The Oxford Companion to English Literature edited by Dinah Birch
Oxford University Press, £35
The Oxford Companion to English Literature, edited by the scholar and diplomat Sir Paul Harvey, was first published 77 years ago in November 1932. It was the first of the highly regarded Oxford Companions and has been enormously popular ever since; a staple not only of school and public libraries but of many homes up and down the country. It was the brainchild of Kenneth Sisam, best known for his book Fourteenth Century Verse & Prose, who conceived it when he was working at the university press as a guide on the lines of the Reverend Ebenezer Cobham Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, “to contain English authors, plots of their works, and characters; foreign authors commonly quoted; legendary characters; a little classical background; and allusions, such as the Wise Men of Gotham.”
Harvey, who wrote most of the original entries himself, produced a second edition in 1937 and a third in 1946. A fourth edition, edited by Dorothy Eagle, was published
in 1967 (my copy, with its battered green and brown dust jacket, “reprinted with corrections, 1975”, and priced at “£6.75 net”, still has a proud place on my shelf).
The fifth (1985) and sixth (2000) editions, edited by Margaret Drabble, have now been followed by the seventh, edited and updated by Dinah Birch. She is Professor of English Literature at Liverpool University, author of Ruskin’s Myths, Ruskin on Turner and Our Victorian Education and editor of scholarly editions of The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot and The Duke’s Children, one of the Palliser novels by Anthony Trollope.
The OCEL, as older users tend to refer to it, has become, over the years, the standard reference book for students and – dreadful term – the general reader alike. A handy, one volume, affordable and reliable mine of useful and literate information. And it’s like an iceberg; not everything that is there is visible to the naked eye. But it’s immensely reassuring to know, when reading an entry, that what is there in front of you on the page is just a fraction of what the scholarly team of writers knows about the subject.
In her introduction Professor Birch says she sees the OCEL as “a guide to English literature in its broadest context” and has introduced “generously enhanced coverage” of children’s literature, travel writing and post-colonial literature.
There are more than 1,000 new entries – including pieces on writers such as Roy Fisher, Thomas Kinsella, Stephen Poliakoff, Michael Palin, Jacqueline Wilson and Anaïs Nin, and subjects such as black humour and problem plays – while the old entries have been reviewed, revised and, in many cases, substantially rewritten.
There are some fine introductory essays, too, on Literary Culture and the Novel in the New Millennium by Hermione Lee; Cultures of Reading by Kelvin Everest; Black British Literature by Bénédicte Ledent; and Children’s Literature by Michael Rosen.
The OCEL is now an invaluable guide to literature in English – rather than just a guide to English literature – but while much of the new material is very useful, a few of the new entries are, frankly, a little odd. Birch was keen to include more science-fiction which, while not to everyone’s taste, is fair enough, even if most sci-fi is more pulp fiction than literary fiction. Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams all deserve to be included. But Lafayette Ronald Hubbard?
The entry for L Ron Hubbard could and should have acknowledged that his writing is penny dreadful (this is a reference book about literature, after all) and, as it describes him as “founder of the Church of Scientology”, could and should have referred to his infamous remark as he pondered giving up knocking out rubbish space operas to set up his own “church”: “Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous; if a man really wanted to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion.”
And Scientology, as the French will be only too happy to tell you after the recent decision of a court in Paris to fine the sect 600,000 euros for organised fraud, is not a proper church or a religion but a cult. I’m also not sure what an entry about Star Wars – a desperately over-rated American film depicting cowboys and indians in space, notable only for a dashing performance by Harrison Ford as Han Solo – is doing in a book about English literature. Bring on the thetans, eh?
But I am being a churl. If this edition flounders, and it does, when tackling the contemporary – an entry on John Grisham is particularly poor – the core entries, and there are more than 7,000 pieces in 1,164 pages, are spectacularly good. And, thankfully, many more people are going to pick up this book to read about John Marston, Thomas Traherne or Richard Harris Barham than they are to look up L Ron Hubbard or The Indigestible Triton.
If you want to know anything about more than 1,000 years of English literature from Old English on – and you may remember the old joke, a favourite among Oxford dons, about using Anglo-Saxon to refer to the period and the culture and Old English to refer to the language, as there can be no confusion if you talk about an Anglo-Saxon gentleman while there can be confusion if you refer to an Old English gentleman – then you will find it here.
The Oxford Companion to English Literature is a treasure trove of ideas and information and an absolute and enduring pleasure to read. Pick it up to check a date, confirm a spelling or find the exact title of that Jacobean play, Victorian novel or Metaphysical poem and I defy you not to find another, and then yet another (“to set budding more, / And still more, later flowers for the bees”) fascinating entry to read.
Every home should have this literate literary companion.
Keith Richmond
