A proposed book of literary delights

I'd love to write a book debunking some of the popular myths about literature. Christopher Marlowe wasn't killed in a tavern brawl. Tennyson didn't invent the phrase ''Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.' Shakespeare's play Hamlet had nothing to do with the death of his son, Hamnet. Lewis Carroll didn't come up with Tweedledum and Tweedledee, or the word 'slithy'. J. K. Rowling doesn't even come close to being the inventor of the word 'muggle'. Oscar Wilde never died of syphilis, though he almost certainly suffered from that literarily-named affliction.


Or, twisting things the other way, there are the surprising and unusual gifts that writers have given us. Charles Dickens first wrote down the word 'boredom'. T. S. Eliot was the first person to use the word 'bullshit'. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, as well as being author of a number of bad novels, gave Bovril its name without realising. Literature and the literary world is full of such gems. But it's not just about trivia, though I think that trivia is incredibly important in educating ourselves in any subject: trivia, to dangle a bon mot in your face, is anything but trivial. But it's more about the fact that many of us know so little of the vast undiscovered ocean of literary knowledge out there, being like Newton's child playing with a few little pebbles of bookish joy every now and then. Of course, maybe John Lloyd and the team of 'QI elves' are already working on 'The Book of General Literary Ignorance', but whether they are or they aren't I have a vision for a different kind of book: one which does for literature what Bill Bryson did for the history of American language and culture in Made in America, or again for scientists in A Short History of Nearly Everything. The walls of university campus Blackwell's all over the country are choc-a-bloc with introductions to literary this, and theorising literary that, but one of the chief things that English schools and departments all over Britain - and the US - really lack is a great introduction to the writers who gave us that thing called 'literature'. I'm not just talking about biographical quirks or etymological oddities, rather something that gives university freshers studying English in all its variegated and diverse forms an idea and shape of the thing they've walked into. And while knowing that Anthony Trollope hated himself for inventing the pillar box (and later died laughing) may not provide them with a framework for deconstructing Heart of Darkness or psychoanalysing Othello, it might provide a less immediately 'useful' but arguably more important role, namely welcoming them into the world of books and literary studies, warming their slippers by the fire for them, and in general acting as their first-semester 'fag'. I for one would buy such a fag, and puff away.