A Little History of Literature

by John Sutherland

  This little book's life began when I signed a contract with Yale University Press, granting them the right to publish my text as a book. Once my manuscript was delivered to them satisfactorily, they paid to have it edited, designed, typeset, printed, bound between hard covers, and stored, prior to sale, in a warehouse. The publishers paid for all those individual processes, and they now own the physical books. Next, the books are distributed, principally to various retailers – physical shops and electronic sellers – and libraries. The physical books now belong to them. Finally, you, the customer, bought this Little History of Literature and took it home. (Or if you borrowed it from the library you will have to return it there.) Today, the publishing of books is usually carried out by a company quite separate from the printers and the booksellers. But up until the nineteenth century, publishing and printing was mainly arranged by booksellers.

  From the earliest period of known history, it took thousands of years, and an awful lot of literature, before any laws were devised to regulate what went on, and to protect the various parties' interests. And it was only when those laws came into being that a coherent industry – with machinery and ways of commercially distributing literary products – could be developed and that ‘literature’ – as opposed to a miscellaneous bundle of texts, oral tales and ballads – could be fully and properly developed.

  The framework of laws and commerce within which literature is now created depended on a number of earlier things happening. Writing, literacy and educational institutions were necessary to create a market. Another necessary prior event was the shift from scrolls – which great ancient libraries such as the one at Alexandria contained – to what is called the ‘codex’, a book with cut, numbered pages, like the one you're reading. (Caudex is Latin for a block of wood; the plural is codices.)

  The manuscript, or handwritten codex, originated in classical Rome, like the word itself. It's thought that it was invented because persecuted Christians, whose faith (unlike that of the pagan Romans) had a sacred book – the gospels – at its centre, needed texts they could keep hidden from prying eyes. A codex was smaller and easier to secrete than a large scroll.

  Creating an early manuscript codex required huge manual labour – taking years, in some cases, if it was illustrated, or illuminated, or handsomely bound – by highly skilled copyists who were often artists rather than craftsmen. Many of those codices which have survived in our great libraries were manufactured as single luxury items, commissioned by a rich owner or institution (the monarch, the church, monasteries, noblemen). The workshops in which they were produced were called scriptoria, writing factories. It's estimated that the total number of works of literature that were readily available to the educated bookworm up to the fifteenth century, was less than a thousand or two. Chaucer's Clerk in The Canterbury Tales, for example, is regarded by his fellow pilgrims as phenomenally well read, yet he owns only half a dozen books.

  This book scarcity meant that many more people had books read to them than they read, or possessed, themselves. A famous nineteenth-century painting shows Chaucer, fifty years before the arrival of the printing press, reading his great poem to an audience from a lectern, or ‘reading stand’. (The lectern still survives in university lecture halls – originally they were designed for reading aloud from a text of which there was only one copy. The word ‘lecture’ is derived from the Latin word lector, a reader.)

  One of the other preconditions for the production of books for a mass market was the discovery, introduced to England from the East around the thirteenth century, of the process for making paper. Before this, writing of any importance was done on parchment or vellum (cleaned and dried animal skin), or was carved on wood. Cheap paper laid the way for the major revolution in the late fifteenth century: printing.

  We think of printing as a European thing, with its famous pioneers Johannes Gutenberg in Germany, William Caxton in England, and Aldus Manutius in Italy (inventor of ‘italic’ type). In fact it had long been practised in China. But the Chinese had a huge problem. The Chinese written language was based on thousands of pictorial ‘characters’. Each of them was inscribed on a block the size of a small brick. The short paragraph you are reading would require sixty of them, and be the size of a small wall.

  The Western phonetic alphabet (‘phonetic’ means being based on sound, not image) was a mere twenty-six letters and a dozen or so punctuation symbols. It was wonderfully convenient for the printer. You could create the necessary ‘type’ by pouring molten lead into what were called ‘fonts’ and store it when cooled in ‘cases’. (Capitals were stored in the upper case – we still use the term.) Many of the pioneer printers were goldsmiths, like Gutenberg, and so used to working with hot metal. The type could be set in lines, in a page-shaped ‘form’ and inked. The ‘press’ could then be pulled down to run off as many copies of the page that were required. The press itself could be quite small – about twice the size of a modern trouser press (which worked on the same principle) if smallness were a consideration.

  The first printed books looked very like manuscript codices, with elaborately styled letters. If this was a fifteenth-century Gutenberg Bible in your hand you would be hard put to say whether it was written or printed. The difference was that Gutenberg's workshop, in Mainz, Germany, could turn out a thousand bibles in the time it took a scriptorium to produce one.

  It was a breakthrough but it brought with it a new set of problems – the most urgent being our old friend, ownership. One of the first books printed in England was Caxton's 1476 edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (good choice) which he sold from his little stall outside St Paul's Cathedral. The great poet was no longer around to give his permission, but even if he had still been alive, Caxton would not have had to pay Geoffrey Chaucer a penny out of the profits of his printing enterprise.

  For the next 200 years it was copycat heaven in the book trade. Some legal mechanism to control the ‘right to copy’ was required, particularly in London which was swelling with large numbers of consumers: a ‘reading public’. It was the London booksellers (as mentioned above, they also often doubled as publishers, with printing machinery in the back of the shop) who brought pressure to bear on Parliament to frame laws that would regulate the book business.

  In 1710 Parliament came up with a wonderfully sophisticated piece of legislation – known as the ‘Statute of Anne’ – which had the clear intention of ‘the Encouragement of Learning’. The preamble reads:

  Whereas Printers, Booksellers, and other Persons have of late frequently taken the Liberty of Printing, Reprinting, and Publishing or causing to be Printed, Reprinted, and Published Books, and other Writings, without the Consent of the Authors or Proprietors of such Books and Writings, to their very great Detriment, and too often to the Ruin of them and their families: for Preventing therefore such Practices for the future, and for the Encouragement of Learned Men to Compose and write useful Books …

  For the first time, it acknowledged that an author composes something original – the author's ‘own intellectual creation’, in the modern phrase – and that it has value. As soon as that original creation has been written down (typed or word-processed, these days), the author owns the copyright – the written work is what we would now call ‘intellectual property’. It can be ‘materialised’ – as a printed book, or nowadays an e-book, or adapted into a stage play or a film. But crucially, from 1710 onward, under copyright law the original creation remains the author's and other people can only use it under the author's licence.

  This first copyright statute foresaw the danger of ‘perpetual ownership’. The creator of a work, or whomever they had sold it to, could own the right to copy it only for a limited period of time. After that it would enter what is called ‘the public domain’, and would be everybody's and nobody's. In 1710 the period of copyright protection was fairly short; it has been extended over the years and in Europe is currently seventy years after the death of the creator.

  Another
careful element in the Queen Anne Act was to decree that there is ‘no copyright in ideas’. This makes the law very different from, for example, patent law, which does protect ideas. Let's explain it this way. If I write a detective novel in which, on the last page, it is revealed that ‘the butler did it’ and you later write a detective novel in which – hey presto – there is the same last-page revelation, you are free to do so. What you may not do is copy my form of words. It is the expression, not the thoughts behind the words, that is protected.

  The author's licence to ‘reap where you have not sown’ is one the great, controlled freedoms that have enabled literature (notably narrative literature) to bloom. There is a network of other laws that control freedom. Libel laws make it illegal to write malicious untruths about living persons. Censorship has made it, over the centuries, illegal to publish what is considered (at any particular time) pornographic or blasphemous. More recent legislation controls the publishing of material thought to be racially provocative or an incitement to violence. But the basic freedoms, and disciplines, which make literature what it is today were created by those wise parliamentarians 300 years ago.

  British copyright law was adopted further abroad, and other countries formed their own conventions. It took some time to happen. America did not sign up to international copyright until 1891, which meant the USA was free to plunder British and other nations' literary work. It famously infuriated Dickens, who never did forgive those damned Yankee pirates. Chapter 37 continues the international story.

  The printed book has lasted for over 500 years. Caxton would recognise the copies of Chaucer in our high-street bookshops as a modern version of his own. But is the book at the end of its life in the twenty-first century? Will the e-book take over, as the codex took over from the papyrus scroll? No one knows for certain. But some kind of co-existence seems likely. There is something wonderfully physical about the old vehicle. You use your legs to walk to the shelf, your arms to take the volume down, your opposable thumb and index finger to turn the page. It's a bodily engagement you don't feel with a Kindle or iPad. My guess is that the ‘feel’ (the touch, and even smell) of the printed book will continue to give it a lasting place – if not necessarily first place – in the world of literature for some time to come.

  CHAPTER 12

  The House of Fiction

  Human beings are storytelling animals. That goes as far back as we can trace our species. If you think of fiction, do you think of novels? Well, we did not start writing and reading novels until a fairly precise moment in literary history, in the eighteenth century. We will come to that in the next chapter. Before that moment, fiction took different forms. If we dig, we can find what we might call some ‘proto-novels’ in literature before, in some cases long before, what we think of as the first novel. Five European works of literature will make the point clearer. They are not novels, but we feel a novel trying to get out in their narratives:

  The Decameron (Giovanni Boccaccio, 1351, Italy)

  Gargantua and Pantagruel (François Rabelais, 1532–64, France)

  Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes, 1605–15, Spain)

  The Pilgrim's Progress (John Bunyan, 1678–84, England)

  Oroonoko (Aphra Behn, 1688, England)

  The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75) became hugely popular and influential across Europe (inspiring Chaucer, for instance), particularly after it was printed in 1470. Its bundle of stories resurface everywhere in literature thereafter. The frame story of The Decameron is simple and gripping. The Black Death is ravaging Florence, as it routinely did in the fourteenth century. (In Wakefield, which we looked at in Chapter 6, the disease wiped out a third of the town's population.) You couldn't cure it, all you could do was run away from it and hope it didn't catch you. Ten young people of wealth and breeding – three men and seven women – take refuge in a villa in the countryside for ten days (hence the title – deca is ‘ten’ in Greek) until the plague burns out. To pass the time this brigata (‘brigade’, as the author calls them) each tell one story every day, so that the book contains 100 stories. Boccaccio, the most famous Italian man of letters of his day, used an interesting word for these stories: novella – Italian for ‘some new little thing’. These tales are told in the warmth of the evening, under the olive trees, to the soft chirp of cicadas, with refreshment to hand.

  The subjects range from the fabulous (verging on the fairy story) and neo-classical (drawing on the literature of the ancients) to the bawdy and the knockabout comic, with a stress on the infinite variety of life as it is lived. The stories are cunningly plotted and overwhelmingly subversive in tone. Many of them satirise the Church and ruling establishments – this is young persons' literature. And this ‘new thing’, the novella, is a literary genre that wilfully breaks literary rules and flouts convention. That is part of its newness.

  Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel, originally published as five separate books, has less of a framework than The Decameron. It loosely clumps a huge number of disconnected anecdotes and running jokes around two highly unlikely giants, father (from whom we get the adjective ‘gargantuan’) and son. It is even more mischievous – or ‘licentious’ – than The Decameron and has been, over the centuries, a book much banned. The epithet ‘Rabelaisian’ has become shorthand for literature which is just this side of publishable; sometimes, when the moral climate is harsh, it has been unpublishable and, occasionally, burnable.

  Despite the long history of banning it suffered, there is nothing squalid in Gargantua and Pantagruel's joyous naughtiness. It overflows with what the French call esprit – for which there is no exact English translation, although ‘wit’ comes near. It differs from The Decameron in drawing its energy from the streets, bawdy folk tales and vernacular, or common, speech. All these will be ingredients in the novel to come two centuries later. François Rabelais (c. 1494– c. 1553) was not himself of the streets. He was a formidably well-read one-time monk who, in his sprawling fantasia, takes the whole of classical and ‘respectable’ literature and turns it into his personal playground. To cause laughter, he proclaims in his preface, is the mission of literature. He succeeds magnificently in that mission.

  Don Quixote, the third of our proto-novels, is a work whose story everyone knows but which too few nowadays read cover to cover. Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) was a diplomat's assistant and soldier who lived an unusually eventful life. He is supposed to have had the idea for his great work as a bored prisoner in Spain. It was written for an age in which people had more time than we do. The plot is simple – in fact there is no plot as such. Don Quixote popularised the variety of fiction known as ‘picaresque’: narratives that wander all over the place. The protagonist (more anti-hero than hero) is Alonso Quijano, a middle-aged gentleman living in quiet retirement in La Mancha. It is not, however, a serene retirement. His brain has been poisoned by ancient romances – tales of chivalry and knight errantry. He hallucinates himself into the role of a knight – ‘Don Quixote de la Mancha’ – and sets out, with a homemade cardboard helmet, on a ‘quest’. As his squire he recruits a fat peasant called Sancho Panza. A broken-down nag, Rocinante, is his ‘charger’.

  There ensue a series of comic adventures, or ‘sallies’, the most famous of which is his battle with the windmills, which in his madness the Don thinks are giants. After a series of similar disasters he returns home, dejected but, at last, sane. Once again he is Alonso Quijano. On his deathbed he draws up his will and repudiates all the romances that have poisoned his mind and ruined his life.

  Nonetheless, there is something touching – admirable even – in that rickety, deluded, old man, his nag and his fat cowardly ‘squire’ bravely taking on the windmills. Like all the best fiction, Don Quixote leaves us in two minds. Fool or lovable idealist? That uncertainty is wrapped up in the word we have taken for general use from the story: ‘quixotic’.

  Ever since The Pilgrim's Progress, our fourth proto-novel, was published over three centuries ago, it ha
s been a runaway bestseller, and hugely influential on later English fiction. Its writer, John Bunyan (1628–88) was a son of the working classes, entirely self-educated, and he wrote much of it in jail after being sentenced for preaching ‘heretical’ (i.e. unofficial) religious doctrine. Bunyan's father had been a pedlar, tramping wearily across the country, a pack on his back, a staff in his hand. That, for the son, was an image of life. John was driven, however, by another vision – that of eternal bliss for the righteous, as promised in the Bible. But his view of righteousness was not that of the authorities. Hence the prison and hence – fortunately for us – The Pilgrim's Progress.

  Like Cervantes, Bunyan sees life as a lifelong quest. In Bunyan's case it is a quest towards something – the gleaming city on the hill. Salvation. And what we have to conquer on the way are not foes, but the obstacles that afflict the religious mind: depression (‘the Slough of Despond’), doubt (‘Doubting Castle’), compromise (‘Mr Facing Both Ways’) and, most dangerous of all, the seductive temptations of the city – ‘Vanity Fair’.

  The story opens dramatically. The hero, Christian, is reading a book (the Bible, we can deduce – and, significantly, in English: see Chapter 8). What he has just been reading raises a terrible question in his mind: what shall he do to be saved? Suddenly he runs off shouting ‘Life, life, eternal life’. He knows what he has to do. His wife and children try to stop him, but he puts his fingers in his ears and runs on, leaving them behind. Why this heartlessness? Because everyone must save themselves, a key tenet of the Puritan doctrine. As the next chapter explains, individualism was to become a key element in the novel as a form, which is why so many of them have names for titles: The History of Tom Jones, Emma, Silas Marner, and so on.