What you will find below is a chronological list of the books C.S. Lewis mentioned reading--or, in some cases, simply quotes or mentions in general (my assumption here is that he's able to quote them because he read them). I also decided to list duplicates, as this may indicate not necessarily that he's reread the work but that it left a lasting impression. Documenting his rereading is also interesting, especially given Lewis's comments on it: in Of Other Worlds, a conversation is recorded in the chapter "Unreal Estates," in which Lewis says "...a book's no good to me until I've read it two or three times..." I suspect he wrote the same idea elsewhere. [In fact, in his letters: 1 February 1916, after rereading Jane Eyre, he writes to Arthur Greeves, "You really lose a lot by never reading books again."]
I'm using The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, volumes 1-3, which chronicle much more than what he read, but I've always been amazed by his reading life. This list isn't complete by any stretch, but I think it might be interesting to lay out what he read according to his correspondence.
One thing I anticipate is that his letters to his friend, Arthur Greeves, will contain the most information. He regularly wrote to Greeves about books, specifically what he'd read.
Lewis was born 29 November 1898 near Belfast, Ireland.
21 February 1909 (to his father): H.G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon (1901).
21 May 1910 (to his father): Shakespeare, Richard II (1595). He quotes the play, and writes, "...but what is this to Shakespearian students like you and I who know what happens--'after a well graced actor leaves the stage.' "
14 May 1911 (his father): Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice (1600). He writes that he'll be attending a showing, so not necessarily reading, but his comment suggests he's already aware of the story.
6 January 1913 (to his father): Shakespeare, Julius Caesar (1623). Similar situation to the one above.
6 July 1913 (to his father): Lewis mentions Kipling poetry. "...there is nothing that I should prize more than a nice edition of Kipling, whose poems I am just beginning to read and to wonder why I never read them before..."
19 October 1913 (to his father): Shakespeare, Romeo & Juliet (1597).
24 November 1913 (to his father): Richard Wagner, The Rhinegold & The Valkyrie (1910); Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods, translated by Margaret Armour (1911).
28 November 1913 (to his father): Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Locksley Hall (1842); In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850).
30 November 1913 (to his father): Thomas Babington Macaulay, Lays of Ancient Rome, "Horatius." Quotes the poem.
7 February 1914 (to his father): Sir Arnold Lunn, The Harrovians (1913).
[In a note, we read "Sometime in mid-April (1914)...Jack came to know his 'First Friend.' " This friend was Arthur Greeves, and they discussed H.M.A. Guerber's Myths of the Norsemen from the Eddas and Sagas (1908).]
17 May 1914 (to his father): "This term in the Grundy I have discovered a new poet whom I must get, Yeats." He also asks for his brother Warnie's Greek Testament.
31 May 1914 (to his father): He mentions reading the poetry of Robert Bridges, "our present poet laureate." The note tells that the volume Lewis read was mostly likely from 1912; also Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights (1847).
22 June 1914 (to his father): The book of Joel; Arthur Christopher Benson, The Upton Letters (1905); The Times (2 June 1914).
29 June 1914 (to his father): A.C. Benson's essays (he compares them to John Ruskin's).
6 July 1914 (to his father): John Henry Newman, Verses on Various Occasions (1868).
21 September 1914 (to his father): Shakespeare, As You Like It (1623); Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766).
26 September 1914 (to Arthur Greeves): Homer, The Iliad; H.G. Wells, The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories (1911); Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (1811).
5 October 1914 (to his father): Quotes Jane Austen as he describes St. Nicolas Church in Bookham, of "no parts"; The Times Literary Supplement, "The Nietzschean Way" (1 October 1914).
6 October 1914 (to Arthur Greeves): H.T. Buckle, History of Civilization in England (1857; 1861); Henrik Ibsen's plays.
13 October 1914 (to his father): Virgil, Georgics.
14 October 1914 (to Arthur Greeves): T.W. Rolleston, Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race (1912).
18 October 1914 (to his father): Mentions Matthew 6:28 in a bid to get his father to stop worrying about the war.
25 October 1914 (to his father): Horace, Odes. "Seize the day"--he uses the quote in another bid to stop his father's worry.
4 November 1914 (to Arthur Greeves): W.B. Yeats, Plays for an Irish Theatre (1911).
10 November 1914 (to Arthur Greeves): William Morris, The Well at the World's End (1896) & Sigurd the Volsung (1876); William Harrison Ainsworth, Old St Paul's (1841).
17 November 1914 (to Arthur Greeves): Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte D'Arthur (1906); John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667).
24 January 1915 (to his father): Mentions Mark 3:26 in a jest about doctoring his father; Homer, The Iliad and The Odyssey; Tacitus, Agricola.
26 January 1915 (to Arthur Greeves): Charlotte Bronte, Villette (1853); Henry Seton Merriman, The Grey Lady (1895), and With Edged Tools (1894).
2 February 1915 (to Arthur Greeves): Remarks that Morte D'Arthur is the greatest thing he's ever read. William Makepeace Thackeray, Henry Esmond (1852); calls George Henty, author of Out in the Pampas (1868) and other books for boys, an "arch-fiend."
3 February 1915 (to his father): Rudyard Kipling, Kim (1901), The Jungle Book (1894), The Second Jungle Book (1895), Puck of Pook's Hill (1906), The Seven Seas (1896).
13 February 1915 (to his father): Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), he uses a quote to open the letter; Euripides, Helena (412 BC); Algernon Charles Swinburne, A Study of Shakespeare (1880).
16 February 1915 (to Arthur Greeves): Mentions 1 Samuel 16:23 to help describe his mood.
3 March 1915 (to his father): Quotes Adonais by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1821); Walter Savage Landor, Pericles and Aspasia (1836-7); quotes Kenilworth by Sir Walter Scott (1821). He also mentions Punch magazine.
7 March 1915 (to his father): Algernon Charles Swinburne, Poems and Ballads; Virgil, The Aeneid: VII & VIII.
21 March 1915 (to his father): Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822).
4 May 1915 (to Arthur Greeves): John Rutherford, The Bread of the Treshams (1903); Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew (1623); Arthur Clutton-Brock, William Morris: His Work and Influence (1914); Charlotte Bronte, Shirley (1849), Jane Eyre (1847).
11 May 1915 (to Arthur Greeves): William Morris, The Roots of the Mountains (1890); Hans Christian Andersen, The Mermaid and Other Fairy Tales (1914).
13 May 1915 (to his father): Francis Bacon, "Of Masques and Triumphs," in Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral (1625).
25 May 1915 (to Arthur Greeves): Mentions Revelation 4:4-10; William Morris, Roots of the Mountains.
28 May 1915 (to his father): Quotes John Milton, Sonnet 16, and Swinburne.
1 June 1915 (to Arthur Greeves): Laxdaela Saga (13th century), translated by M.A.C. Press, Temple Classics (1899).
8 June 1915 (to Arthur Greeves): Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814).
18 June 1915 (to his father): Plato, Phaedrus; Cecil Raleigh & Henry Hamilton, The Whip (1909); Shakespeare, Othello (1622), King Lear (1608), Macbeth (1623), Hamlet (1603).
29 June 1915 (to Arthur Greeves): E.V. Lucas, The Open Road (1905); Maurice Hewlett, ("an extract from") Pan and the Young Shepherd (1898); Charlotte Bronte, The Professor (1857). Note: He mentions two others from Hewlett, Lore of Proserpine (1913) and Forest Lovers (1898), but clearly hadn't read them.
19 July 1915 (to his father): Quotes Genesis 3:19 and mentions the orators Demosthenes and Cicero.
24 July 1915 (to Arthur Greeves): Henry Seton Merriman, The Sowers (1896); Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Christabel and Other Poems, (1816), The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, (1798). He also mentioned having never read George Eliot.
28 July 1915 (to his father): Quotes G.J. Danton in Le Moniteur (4 September 1792): "Boldness and ever more boldness."
5 October 1915 (to Arthur Greeves): Charlotte Bronte, Shirley (1849); Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1596); Swinburne Poems and Ballads.
12 October 1915 (to Arthur Greeves): In an answer to what his day consists of, including what he studies, he mentions Thucydides, Homer, Tacitus, Plato, and Horace; Sappho, poems (mid 7th cent. BC); Gaius Valerius Catullus, poems (1st cent. BC); Jack London, The Jacket (1915).
22 October 1915 (to his father): Quotes Francis Bacon, "But enough of these toys"; alludes to Friedrich von Logau's Sinnegedichte (1654), translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
11 November 1915 (to his father): Rudyard Kipling, Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses (1892), The Day's Work (1908), and The Seven Seas (1896); Sir Henry John Newbolt, who is known for "his nautical ballads" in Admirals all and Other Verses (1897); Thomas Love Peacock, Headlong Hall (1816).
15 November 1915 (to his father): William Shakespeare, Sonnet 17 (1609); Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea (1883-6); Algernon Charles Swinburne, Erechtheus (1876), Atalanta in Calydon (1865); R.C.L., "Killed in Action," (in Punch, 13 Nov 1915).
16 November 1915 (to Arthur Greeves): Mentions a comment from Horace, found in Epistles; writes that he's finished the first volume of Spenser's "The Faerie Queene," as well as reread William Morris's The Well at the World's End.
19 November 1915 (to his father): Quotes several authors: George Gordon, Lord Byron, The Destruction of Sennacherib (1815); Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Wreck of the Hesperus (1839) & The Village Blacksmith (1839); Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1849-50).
24 November 1915 (to his father): W.S. Gilbert & Arthur Sullivan, The Pirates of Penzance (1879).
4 December 1915 (to his father): Virgil, Aeneid; Andrew Lang, History of English Literature (1912); John William Mackail, Springs of Helicon: A Study in the Progress of English Poetry from Chaucer to Milton (1909) & The Life of William Morris (1899); mentions wanting to read Chaucer because of the former work, but quotes Geoffrey Chaucer to open the letter; Gilbert Murray, A History of Ancient Greek Literature (1897).
1 February 1916 (to Arthur Greeves): He's working on his new volume of Spenser's "The Faerie Queene"; rereading Jane Eyre; Algernon Blackwood, The Education of Uncle Paul (1909). He also mentions The Lore of Proserpine by Maurice Hewlett (1913?). This is one of the few books not noted by Hooper. Arthurian Chronicles, Represented by Wace and Layamon (1912).
Comments
Post a Comment