; public pressure brought the detective back in 'The Adventure of the Empty House'.

Which Oxford professor, marking exam papers, scribbled 'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit' on a blank page?

J. R. R. Tolkien recalled the moment in a 1955 letter to W. H. Auden; he had finished the story by late 1932 and lent the manuscript to friends including C. S. Lewis.

Which novel began at the Villa Diodati in 1816, when a house party agreed that each guest would write a ghost story?

Frankenstein was the eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley's answer to the challenge, which the host set after the group had read German ghost stories aloud by the fire.

Which Coleridge poem, begun in an opium dream, was left unfinished when 'a person on business from Porlock' called?

Kubla Khan, Coleridge's own note says, came to him in a reverie 'brought on by two grains of Opium' at a farmhouse between Porlock and Linton on the edge of Exmoor.

Which lexicographer defined 'oats' as a grain that feeds horses in England but supports the people in Scotland?

Samuel Johnson compiled his 42,773-entry Dictionary of the English Language almost single-handedly, with clerks only to copy out the quotations he had marked in books.

Which George Orwell novel was finished on the Scottish island of Jura while Orwell was ill with tuberculosis?

Nineteen Eighty-Four was completed in second draft on Jura in November 1948, and Orwell rejected his publisher's blurb calling it 'a thriller mixed up with a love story'.

Which D. H. Lawrence novel's 1960 obscenity trial had the prosecutor ask jurors whether their servants should read it?

Lady Chatterley's Lover was cleared by the jury, and Penguin's unexpurgated edition sold its first print run of 200,000 copies on the day of publication, 10 November 1960.

Which boy uses the conch shell as a horn to gather the survivors in Lord of the Flies, and is elected chief?

Ralph is voted chief over Jack, and the conch stands for order until Roger's boulder smashes it and kills Piggy; Faber & Faber took the novel after many publishers had turned it down.

Which Romantic poet died in Rome at 25, asking for the epitaph 'Here lies one whose name was writ in water'?

John Keats had qualified as an apothecary in 1816 before choosing poetry, and his three volumes sold perhaps 200 copies in his lifetime.

Which author of Doctor Faustus was stabbed to death in a Deptford house, reportedly in a quarrel over the bill?

Christopher Marlowe was stabbed above the right eye by Ingram Frizer, according to the coroner, after the two argued over 'the Reckoning' at the widow Eleanor Bull's house in 1593.

A misfiring stage cannon during which Shakespeare play burned the Globe Theatre to the ground on 29 June 1613?

Henry VIII was being staged when the cannon set the wooden beams and thatch alight; the Globe had been built in 1599 from the timbers of an earlier Shoreditch playhouse, and a second Globe stood on the site by June 1614.

Which Samuel Beckett play, 'nothing happens, twice' to one critic, has Vladimir and Estragon linger by a leafless tree?

Waiting for Godot was written in French as En attendant Godot in 1948–49, and the critic Vivian Mercier's quip noted that its second act is a subtly different reprise of the first.

Which Irish playwright was the first person to win both a Nobel Prize and an Oscar, the Oscar for adapting Pygmalion?

George Bernard Shaw called the 1938 Academy Award for the Pygmalion screenplay an insult coming from Hollywood, having accepted the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925.

In Beowulf, what creature deals the hero his fatal wound fifty years after he has killed Grendel and Grendel's mother?

A dragon, roused when treasure is stolen from its burial-mound hoard, is slain by Beowulf with help only from his young kinsman Wiglaf, whose name means 'remnant of valour'.

Which Whitby cowherd, says Bede, learned to compose in a dream, becoming the earliest English poet known by name?

Cædmon, in Bede's account, was asked in the dream by a stranger to sing of 'the beginning of created things', and his short Hymn is among the oldest surviving Old English verse.

Which Canterbury Tales pilgrim tells of a knight who must learn, in a year and a day, what women most desire?

The Wife of Bath's knight is told the answer by an old woman he must then marry: women most desire sovereignty over their husbands and lovers.

Whose 1400 burial in Westminster Abbey, earned as Clerk of Works rather than as a poet, was the first in Poets' Corner?

Geoffrey Chaucer was entitled to the grave as a tenant of the Abbey's close; Nicholas Brigham's tomb of 1556 and Edmund Spenser's burial nearby in 1599 began the tradition.

Which Arthurian poem's hero accepts a silk sash from his host's wife, then wears it to Camelot as a badge of failure?

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight survives in a single manuscript alongside Pearl, Cleanness and Patience, all thought to be by one anonymous 'Gawain Poet' of the North-West Midlands.

Which Dean of St Paul's wrote 'No man is an island' in meditations composed while recovering from a grave illness?

John Donne wrote the Devotions upon Emergent Occasions in December 1623, a section for each day of an illness thought to be relapsing fever or typhus, two years into his time as Dean.

Which epic did John Milton dictate after going blind, selling the publishing rights for an initial £5?

Paradise Lost earned Milton £5 from Samuel Simmons in April 1667, with another £5 due as each print run of up to 1,500 copies sold out; he had composed it entirely by dictation, having lost his sight in 1652.

Which Shakespeare tragedy, his longest play, has a Danish prince avenge a father murdered by his uncle Claudius?

Hamlet, written between 1599 and 1601, survives in three early texts, each including lines and passages missing from the others, which editors have argued over ever since.

Which Shakespeare comedy has Puck give the weaver Nick Bottom a donkey's head in a wood outside Athens?

A Midsummer Night's Dream has Puck, taking Bottom's name for another word for jackass, transform him mid-rehearsal of Pyramus and Thisbe, and the enchanted fairy queen Titania then falls for him.

Which two actors from Shakespeare's company compiled the First Folio, the first printing of eighteen of his plays?

John Heminges and Henry Condell dismissed the earlier quartos as 'stol'n and surreptitious copies', and their 1623 Folio of 36 plays is the only reliable text for about 20 of them.

Which Dublin dean's satire A Modest Proposal suggested the Irish poor sell their infants as food for the rich?

Jonathan Swift, Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral from 1713, deadpans that a well-nursed year-old child is 'a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled'.

Which poet engraved, printed and hand-coloured his Songs of Innocence and of Experience, which includes 'The Tyger'?

William Blake invented relief etching in 1788, aged 31, and used it for most of his books, combining words and pictures on a single plate in the manner of medieval illuminated manuscripts.

Which Percy Shelley sonnet, written in friendly competition with Horace Smith, mocks a ruined colossus of Ramesses II?

Ozymandias is the Greek name for Ramesses II, and both poets took the inscription 'King of Kings Ozymandias am I' from the historian Diodorus Siculus; Shelley's version appeared in The Examiner in January 1818.

Which Jane Austen novel was dedicated to the Prince Regent after his Carlton House librarian suggested the tribute?

Emma went to the Prince Regent with a dedication copy sent to Carlton House in December 1815, after the librarian James Stanier Clarke had shown Austen round the library at the prince's request.

Which Derbyshire estate, worth at least £10,000 a year, does Fitzwilliam Darcy own in Pride and Prejudice?

Pemberley is the Darcy family seat, and Darcy's shy younger sister Georgiana comes with a settled £30,000 dowry from the estate; the novel has sold over 20 million copies.

Which Dickens novel, only six of twelve planned instalments written, lay unfinished in his desk when he died in 1870?

The Mystery of Edwin Drood centres on Drood's uncle John Jasper, a cathedral choirmaster and opium addict, in Cloisterham, a lightly disguised Rochester; a later stage musical lets the audience vote on the murderer.

Which Wuthering Heights character confesses to having opened Catherine's grave twice?

Heathcliff's confession comes as he grows increasingly wild; the novel, Emily Brontë's only one, ends with Lockwood finding the graves of Catherine, Edgar and Heathcliff side by side, convinced all three are at peace.

Which 1859 novel was the first of the seven that Mary Ann Evans published as George Eliot?

Adam Bede appeared in 1859, and the pen name also shielded Evans's scandalous life with the married George Henry Lewes, whom she called her husband.

Which nonsense poem, read by Alice in a mirror in Through the Looking-Glass, gave English 'chortle' and 'galumph'?

Jabberwocky's coinages 'chortled' and 'galumphing' are now in the Oxford English Dictionary, and Lewis Carroll asked his publisher in 1868 whether a page or two could be printed in reverse.

Under what name was Oscar Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol first published by Leonard Smithers in 1898?

C.3.3. was Wilde's cell number at Reading, cell block C, landing 3, cell 3; only the seventh printing of June 1899 added his name in square brackets below it.

Which Irish writer, business manager of London's Lyceum Theatre for 27 years, had his vampire come ashore at Whitby?

Bram Stoker researched Dracula in Whitby's public library in 1890, and in the novel the Count runs up the 199 steps to St Mary's churchyard in the shape of a black dog.

Which author of the Barsetshire novels, a Post Office official, is credited with introducing the pillar box?

Anthony Trollope wrote his early novels while working as a Post Office inspector, sometimes raiding the 'lost-letter' box for ideas, and conceived The Warden on a visit to Salisbury Cathedral.

Which co-founder of Dublin's Abbey Theatre won the 1923 Nobel Prize while serving as a senator of the Irish Free State?

W. B. Yeats was cited for poetry that 'gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation', and had been appointed to the Senate in 1922 for the first of two terms.

James Joyce set Ulysses on 16 June 1904 because it was the date of his first outing with which future wife?

Nora Barnacle, a Galway-born chambermaid at Finn's Hotel in Dublin, met Joyce on 10 June 1904; the couple did not legally marry until 1931, in London.

Which Virginia Woolf essay, grown from 1928 Cambridge lectures, imagines Shakespeare's equally gifted sister Judith?

A Room of One's Own argues that 'a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction', and Judith, kept home while her brother went to school, is Woolf's proof of what was lost.

Which poem, dedicated to Ezra Pound as 'il miglior fabbro' after he edited it, opens 'April is the cruellest month'?

The Waste Land, all 434 lines of it, first appeared in October 1922 in the magazine The Criterion, and the dedication to Pound was added only in a 1925 republication.

Which Welsh poet wrote 'Do not go gentle into that good night' and died in New York at 39?

Dylan Thomas is thought to have written the poem for his dying father, who in fact lived until just before Christmas 1952, less than a year before the poet collapsed on his fourth New York trip.

Which Rushdie novel, narrated by Saleem Sinai, born at the moment of Indian independence, won the 'Booker of Bookers'?

Midnight's Children won the 1981 Booker, the Booker of Bookers in 1993 and the Best of the Booker in 2008, its Saleem born at midnight on 15 August 1947 and telepathically linked to the other midnight children.

Which novelist, born Józef Korzeniowski, wrote Lord Jim in English, a language he acquired only in his twenties?

Joseph Conrad spoke Polish and French fluently from childhood, and some biographers hear both beneath his English, which he always spoke with a strong foreign accent.

Which number is the Shakespeare sonnet, one of 154, that opens with 'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day'?

18 is among the best known of Shakespeare's sonnets, its speaker deciding that the Fair Youth has qualities that surpass a summer's day.

Which Kazuo Ishiguro novel, narrated by the butler Stevens on a motoring trip to Cornwall, won the 1989 Booker Prize?

The Remains of the Day has Stevens reminisce about serving Lord Darlington at Darlington Hall in the 1920s and 30s, and Ishiguro went on to win the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Which Daniel Defoe novel was inspired by Alexander Selkirk, a Scot marooned for four years on an island off Chile?

Robinson Crusoe ran through four editions before the end of 1719, and Selkirk's island of Más a Tierra was renamed Robinson Crusoe Island in 1966.

Beside which lake did William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy see the daffodils of his best-known poem?

Ullswater's 'long belt' of daffodils, seen on a walk around Glencoyne Bay, became 'I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud', one of the most popular poems Wordsworth ever wrote.