Great minds do think alike, because Cara’s post yesterday is the perfect lead-in to this one.
I am indeed ashamed to admit that I haven’t ready anywhere near enough of the sort of things our heroes and heroines would have had in their libraries. Now my sins are coming home to me, because I’m writing a hero who insists on being very well-read. I am hoping that reading more of what he has eagerly devoured will help me get into his head. (Or maybe I’m just procrastinating, but that’s another post!)
This is why I’m currently slogging through Paradise Lost. It’s something I’ve just heard referenced too many times and I feel a dunce for not knowing it. Some of it is slogging, especially the long passages full of more allusions that make me feel still more ignorant. But I am nothing if not stubborn and there are some rewarding gems in there.
Being slightly obsessive-compulsive (OK, maybe more than slightly!) I’m trying to come up with a list of works that will at least help me fake a broader knowledge of literature prior to 1820.
One area I need to brush up on is the classics. My O-C tendency isn’t quite strong enough to make me learn Greek or Latin but I’d like to read at least a few works in translation. Somehow I think having viewed some of those old Technicolor movies based on mythology isn’t going to help me here!
Re Shakespeare, I’ve read Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar and Othello, and seen quite a few more, but there are quite a few plays I haven’t experienced either way. King Lear and The Tempest are a few that come to mind. (More shame on me!)
Another area is novels; this hero doesn’t despise a good novel. I’ve read everything by Austen and a goodly few by Scott but I haven’t read anything earlier. (It is a disgrace, I know.)
Re poetry–I’ve read some of the Lake poets but nothing by Byron. (Gasp!)
So two questions for the Riskies and visitors:
1) Which works would you recommend I read in the cause of developing my bookish hero? The ones that will help me look better-read than I am but are also the most interesting, thought-provoking?
2) Am I getting too obsessive-compulsive here? On second thought, maybe I don’t want to know! If it helps, it helps. I am writing, too.
Elena
LADY DEARING’S MASQUERADE, RT Reviewers’ Choice Award, Best Regency Romance of 2005
www.elenagreene.com
Rousseau. No well-read gentleman of the era would have been ignorant of Rousseau.
Hmmm–I once had a hero/heroine who shared a mania for Elizabethan poetry, but mostly because this was my own “specialty” at university, and I wanted to use all that piled-up research. 🙂
I agree with Rousseau, and probably Shakespeare. Will give some thought to others.
Because of my own particular bent, I’d say Rabelais (Gargantua and Pantagruel, or vice versa) and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Both really vulgar in an 18th century way, very esoteric, definitely different.
Yes, it totally depends what you want him to be like — and also whether or not you want to cater to, um, the reader. 🙂
When I read Regencies, I’m constantly coming across well-read heroes who’ve read Austen, and Byron, and Radcliffe. And the Radcliffe they talk about is almost always Udolpho…and then maybe they’ve read The Monk and Otranto. The modern version of the Gothic Greatest Hits, though probably not the actual Regency version of GGH…. But few readers are real 18th C lit experts, so the authors I think like to give them touchstones they know…
By contrast, my research has led me to believe that the classics were way more read and talked about during the Regency than they are in Regency romances… And poetry as well. And essays. Novels, less so. Definitely into Shakespeare too. (Some plays more than others.)
I think they still read old essays from the Spectator and the Guardian, in collections…. They’d also read the new writings on science, architecture, art, etc. Well-educated aristocrats would probably also read a variety of things in other languages…
If you want your hero to be a bit eccentric, I agree with Megan that Tristram Shandy would be good. It was a bit warm for some Regency tastes, and also a bit old-fashioned perhaps, but it’s fascinating and bizarre, and very funny.
The Aeneid would be a major piece of his education, I suspect — and the Iliad and Odyssey too, though I think a bit less so — as the Brits read Latin usually much better (and earlier) than Greek, and had such a feeling of sympathy for the Roman Empire, I suspect they valued Roman lit more than we do, and Greek a bit less…
Anyway, if you could find a nice readable translation of the Aeneid (if you don’t already know it) that could be helpful.
Sorry this is so rambling! Anyway, this is a topic I’ve thought on before, so I have rambling ideas more than helpful suggestions to offer!
Cara
Here’s what I’d do. Go to http://www.answers.com (a great research tool) and search for “literature” It will give you several choices but I picked “literature by country”. then I picked “English literature” there I found L’Morte Arthur, surely something your hero would have read.
I also used answers.com to search “18th century” and “17th century” – events of the century are listed, but also significant people. You can pick out the authors.
For example, it jogged my memory. Hero would have read Samuel Johnson.
then you can probably look up the specific writers (eg Defoe) in answers.com and find out enough about the works to fudge it.
That’s what I would do…..
Definitely the classics, as Cara suggested, Catullus if he was feeling a bit naughty (didn’t Pope or Dryden, who would also be known to him, do some translations thereof?) and maybe Ovid. He would have had Greek and Roman myths and the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer drummed into his head all his life (all of which would give him a leg-up on Shakespeare).
Janet
You could have your hero read Rochester if he was really naughty. *GRIN*
For some reason my brain just refuses to grasp that Gulliver’s Travels and Robinson Crusoe are period. The idea that my character could have a body servant they refer to their “man Friday” just feels so modern.
Funny the things that live on and become part of the vernacular, isn’t it?
Thanks for the great suggestions, especially the more esoteric ones. If my hero reads them, readers will think he (and I, of course) have already read all the old standards, right?
Elena, always looking for ways to fake it more efficiently 🙂
Oh gee, that’s too tough. Good thing there are already suggestions posted! LOL 🙂 The only thing I could ever suggest is I’ve read a fair amount of Shakespeare in my time, and that’s an obvious must read.
Lois
I just wana say thanks again for the fab post. It really got me thinking about stuff I need to read, too!
You’re welcome, Kalen!
And thanks to everyone for not obviously booing and hissing at me for my reading deficits. Please remember that I started adult life as a techie and that I am trying desperately to catch up!
I think Cara is right on the money as far as the classics are concerned. Since your hero is a gentleman, he might be interested in some of the more martial classics: Caesar’s Commentaries (also often used as a school text, since it is written in relatively simple Latin–I have an old copy with interlinear translations); Thucydides’s Peloponnesian War; and Herodotus’s Histories. Also along a slightly naughtier line would be Ovid’s Art of Love.
However, since you could spend years reading all this stuff, may I suggest a (gasp!) secondary source? (Albeit one you may already have read.) Edith Hamilton wrote three very readable books on the classics: Mythology (which many people, including me, studied in school), The Greek Way (about the most notable ancient Greek writers) and The Roman Way (about the most notable Roman writers). Apologies if you’ve already read these and are far beyond them! But I enjoyed them very much.
It sounds like a fun project! I’d love to have an excuse to spend time reading all the books I’ve always meant to read…
Todd-who-loves-to-have-an-excuse
The other thing to be aware of here is that English people, in general, are more familiar with The Classics than are Americans.
I took Ancient Greek in prep school, although I never took Latin. Nonetheless, a well-born educated man would know a lot of Latin and Greek. And when you study Greek, especially, you do that by reading poetry and plays. (Romans wrote more military treatises, letters, contracts, and reports than did the Greeks, so more of them survive.)
Well into Edwardian times, English men and women who went for The Grand Tour are focusing a lot of their sightseeing on Ancient Monuments.
Now, whether your hero LIKES his dead languages, Greek drama, or Roman military theories is an entirely different matter. But the Greek dramas are very important to understanding some of humor Shakespeare develops.
Most people would at least know of the plot-lines of the great plays of Aeschylus (Oresteia), Euripides, and Aristophanes (who first wrote about Pantagruel) Rabelais knew his Greek, and Byron, his Latin.
(Another thing to be aware of, when delving in to Greek and Latin, is that Greek is often considered to be a feminine pursuit, whereas Latin is considered more manly. Drama, Comedy, Tragedy, poetry; all Greek. Management, Contracts, Legislation; all Latin. However, an educated make would know both–or at least the very, very late form of Hellenistic Greek in which most of the New Testament is written.)