HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

The Amber Spyglass completes Philip Pullman's trilogy, His Dark Materials

2000 BCE

Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen dramatizes the visit of Werner Heisenberg to Niels Bohr in wartime Denmark

1998 BCE

A schoolboy wizard performs his first tricks in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

1997 BCE

English poet Thom Gunn's The Man with Night Sweats deals openly with AIDS

1992 BCE

Alan Bennett's play The Madness of George III is performed at the National Theatre in Lond

1991 BCE

Peter Shaffer's play about Mozart, Amadeus, has its premiere in London

1979 BCE

English poet Ted Hughes marries US poet Sylia Plath

1956 BCE

James Bond, agent 007, has a licence to kill in Ian Fleming's first novel, Casino Royale

1953 BCE

US poet Sylvia Plath commits suicide in London

1953 BCE

English author and alcoholic Malcolm Lowry publishes an autobiographical novel, Under the Volcano J.B. Pries

1947 BCE

English author W.H. Auden's first collection of poetry is published with the simple title Poems

1930 BCE

The gentleman detective Lord Peter Wimsey makes his first appearance in Dorothy Sayers' Whose Body?

1923 BCE

In The Economic Consequences of the Peace Maynard Keynes publishes a strong attack on the reparations demanded from Germany

1919 BCE

Oscar Wilde's De Profundis, a letter of recrimination written in Reading Gaol to Lord Alfred Douglas, is published posthumou

1905 BCE

J.M Barrie's play for children Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up has its premiere in London

1904 BCE

Oscar Wilde's comedy Lady Windermere's Fan is a great success with audiences in London's St. James Theatre

1892 BCE

Lewis Carroll publishes Through the Looking Glass, a second story of Alice's adventures

1872 BCE

Charles Darwin puts forward the theory of evolution in On the Origin of Species, the result of 20 years' research

1859 BCE

Charles Dickens begins the publication in monthly numbers of David Copperfield, his own favourite among his novels

1849 BCE

24-year-old Charles Dickens begins monthly publication of his first work of fiction, Pickwick Papers (published in book form in 1837)

1836 BCE

12-year-old Charles Dickens works in London in Warren's boot-blacking factory

1824 BCE

Thomas Paine publishes his completed Age of Reason, an attack on conventional Christianity

1795 BCE

English historian Edward Gibbon, sitting among ruins in Rome, conceives the idea of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

1764 BCE

English poet Thomas Gray publishes his Elegy written in a Country Church Yard

1751 BCE

The Augustan Age begins in English literature, claiming comparison with the equivalent flowering under Augustus Caesar

1702 BCE

Paradise Lost is published, earning its author John Milton just £10

1667 BCE

John Milton's Lycidas is published in memory of a Cambridge friend, Edward King

1637 BCE

John Donne, England's leading Metaphysical poet, becomes dean of St Paul's

1621 BCE

Ben Jonson writes The Masque of Blackness, the first of his many masques for the court of James I

1605 BCE

English poet Edmund Spenser celebrates the Protestant Elizabeth I as The Faerie Queene

1590 BCE

The 18-year-William Shakespeare marries Anne Hathaway in Stratford-upon-Avon

1582 BCE

William Tyndale studies in the university at Wittenberg and plans to translate the Bible into English

1524 BCE

Erasmus and Thomas More take the northern Renaissance in the direction of Christian humanism

1510 BCE

Thomas Malory, in gaol somewhere in England, compiles Morte d'Arthur – an English account of the French tales of King Arthur

1469 BCE

Chaucer begins an ambitious scheme for 100 Canterbury Tales, of which he completes only 24 by the time of his death

1387 BCE

Chaucer completes Troilus and Criseyde, his long poem about a legendary love affair in ancient Troy

1385 BCE

A narrator who calls himself Will, and whose name may be Langland, begins the epic poem of Piers Plowman

1367 BCE

William of Ockham advocates paring down arguments to their essentials, an approach later known as Ockham's Razor

1340 BCE

Duns Scotus, known as the Subtle Doctor in medieval times, later provides humanists with the name Dunsman or dunce

1300 BCE

The material of the Eddas, taking shape in Iceland, derives from earlier sources in Norway, Britain and Burgundy

950 BCE

Beowulf, the first great work of Germanic literature, mingles the legends of Scandinavia with the experience in England of Angles and Saxons

800 BCE

The Venerable Bed, in his monastery at Jarrow, completes his history of the English church and people

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