THE 10 GREATEST BOOKS OF ALL TIME In English Literature

in this video we're going to take a look at the 10 greatest classic books ever written in the English language so without further Ado let's get stuck in shall we hello out there all my bookish friends in booktube land welcome to another episode of Tristan and the classics now like I said this video is a bit of a grand one it's the 10 greatest classic books written in the English language um now I want to say a couple of things up front one one of these was not actually written in English um it's a translation but you'll see why it's included in the list when we get to it but secondly I want to tell you just a little bit about making this video making a list of top 10 um is is pretty impossible because literature is subjective you can have a certain consensus around which books are great however consensus is not literature so everything in literature is somewhat subjective but when I thought of 10 books from the English language that are the greatest classics I thought which books which works have an extraordinary impact on later works or even fictional Works which have an impact on the national identity of the British people and then by extension the English-speaking world and by extension because of the influence of Britain and America over the past couple of centuries the culture of the World At Large and it's based upon those ideas that I came up with this list and this list will be especially useful to you if you are personally on a project of trying to dig a bit deeper in literature um I've said in other videos like on how to build your own classic library then you don't have to read all the books that others consider Classics you want to look at what interests you so go and have a look at that video where I give you tips on how to build a classic library that suits your personality but this video is focused for those who are watching who might want to educate themselves in sort of the pedestal foundations of English literature what I will say is that I'm not going to spend an awful long time on each of them because I could wax lyrical about every single one of these they are all Grand Works um but we're just going to take an overview of why I think they are the 10 greats of the English language now we're going to go chronologically through the 10 great works of classic literature and we're going to start with Beowulf now you've probably heard of Beowulf there's been films made of it it's a grand Saga of of the Scandinavian Northern Germanic ilk but it's English it was written down in Old Anglo-Saxon in the 10th Century can you believe 10th Century that's a thousand years ago that this was first penned down and the story itself may have gone back a long time before that and just been passed orally but this is written in Old English and it's written in a particular way as could be memorable so if you were a traveling Bard as it were telling your stories um you could remember it because of the Rhythm and the meter and the Cadence now the story itself takes place in Scandinavia and we have the king rothgar having some problems with in in his town in his place his land called hirot because of an attack by a monster called Grendel and Grendel keeps coming and knocking through the Great Hall doors and munching on profdar's men often when they're asleep which is a terrible way to be woken up and so hrothgar calls for the aid of Beowulf this Warrior and Beowulf comes along and he takes on the monster Grendel now I don't want to give spoilers away but later on Grendel's mother turns up and Beowulf is in a bit of a fix there and there's a dragon that turns up as well and this cider goes on for quite a long time but why it's so important and why it's such great literature one even reading it in translation it's moving it doesn't read just like prose it is a poem and so you don't just get the usual casual description of things descriptions like the burial of a king or the burning of a king as he's sent off on his boat um is done in Poetic form it's the layering on of of beautiful words upon beautiful words upon beautiful words without so many connectives but also when read in the original language it apparently had a beautiful Cadence It Was Written in stanza's full of alliteration I think it was three thousand odd lines of alliteration and I'll just give you an example of that now I'm going to use obviously the modern translation because I can't read old Anglo-Saxon and so a translation doesn't always follow this but in Old English it would look more like this all the way through just look out for the alliteration fourth from the fence from the Misty moorlands Grendel came gliding God's Wrath he bore came into clouds until he saw clearly glittering with gold plates the Mead Hall of men down fell the door though fastened with fire bands open it spring at the stroke of his paw swollen with rage burst in the Bale bringer flamed in his eyes a fierce lightest fire did you hear that constant alliteration which sort of draws you along you're sort of Galloping along through the story or walking through it but why Beowulf is such a great epic a great piece of English literature is not only is it apparently brilliant in its Old English form but it gives us the ideas of men and women of the day how they perceived life how are they perceived more importantly in the afterlife death friendships loyalty Community the Anglo-Saxon setup would come crashing down in 1066 when the Normans would invade and the French Norman influence would sort of hold sway over the whole land and those ideas were different to the original English-speaking peoples Beowulf gives the British their fundamental most primeval identity of an adventuring people these are ones that used to come across the sea they wanted to tame the elements they had ideas about what made a person great loyalty in close-knit community as opposed to the broader bureaucratic national identity I say national identity it gave the English a national identity what what it was to be an angle an Anglo-Saxon and you'll have to read it to find out what happens at the end because the end is really moving it's really strong and leaves you almost breathless and like I say that was written a thousand years ago if you want to get into English literature then Beowulf is a book at some point that you must read it is one of the 10 greatest works of English literature to get to our second greatest work we need to jump forward 400 years to the age of Jeffrey Chaucer and his Canterbury Tales the reason the Canterbury Tales is so important to English literature is the way it suddenly diverted its attention we're coming out of the high Romantic era in the Middle Ages Britain after the Anglo-Saxons had the influence of the Normans and they brought French culture with them which focused on romance on the Troubadours on courtly love um and chivalry you know those kind of things and so you had the classic setup of knights and princesses um and heroic Deeds of Valor in in the pursuit of either love or God or spirituality I also wrote The Canterbury Tales he did something highly unusual for a start he writes in English um for the most part up to this point the people of the court of whom Chaucer was one were predominantly they would still speak Latin and French but in the past about Century they'd started using English as the main language and Chaucer writes the Canterbury Tales in this but it's not so much that he writes in English as what he writes about that's so brilliant so in the Canterbury Tales this is the story there is an inn in southwark which is a little um quarter of London on the bank of the Thames River and people who are going on a pilgrimage to the town of Canterbury they'll come to London as a stopping point before carrying on and a group of these Travelers assemble at the tabard Inn but these Travelers don't know each other they wait there to form a group so that they can then walk onto Canterbury together to keep themselves safe from Bandits this was the the common practice of the day now amongst them we're introduced by Chaucer who is actually a character in The Canterbury Tales we're introduced to various characters a night his Squire a yeoman who is also sort of like a Forester you've got a prioresse a nun you've got a monk you've got a prior and you've got a Summoner you've got um a student like a student from Oxford and then you've got a good wife The Good Wife of bath probably the most famous of all the characters in The Canterbury Tales and the host of the tabadin says I'll tell you what I will come along with you because you're such a great bunch of people I've enjoyed serving you this evening and what we're going to do is on the way we're all going to tell two stories on the way to Canterbury and on the way back we'll all tell two stories and it will make the time pass and whoever gets the title of the best story they will have a free supper when they get back here it will be paid for by everybody else and that's how the story starts these people are Ordinary People this is not a story about courtly love this is not a story um about the Saints necessarily and keeping it all religious this is not a story about all men clad in armor doing wonderful things for a mistress they are Ordinary People a student a yeoman a friar they're just common people a Summoner that's that's a person who when someone's in trouble with the courts the Summoner goes and gets them summons them to court and they all tell their own different tales and they give us an insight into life as it was for the ordinary person but not only that we identify with them we actually understand how they feel they have got a bit of a different perspective because they lived like 600 years ago so of course they've got a different perspective but the same emotions the same things that make you smile and laugh the irony of life is all in there but it's magnificent because what happens because of Chaucer is literature suddenly becomes interested in the common person telling the story of the everyday man and woman it's revolutionary really and this would eventually lead to the novel the way Chaucer changes the speech of all these characters is something to behold you can it's almost like you can step back in time and inhabit the Middle Ages and see things from their perspective and actually realize that you would have done quite well back then you would have understood how people felt our next book is a book you don't hear much of nowadays and it's Utopia by Thomas Moore and Thomas More was the the Lord High Chancellor of the realm of England under King Henry VII you know this was some bigwig and a serious intellect as well Utopia is a novel but it's passed off as if it's being written or recounted as real events which was quite a common thing to do back then so we're talking we're in the 1500s here now it concerns itself with society and government and politics and philosophy the governance or the well-governance of the human race and around and the book itself is sort of split into two parts in the first part Thomas Moore himself describes going abroad and being introduced to this traveler by his friend and they get talking about the State of Affairs in Europe and the way Europe is managed and the propensity of Kings to keep going to war for trivial things and then there's greed and Intrigue and the backstabbing of court and having to play false in order to get anywhere so all of that's talked about in the first part of the book and more learns from this traveler that he's been introduced to now this traveler has spent the last number of years in an island called Utopia the Island's about 200 miles long it's just off the coast of a Mainland so it's a bit like Britain really and um he's lived there now in book two we have a description of Utopia itself how the society is set up and it's I tell you something it's amazing we are talking about like Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto 300 odd years before Karl Marx we're talking socialism that's written down uh communism and we'll just mention a little bit about this after I've just told you a little more about the the story of utopia Utopia itself is set up and what you've got is 56 different cities all through the island of Utopia they have a maximum population threshold before someone will have to be sent to other cities or sent over to the mainland if there's a decrease in the population on Utopia they cause some of those settlers back there are is it three or six thousand families are allowed per City each family is between 10 and 16 people large 30 families will nominate someone to be in charge of them you know to be sort of like an ombudsman for the families and then a group of those thirties the person that they assigned these these I can't remember what they're called now they assigned someone else to be over them and then they elect a prince over the city and as long as the prince is not tyrannical he will be Prince for life but if it becomes tyrannical he can be ousted there's no private property in Utopia nobody wears fine clothes the fashion industry is done in everyone can wear sort of similar kind of clothing so there's no class distinction gold is used to make things like um chamber pots or toilets slaves are in Utopia normally because they're criminals or because they're captives of War but the slaves are Shackled with gold now the reason is they know they need gold to trade with the outside world but they don't want avarice to take over in the country and so they make they turn the gold into objects which are demeaning so that no one craves gold it's clever isn't it in fact they do the same with precious gems they make the children wear precious gems and play with precious gems so as they grow up they give up the gems because they think it's childish okay there's so much set up about equality in this system and the way punishment is meted out and what for and ultimately more is making the argument of a utopian world it's where we get that phrase a utopian the perfect ideal system where all men have Liberty um egality for eternity I think it may even be more that actually said that I know it's the motto for the French but I think it was more that said that in this book but here's the thing you can read this book in two different ways is Thomas Moore saying that a communist socialist setup is the Utopia the ultimate thing to aim for or is he satirizing the idea by saying it's impossible I'm not going to say any more about this other than if you read it all of the names of utopia and the characters look them up because they all mean something and it's for hundreds of years now the argument still rages about what side Thomas More was on was he for or against the Socialist Communist idea the reason it's so important is because he was crystallizing the thoughts of a Nation who were exploring the outer reaches now the Americas and people were beginning to dream of a more liberal Society and the Utopia does sum up the grand ideal that all modern day countries try and aspire to now how amazing that you've got to say that is great literature if you've managed to capture the ideal to which All Nations today are trying to Aspire to so that was our third one Utopia by Thomas Moore next up on our list just after Thomas Moore is the King James Bible actually I should be more specific I really should say William tyndale's Bible because 90 of the the King James authorized version came from William Tyndale who only a few years before have been burnt at the stake for translating the Bible into English and that brings me on to the first point the Bible is not a work of English it's a work of Hebrew and Greek and a little bit of Aramaic but the reason it's on this list and it's also not classed as fiction but the reason it's on this list is twofold it's not simply that it was translated it was the style of the translation William Tyndale wanted to allow a mere plowboy to be able to read and understand the word of God in his own tongue now to do that he had to skip around being convoluted in his translation of the Greek and the Hebrew into some Scholastic large word wordy volume he had to make it memorable um now granted a lot of the Hebrew poetry and the Greek Renditions made a lot of that possible but when you read the King James version like the original the Rhythm that you find is so attuned to the English ear um you'll get almost like iandic pentameter going through it um and it makes it memorable and just the sheer Brilliance of the translation probably added so much to the impact of the Bible on later works of literature and Society so that's one power that's why I put it in this as English is because of the translation itself that Tyndale named the second point is although it wasn't written by the English or in English originally and it's not Fiction it's just simply too prominent a book not to have in this list no other book has had such an influence on literature schools of thought as the Bible no the book has been probably hated as much as the Bible either and you know attacked the irony is we just talked about Thomas Moore in Utopia he espouses religious freedom everyone's allowed as Moon worshipers some worshipers animal worshipers but he strangely enough despite espousingness in Utopia he actually wrote letters condemning Tyndale for trying to write the Bible in the English language um he he was very much on the get the Heretics side of things anyway going back to the Bible um if you're going to read the Bible it's a massive book um if you want to cover it for literature so rather than read all of it because books like Leviticus Numbers Deuteronomy Ezekiel Revelation is Grand to look at but complicated the Pauline letters the 14 letters by the Apostle Paul um they deal with the intricacies of Hebrew law and how it translates to the Christian way so if you're going to read the Bible or get some background from it I would recommend these parts Genesis that's a really important book because it's alluded to a lot in literature the gospels so that's Matthew Mark Luke and John which form the accounts of Jesus Christ on Earth the Psalms also massively alluded to in literature and then there are a couple of other books you may want to go further on so Ruth is one Esther is another one um The Book of Proverbs is just wise sayings now what I want to say about the Bible itself as a work of literature not going either whether you believe it or whether you don't believe it a lot is said about the Bible what I will say it it does have a uniting message a lot of people just say it's a disparate concoction um having that attitude will undermine your understanding of allusions to it in literature the Bible itself although written by 40 different men over the period of what sixteen hundred years um it actually does have a uniting idea behind it there's actually one single verse in the Bible that all the others tied to did you know that but this is often overlooked when anyone talks about the Western Canon but I would just say that you go to those books if you want a background in the influences of English literature out of all the books on this list this one is by far and away the most influential because of course it was held by practically everyone as the word of God so naturally it's going to hold a bit of a high position in people's minds but a lot of societies well we'll talk the English speaking world and the Western world its moral code its structure of civilization has been shaped by the Bible um fundamentally a lot of the basic laws are script drops so that's why it's such an important book well it's one of the greats is because it has such a far-reaching effect into our everyday life whether we're Believers or not our next work of great English literature is written around the same time that the Bible was translated into English and that is the complete works of William Shakespeare I had to put the complete works in there was no way I could just pick Hamlet or Macbeth or Romeo and Juliet that I just The Works of Shakespeare are just a phenomenon the man who wrote this whoever he may be after all the arguments was just amazing his insight into The Human Condition was in my opinion is unmatched it's certainly unmatched in the English-speaking world and he covers all areas of the human life with great insight and depth of feeling he allows you to touch to grasp to hold up and feel all of the virtues and vices of humanity and to consider them you know you've got loyalty you've got the nobility of um Henry V what you would call the his ideal Christian King as it were marrying the power of the The Throne with the religiosity of the church you've got the hubris um of Richard II you've got the ambition of Macbeth you've got the moral dilemma of Hamlet and doing what is right you know conscience plays such a fierce role in that I think as indeed it does in Macbeth the role of conscience you've got the the the problem of jealousy in Othello you've got the family problems in King Lear you've got the hijinks of the comedy of um Comedy of Errors which I actually love to bits and amongst all of this just the most brilliant use of language the the Rhythm the heart beating iambic pentilator by the way if this is the first time you're watching me please please please go and watch my video on what is I am Nick pentameter as in Shakespeare explained I am at pentamicize think is what I've called it um it will give you the most expensive explanation of I am at pentameter on YouTube that I've seen and then there's just the sheer Brilliance of his similes his metaphors his terms of phrase so vivid so simple that we use them now like 400 years later they're that good have you ever said to someone good riddance you're quoting troyless and Cressida by William Shakespeare okay music is the food of love that's Twelfth Night um have you ever said to someone that they've LED you on a wild goose chase you're quoting Mercutio from Romeo and Juliet okay we Band of Brothers that's Henry V forever and a day that's a Shakespeare I think drop of the drop of a hat I think is Shakespeare as well you know this guy turned up with so many phrases he's just a prodigy an absolute Marvel that only seems to come along like once every Thousand Years Shakespeare also is alluded to so much through the rest of literature including the world's literature the complete works of Shakespeare and the Bible those two works are alluded to probably more than all others in literature of course you've got the Greeks as well from way back but those two in English literature are alluded to all the time and so if you really want to get to grips with English literature get deep into it then slowly work your way through the works of Shakespeare so here's a surprise the lighting is different and I'm wearing different clothes that's because the next book that I'm about to mention I accidentally deleted while editing so I've got to do it again the next day and that book is John Milton's Paradise Lost John Milton is the great poet of the English he wrote Paradise Lost as an epic poem he did it deliberately he wrote in blank verse which has a meter but deliberately doesn't rhyme now in doing this he was trying to copy Homer with his Odyssey and and Virgil and the old Greeks with their epics and he was asked why have you decided to make this poem not right he could have just said because I I didn't want it to rain but he actually said I want to liberate poetry and the English language from the tyranny of rhyming and he felt that the greatest stories were like the Greeks best told without rhyme but structured in a particular way that carried the force and force of feeling and greatness and Grandeur of the story now the story itself Paradise Lost is about the fall of Man Adam and Eve in the Bible being tempted by Satan the devil and Paradise Lost actually starts before that takes place it comes to it but it starts before with um Satan and God having a falling out and a war in heaven and Satan losing getting cast to hell and then he's got this massive chip on his shoulder and brood's an awful lot about himself and tries to justify his acts um and it's not my place here to be talking about what the whole story is about but the reason Milton wrote it he said is he wanted to justify God's actions to men because clearly we live in a world in which if there was a benevolent Creator this world doesn't seem to match that idea and you've got to remember with Milton this is the time when the English had gone through the Civil War there'd been a lot of Bloodshed um a lot of Cruelty enacted um Milton and things had reversed again after this with the restoration of the monarchy so humans men and women were confused with the world and what he was writing they were familiar with Bible story but he was trying to do an exposition on it it's almost an apologetic you could say what's interesting though is how people have interpreted this epic poem some come down on the the thought that Milton was on the side of Satan whereas others say no clearly he wasn't but you'd have to read that and judge that for yourself so one of the things about literature unless you know that author directly you bring to bear in it a lot of your own views and prejudices now the book itself if you were to get into it and decide to read it be prepared to be very very confused it's written as a poem it's written as an epic which is not necessarily the best way to tell a story in terms of clarity um and then it's full of ornate language and various kinds of rhythm which are not always pleasing to our ear um not in our modern day anyway but even when he wrote it people complained like the guy who printed it said I don't know what it means because there's a layering up of claws upon claws I think some critic one says these Clauses up here um as if they don't know where they came from and stand there embarrassed in the stanza but then they're given a relief at the end of each stanza so this is not a work you simply just sit down and read lightly it's one that you have to go to and maybe take it a bit at a time what's remarkable considering it's about the Fall by the way of Adam and Eve and the tree of knowledge of good and bad is that Adam and Eve don't turn up until like three quarters of the way through the book it all gives a huge background to Satan himself and Milton appears in the poem he he stops and tells you um about what it's like to write the poem um the the journey that he's going on in some respects this is an epic novel about writing an Epic Novel as well as recounting the scriptural story and I'd just like to say it's not the scriptural story there is a lot where Milton has read into it he's trying to get to grips with God's ideas of justice and Satan's challenge to God's Authority so that he can explain this to the Common Man in Epic verse but what he ends up completing is the Great British epic it's a work of poetry which has endured and inspired poet after poet both believer and non-believer you know you think of Percy Shelley he thought this work was wonderful Percy Shelley was an atheist and you've got others who were devout and they thought it was wonderful for the opposite reasons that Shelley did one thing they could agree on was the masterliness the masterful handling of the language and the beauty which the language pulls up and like I say when you read it it's it's going to make you slow right down there may not be any other work in English um that we can actually easily read um which is so hard to get through if if you're not ready for it um with the exception of if you're going back to reading old Anglo-Saxon like Beowulf if you'd have to learn a new language essentially there I'm talking it's a language you recognize on the page but the meanings there's a there's a lot to get your head around however it's a it's an absolute gargantuan piece um edifice in English literature and undoubtedly I don't think anyone could argue that it shouldn't be in the top 10 works in the English language for our next work we are jumping right forward to the 19th century right at the beginning of the 19th century that's jumping over an awful lot of great works in the meantime and the one I'm going to pick it was a toss-up actually between two so I'm going to mention a bonus one here the one I left out which perhaps could have or should have even made it to this list was um Tristram Shandy by Lawrence Stern but that wasn't the one I put on this list the one I put on this list comes just shortly after and it's Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen something about Pride and Prejudice it's its effect on the novel you've got the first person narrative which before Pride and Prejudice was and at the time of was still the primary mode of narration the first person the third person omniscient you know the Godlike perspective that knows the thoughts of everybody that is used but Jane Austen uses a feature of narration although she's not the maker of it it happened than before she used it so effortlessly um it's almost as if she didn't actually do it thinkingly and that is free indirect speech I should do a short video on this I always say short it always ends up getting half an hour free indirect speech this is when you've got a third person narrator who looks at you from a distance but can suddenly zoom in and read the thoughts of the character so we shouldn't get a close-up um so you could say that Lizzie Bennett walked into the room and her mother was crocheting a blanket now that's just third person it's observation but if it said Lizzie Bennett walked into the room and her crusty old mother sat knitting her a horrific crochet monstrosity I've described the same thing but there's no but the words I'm using clearly have to come from the protagonist Lizzy you know Christie is a descriptive word it's not just the narrator observing um that monstrosity is clearly Liz's feelings towards this crochet blanket this is free indirect speech it allows the narrator to sort of drop into the mind of the main character and come back out zooming in and out making us feel more psychologically involved in the drama um and it can it can mislead us as well it's a great use for for making dramatic irony Jane Austen uses this throughout her works and she uses uses it effortlessly after Jane Austen who wasn't received too well in her time she's later discovered and absolutely praised to the High Heavens For This and lots of people use this austinite free indirect speech and so I pick Pride and Prejudice because it's the first one of hers and it's also the narrative style that she uses which is now so commonplace to us it wasn't in its day that in that respect I don't know to what extent it influenced lots of others but if it did then that makes it a seriously great work of English literature for the effect it had on narration going forward we're jumping further along in the 19th century now and we're coming to the great English writer Charles Dickens and I've picked for this one um David Copperfield now um a subscriber who watches this channel Troy big shout out for you make some amazing observations about books um he got in touch with me when I I released this list on a little short video and he said David Copperfield really he says I wouldn't even say it's one of Dickens best works let alone part of the Big Ten and I responded to him saying in some respects I think I'd agree it's not his best work so why pick it it's because it's almost the totem of Charles Dickens you know the icon that is Charles Dickens David Copperfield is semi-autobiographical it it follows the story of young David trying to make his way in the world through the ups and downs the vicissitudes of Light of Life the the slings and arrows of fate and how he rides with these how he progresses how he goes back how he meets characters who dissemble and lie and and not what they appear and how he meets others who he thinks are not good and have got a bit of a shady pass to turn out to be good what Copperfield what happens in David Copperfield is it it sort of summarizes everything that Dickens is about um I couldn't put the complete works of Charles Dickens in this because not all of his works are worthy in my opinion although I love him to bits but what Dickens does crosses literature is he creates characters like you just wouldn't believe some people don't like them they say they grow tests they're caricatures the reason their character chores is because just like a cartoonist takes one feature of your face and blows it out of proportion and everyone looking at that picture goes yeah that's you even though you might have a nose seven times bigger than your head in a cartoon Dickens does that with characters from everyday life which we all instantly recognize and what that allows you to do through Dickens works and he does it better than anybody else is he allows you to get into the psychology of your protagonist who is always an ordinary character but he allows you to touch and feel the aura and the psychology of the other people you interact with in the book he allows you to literally stand in the Streets of London in the middle of Victorian England and mix with those people as if they're as close and real as your next door neighbors what Dickens does in his works is he takes characterization to a new level now of course some people they don't quite like that style of characterization and many authors um you know might have criticizing them not being realistic enough but most authors across Europe Tolstoy thought Dickens was the greatest you know amongst the greatest um and the reason for that was be his ability to love his characters and make you emotionally connect with the character and everyone really when they wrote a character from this point going forward once said red Dickens they knew what a character had to be now you if you could make it more real great but you had to connect to them like Dickens could get you to connect to his characters and that shaped a lot of literature um yeah the undercurrents of Dickens is felt everywhere also he plays into the national psychic Christmas would not be the way it is without Charles Dickens Christmas Carol not because it's tradition but because people were losing interest in Christmas before he released the Christmas carol um and then we just have all these names that he comes out with which are part of the common vernacular really in in English as well you know you think of an Artful Dodger it's a it's a you know a naughty little pickpocket a street urchin isn't it an Oliver Twist is some poor ragged little child so he introduced or put into Sublime vision a lot of the identities of humanity and so I picked David Copperfield not because it's necessarily his best one some think that um Great Expectations is another ground Bleak House is another fantastic one but David Copperfield is the story of Dickens himself and that's why I put it on this list there you will see a person trying to make their way it's Dickens actual life but written with all the beautiful characters that only Dickens could write so well our next book is Moby Dick by Herman Melville now you might say that's American not British I did say English literature this is I know you could call it a miracle of trump so I mean Works written in English now Moby Dick poor that is one book and a half that is that's a seriously powerful piece of literature this opened up it goes beyond psychological this is almost the meaning of life kind of stuff we've got this um monomaniac which is always how it's described Captain Ahab of the pequod who wants to go after this white whale that sinks ships which actually stoved in his ship and caused him injury and he wants revenge but you've got the narratos the somewhat ordinary slightly boring Ishmael and he's just looking for a sense of adventure he often gets to this point where he says he feels like you commit suicide life has no meaning so he goes and puts himself into an adventurous situation which is dangerous and so working on a whaling boat in the middle of the 19th century that was dangerous work also in the freezing conditions you know setting sail from Nantucket so what we get is this group of disparate characters on the pequod and you've got the the great queequake the cannibal the noble cannibal um they're all in this boat and you are trapped in a very isolated dreary gray Misty flat sometimes world you have the inner turnings of not just the author the narrator but you can sense the inner feelings of the crew as well the discontent the male content the uneasiness of being with Ahab this monomaniac after his whale but all set in this broad expanse of ocean and what it gives birth to is a novel that grows almost too large for a shelf to contain issue down to the rudiments of humanity what we are inside this adventure we call life which is full of threat obsessions uneasy interactions what is the symbolism of the ocean and of the whale you know there's a question that goes in there that's been debated a lot um you know the differences of character like I think of quick Quake naturally he would be somewhat on the outsides of society because he's not white um but his nobility and it's so beautifully handled through ishmael's narration because it makes you realize we are all human we all experience things the same really and this is where classic literature is great because classic literature transcends race it transcends boundaries it transcends economic status people who just say this is written by a white person it doesn't matter you know quickway could be white and Ishmael could be black the story would not change one bit we resonate with the emotions with the feelings with the understanding of being brought close almost to a frosted mirror of ourselves seeing the hazy outline of what we truly are within and this is particularly encapsulated in Moby Dick because of the sheer vastness of the landscape and yet the claustrophobic narrowness of the scene which is what you suck on the pequod and like I say written with the most beautiful prose in places that you will ever come across it showed to other authors at the end of the 19th century just what could be accomplished with a novel and that would take off with the modernists um and you'd end up getting to books like Ulysses although written in a totally different style the greatness of it and one thing I will say about Moby Dick if you think of Northrop fry is the great literary critic he talks about his his sort of his five modes of the tale and he comes to the bottom one the ironic one which descends somehow circularly into the top one of legend by using an ordinary man Moby Dicks like this they are ordinary men somewhat Outcast ahab's a bit weird and yet from that looking down on someone who's mental he turns into this Legend he comes in at the Top Mode in Fry's sort of five modes of literature so uh that's the next one that was Moby Dick by Herman Melville and now we come to our 10th of the ten greatest classic books in English literature and I'm keeping it within the 19th century I've mentioned Ulysses that could go in this but it's 20th century I wanted to stop in the 19th and this book is George eliot's middlemarch some class this as the greatest novel ever written in the English language full title of this book is important when telling you what's on this list it's Middle March a study of provincial life and provincial means everything outside the capital really um and this takes place in a made-up Town Middle March in the Midlands which is pretty much like Coventry because that was down the road from George Eliot she she was born in nuneaton and she actually had friends in little Villages which are now inside the great city of Coventry um in fact one of her friends was a cobbler whose name was George Eliot so maybe that's where she got her name from now the study in provincial life it does follow four main characters but instead of going through the story I'll tell you why it's a work of great literature it's its scope and it's unmatchable observation she wrote a realist book in middlemarch which you could say has been never been matched she observes the attitude of so many parts of society she observes the role of sex in society she observes the role of marriage the role of religion the role of Academia the role of Commerce the role of Agriculture this the growth of City the shrinking of the Pastoral way of living she covers so much she was criticized in her day by some writers by saying her books disjointed and one chapter goes into the other but without making any sense if you've read Middle March you'll know what they mean by that but it does make sense however it's not plot driven so although there is a plot a thread two main threads going through the book with four main characters she is also just observing how life sweeps through how if we were to Zone in on someone hone in on someone we might be able to make a story out of them but that isn't actually life really is it life is something that is happening of which we are merely a cork bobbing around in a tumultuous sea but she comes in analyzes some of those lives that holds an interest to us but by doing it she incorporates so much of the way of life that people are living and again this is what makes classic literature so great is it makes us reflect on life it puts life in front of us to experience it helps open ourselves up to ourselves we begin to identify with emotions inside the protagonists or the antagonists and they it causes us to question ourselves do we identify with them do we not do we hope they go one way and not the other you know the ending of Middle March is so disappointing to some people but unbelievably real considering what date it was meant to be taking place in and the truth that George Eliot keeps on this book keeping herself from infecting it with her desires coloring it with her observations it's an outstanding piece of work so there are the 10 greatest classic books in the English language you'll notice that six of them go back to the year 600 and before it's because they are so foundational to the literature that we have now and the way we see things now of course one book goes back thousands of years that's the Bible but the translation into English had a massive effect um on changing the English-speaking peoples of the world if you really want to get into literature if you're really looking to like I say make a deep deep deep foundation and you're prepared to put in a bit of the work go back to these books at some point now are there any books on this list that you would like me to go into further in a different video If there are please put your comments down below until the next time I see you on video I wish you Joy in your reading

Channel: Tristan and the Classics

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Keywords: 10 greatest works of english literature, 10 greatest books of english literature, 10 greatest books in english literature, greatest works in english literature, the greatest works of english literature, the greatest works of literature, the greatest literature of all time, the greatest novels of all time, top 10 greatest classic books ever, best books of all time, greatest classics of all time lecture, the greatest books of all time, top 10 greatest books of all time

Id: Ziq7H5ENuHQ

Length: 53min 52sec (3232 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 16 2022