100 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 pit with his neighbour Sir William Penn, and his shorthand diary was later transcribed by John Smith, who worked unaware that a key sat in Pepys's own library.

Which writer'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 Elizabethan playwright 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, the coroner's inquest found, 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 a slave steals a golden cup from its hoard, mortally wounds Beowulf, and of all his men only his kinsman Wiglaf stays to help him kill it.

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 wears a lady's silk sash back 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 turn Bottom's head into a donkey's mid-rehearsal, and the enchanted fairy queen Titania falls in love with him the moment she wakes.

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.

Oscar Wilde first published The Ballad of Reading Gaol under what instead of his own name?

His prison cell number, C.3.3., meant block C, landing 3, cell 3 at Reading, and Wilde's own name appeared only in the seventh printing, in June 1899.

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

Bram Stoker researched Dracula at Whitby's library in the summer of 1890, and in the novel a large dog leaps ashore when the ship Demeter reaches the town.

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.

What does Shakespeare's sonnet beginning 'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day' promise will keep the beloved alive?

This poem is the promise of the couplet, 'So long lives this, and this gives life to thee', in the first sonnet after the run urging the young man to have children.

Which Kazuo Ishiguro novel, narrated by the butler Stevens on a motoring trip, 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 is often linked to 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.

Which Romantic poet kept a tame bear at Trinity College, Cambridge, because the college rules forbade pet dogs?

Lord Byron found no mention of bears in the college statutes, so the authorities could not object, and he even suggested that his pet should apply for a fellowship.

Which J. M. Barrie play has paid royalties to Great Ormond Street Hospital since he gave away its copyright?

Peter Pan earns the children's hospital royalties in perpetuity under a clause in the 1988 copyright act, and Barrie asked that the value of his gift never be disclosed.

Which Belfast-born children's author and Oxford don died on the day President John F. Kennedy was shot?

C. S. Lewis collapsed about 55 minutes before the shooting in Dallas, and news of the assassination overshadowed the death of Narnia's creator.

Ian Fleming took the name James Bond from the American author of a Caribbean field guide to which creatures?

Birds of the West Indies was a book that Fleming, a keen birdwatcher living in Jamaica, was familiar with, and he chose its author's name because it sounded as ordinary as possible.

Which Charles Dickens book, written in six weeks, sold out its first run of 6,000 copies within days?

A Christmas Carol came out on 19 December 1843 and was gone by the 24th, but the costly production Dickens insisted on left him just £230 instead of the £1,000 he expected.

Which Shakespeare play do superstitious actors avoid naming inside a theatre for fear of bringing a production bad luck?

Macbeth is known backstage as the Scottish Play, and tradition blames a coven of witches who cursed it because Shakespeare had used a real spell.

From which country does Michael Bond's Paddington Bear arrive at the London station that gave him his name?

Peru was a late change: Bond first had the bear travel from darkest Africa, until his agent pointed out that Africa has no bears.

Which children's author, born in Cardiff to Norwegian parents, flew as an RAF fighter pilot before turning to writing?

Roald Dahl fractured his skull in a wartime crash landing in the desert, and his account of that crash became his first published work.

Which George Orwell book, first subtitled 'A Fairy Story', was rejected by several British and American publishers?

Animal Farm was written while Britain was in its wartime alliance with the Soviet Union, and even Orwell's own publisher, Victor Gollancz, turned the satire on Stalin down.

In Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which creature does the sailor shoot and later wear around his neck?

An albatross had led the ship out of the Antarctic ice, and the crew's punishment for killing it gave English its idiom for a heavy burden of guilt.

In which Warwickshire market town was William Shakespeare baptised and buried in the same church, Holy Trinity?

Stratford-upon-Avon's church keeps a grave whose epitaph curses anyone who moves his bones, and restorers in 2008 took care to work around the stone.

In which Italian city did Shakespeare set Romeo and Juliet, a story he drew from Arthur Brooke's English poem of 1562?

Verona shows visitors a medieval house as Juliet's home, though its famous courtyard balcony was only added in the 1930s.

Which Charlotte Brontë heroine, governess at Thornfield Hall, learns at the altar that her employer is already married?

Jane Eyre's harsh Lowood was drawn from Cowan Bridge, the school Charlotte attended with her two eldest sisters, who both died of tuberculosis in 1825.

Which children's author and prize-winning sheep breeder left the National Trust over 4,000 acres of land at her death?

Beatrix Potter was also a serious student of fungi, and her watercolour studies earned her wide respect in the field of mycology.

Which Ayrshire-born poet is toasted every 25 January at suppers of haggis, whisky and recitations of his verse?

Robert Burns was first honoured by friends at his birthplace cottage in 1801, and an early club dined on 29 January until parish records showed his real birthday.

Which Punch humorist turned his son's toy bear and a Sussex forest into bestselling children's stories?

A. A. Milne's son was given the Harrods bear in 1921, and part of its name came from Winnie, a real bear the family had seen at London Zoo.

On which moor did Conan Doyle set The Hound of the Baskervilles, written after he had killed off Sherlock Holmes?

A West Country legend of a phantom hound reached Conan Doyle through a journalist friend, who explored Dartmoor with him and earned a third of the royalties.

Which Great Expectations character stopped every clock in her house at twenty to nine, the moment she was jilted?

Miss Havisham also never took off her wedding dress and left the cake uneaten on the table at Satis House, where she raised Estella to break a boy's heart.

Which Aldous Huxley novel takes its title from Miranda's speech in The Tempest and counts its years 'After Ford'?

Brave New World opens in AF 632, in a society that treats Henry Ford as a messiah and has cut the tops off its crosses to make the letter T, after his Model T.

Which Edinburgh-born author built a pirate adventure around a secret map to amuse his young stepson?

Robert Louis Stevenson began Treasure Island while bad weather kept the family indoors in the summer of 1881, and first put it out under the pseudonym Captain George North.

Which Shakespeare title character splits his realm between daughters Goneril and Regan after disowning Cordelia?

King Lear was thought so bleak that a 1681 rewrite with a happier ending, in which Cordelia survives and marries Edgar, replaced it on the professional stage until 1838.

Which P. G. Wodehouse character, valet to Bertie Wooster, later lent his name to an early internet search engine?

Jeeves is strictly a gentleman's personal servant and not a butler, who runs a whole household, though on rare occasions he fills in for one.

Which Daphne du Maurier novel never reveals the name of its narrator, who becomes the second Mrs de Winter?

Rebecca is named after the dead first Mrs de Winter, whose memory haunts the Cornish estate of Manderley, and the book has never gone out of print since 1938.

Which novelist had Martians land on Horsell Common, near Woking, the Surrey town where he was then living?

H. G. Wells cycled the lanes around Woking choosing places and people for his Martians to destroy, as he later admitted in his autobiography.

Which Bombay-born writer became, in 1907, the first to win the Nobel Prize in Literature for work in English?

Rudyard Kipling owed his first name to Rudyard Lake in Staffordshire, where his parents had courted, and he later declined both a knighthood and the Poet Laureateship.

Under which shared surname did Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë first publish, as Currer, Ellis and Acton?

Bell hid three sisters behind deliberately ambiguous first names, and their first book, a joint volume of poems in 1846, sold only a handful of copies before the novels made them famous.

Which George Eliot novel, subtitled 'A Study of Provincial Life', follows Dorothea Brooke into an unhappy marriage?

Middlemarch was stitched together from two unfinished pieces: a novel about the ambitious doctor Lydgate and a long story about Dorothea called Miss Brooke.

Which Tudor statesman, born in Putney around 1485, is the hero of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and its two sequels?

Thomas Cromwell brought Mantel the Booker Prize twice, in 2009 for Wolf Hall and in 2012 for its sequel Bring Up the Bodies, before a third book completed the trilogy.

Which author of Brideshead Revisited first married a woman who had exactly the same first name as his own?

Evelyn Waugh married Evelyn Gardner in 1928, and friends quickly took to calling the pair He-Evelyn and She-Evelyn.

Which Jane Austen novel reunites Anne Elliot with a naval captain nearly eight years after she broke their engagement?

Persuasion was named not by Austen but by her brother Henry, who chose the title when the book came out five months after her death.

In which English cathedral city is Jane Austen buried, beneath an epitaph that never mentions her writing?

Winchester was where her sister and brother had taken the dying Austen for treatment, and the epitaph her family composed praises her mind but not her books.

Which Thackeray novel, subtitled 'A Novel without a Hero', follows the scheming Becky Sharp in the Napoleonic era?

Vanity Fair first came out in monthly parts with Thackeray's own illustrations, under the earlier subtitle Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society.

Which war poet was killed a week before the 1918 Armistice, with his mother receiving the telegram on Armistice Day?

Wilfred Owen found his voice after meeting Siegfried Sassoon while being treated for shell shock in Edinburgh, and most of his best-known poems were published only after his death.

Which Poet Laureate wrote The Charge of the Light Brigade in minutes after reading The Times's account of the battle?

Alfred Tennyson held the laureateship from 1850 to 1892, and after his death the post was left unfilled for several years as a mark of respect.

Which Yorkshire-born Poet Laureate, once married to Sylvia Plath, wrote the children's story The Iron Man?

Ted Hughes wrote the story to comfort his two children after their mother's death, and Warner Bros. later filmed it as The Iron Giant.

Which fortified wine goes by tradition to Britain's Poet Laureate, a perk begun as Charles I's 'butt of Canary wine'?

Sherry comes by the barrel: the old royal gift had lapsed into a cash payment until a twentieth-century laureate revived the custom and received 720 bottles.

Which novelist has Edinburgh's main railway station named after his fiction and a 200-foot monument standing nearby?

Walter Scott published Waverley anonymously in 1814 and did not put his name to the novels that followed until 1827; the station took their name around 1854.

Which Virginia Woolf novel follows a society hostess through a single June day in London as she prepares a party?

Mrs Dalloway was drafted under the working title The Hours, and almost all of its action is squeezed into one day in the middle of June 1923.

Which book of Round Table legends was apparently written by a prisoner around 1470 and first printed in 1485?

Le Morte d'Arthur was the work of Sir Thomas Malory, and its first printed edition stayed the earliest known text until a manuscript finally came to light in 1934.

Nadsat, the teenage gang slang of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, draws most heavily on which foreign language?

Russian even supplies the slang's name: nadsat is the Russian suffix that does the job of the English -teen in counting.

Which Victorian poet of Goblin Market wrote the verses that Gustav Holst later set as In the Bleak Midwinter?

Christina Rossetti also sat for several paintings by her brother Dante Gabriel, including as the Virgin Mary in his first completed oil.

Which poet, famed for his dramatic monologues, secretly married Elizabeth Barrett in 1846 and moved with her to Italy?

Robert Browning had to marry in secret because her domineering father disapproved of marriage for any of his children, and he duly disinherited her.

Which poet of The Whitsun Weddings, a university librarian in Hull for thirty years, declined to become Poet Laureate?

Philip Larkin turned the post down in 1984, the year before he died; he had also spent a decade as the jazz critic of The Daily Telegraph.

Which playwright of Volpone killed an actor in a duel and won release by reciting a Bible verse, the 'neck-verse'?

Ben Jonson pleaded guilty to manslaughter but walked free through benefit of clergy, at the cost of his goods and a brand on his left thumb.

Which author of Tom Jones was also a London magistrate who founded the Bow Street Runners, an early police force?

Henry Fielding's Runners are often called London's first professional police force, yet his own lack of financial sense often left his family in poverty.

Which poet earned a £50-a-year pension from Elizabeth I for an epic whose heroes each embody a different virtue?

Edmund Spenser presented the first three books of The Faerie Queene to her in 1589, though there is no evidence that Elizabeth ever read any of the poem.

Which Sheridan comedy, his first play, features Mrs Malaprop, whose muddled words gave English a term for such slips?

The Rivals was rejected by its first-night audience, so Sheridan withdrew it at once, revised it in eleven days and saw the new version become a lasting success.

Which comic novel of the 1760s has a narrator so digressive that his own birth is not reached until the third volume?

Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne, also toys with the printed page itself, with blank, black and marbled pages and whole paragraphs censored with asterisks.

Which Shakespeare play turns on a dropped handkerchief that Iago plants to make a general doubt Desdemona's fidelity?

Othello had given the handkerchief to Desdemona as his first gift, and Iago gets hold of it only because Emilia, unaware of his plan, picks it up and hands it over.

Which York-born poet wrote Funeral Blues, which won fresh fame when read in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral?

W. H. Auden first wrote the poem for a 1936 play, then substantially reworked it as a cabaret song for the singer Hedli Anderson.