I was answering a student question the other day and discovered that what was once common historical knowledge no longer is. Granted, this is about something from the 1800s-early 1900s, and that a few people do today for reenacting or hobbies, but … When I was growing up, everyone knew it. Just like I am having to explain words in English that no one ever uses today (or no young people are familiar with today) but that tie directly to other Germanic languages.
The English teachers and I have tossed this problem back and forth for a while. Students no longer get important references in older books (1980s and before) because they don’t know, oh, the King James Bible, or Shakespeare, or Aesop’s Fables.
So, a question. If you had to pick key cultural works to use to give someone a grounding in Western Civilization, aside from those listed above, what would you recommend?
Mad Genius Club 
14 responses to “Missing the Reference”
I think you’d have to start with Plato and Aristotle. But I’m pretty sure you can only get away with exposing kids to Politics and The Republic in private school. (Wouldn’t want the whippersnappers concluding that the government is corrupt, or that the government deliberately lies, after all.
The Declaration of Independance and the Preamble to the Constitution.
Homer.
Longfellow/Wordsworth/Kipling poems.
Western Civ at what period?
Mass-printed books date to the age of the linotype. Until then, popular reading was limited to those who had access to more expensive books.
Do any of our age’s popular novels decently depict their period? Horatio Hornblower? The Sacket saga?
People who today enjoy =A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum= see the story in a very different way than those who enjoyed the ancient work that inspired it. A young heir to a House besotted with a pretty slave for sale would have been an object of shame if I read the picture aright.
Why did the dark age and medieval warlords become the nobility instead of engaging in ever-worse bloodshed? Was it simply the lack of firearms, or did Christianity temper them with the promise of Hell vs. legitimacy for those who ruled responsibly?
So many threads twist and change color!
Actually, the young patrician in love with the pretty slave was a standard plot of the New Comedy. The tricky slave would convive to bring about their happiness, and the final act would reveal the tokens left with her when she was exposed as a baby reveal her to be patrician too, so they marry, and the slave is freed.
Kipling undoubtedly. And Twain as well. Robert Louis Stevenson would be a good pick. I would also consider translations of Jules Verne and Alexandre Dumas.
For more contemporary picks I would suggest L’Amour stories that deal with a historical event or show something of human morality. Maybe a Tony Hillerman book that intertwines modern and historical cultural values. Maybe Agatha Christie as well. And Charlotte MacLeod is great for expanding vocabulary.
I’d recommend the Harvard Classics. A 71-volume set, it is called “The Famous Anthology of the Greatest Works of World Literature.” Well, the Western World. You can get an e-book set of all 71 for just a couple of dollars on Amazon.com. Marvelous assemblage and you can’t beat the price.
I first came across them in a John P. Marquand novel, Sincerely, Willis Wade. The title character read them for 15 minutes each day to “get culture.”
I don’t think people are starting early enough. Very young children ought to have these stories given to them in abbreviated form. Think Charles Lamb, Howard Pyle, Roger Lancelyn Green, children’s Bibles (good ones), Classic Comics. I noticed this 30 years ago when all the Disney films suddenly had books and merch flooding the kid world. There’s only so much space in a child’s imagination. Ten books about Ariel or one plus a lot of stories about something ELSE. Make a choice. Six year olds are dying for stories and can absorb/are absorbing far more than people realize. Better make it count.
I grew up on Lang’s Coloured Fairy Books and while they have their flaws, they gave me a much wider background.
Oh, Kipling’s collected works for sure. And Mark Twain. Bullfinch’s Mythology. The various color Fairy Book collections. Grimm’s Fairy Tales. (But not Hans Christian Anderson — too depressing, everyone/everything dies!) Perhaps Sir Walter Scott – best-selling pop novelist of his day. Robert Lewis Stephenson.
And getting close to modern, WWII novels can set the tone of whole nations doing Bad Things without the interference of Woke. Alistair Maclean is a good one for that, and into the Cold War. Good Men’s Adventure for the teen boys (And girls, I loved them all!)
I’d go with something like the Carol Burnett show, or some other long running comedy skit series.
Because you don’t get the references, but they’re repeated enough you can figure out most of it.
I’m still picking up on Warners’ Bros’ references. If you knew nothing about classical music other than Bugs Bunny, you could do a lot worse.
I might try to work in “What’s Opera Doc?” this year.
The sign for when things started going downhill culturally was when cartoons stopped referencing Wagner (What’s Opera, Doc) and Rossini (The Bunny of Seville) and started referencing other cartoons.
Bulfinch’s Mythology is a good starting point – pretty much everything I know about not-Greek-or-Roman mythology, I learned from Bulfinch. One of the better versions of the tales of Robin Hood. Somewhere there has to be a version of King Arthur’s legend that isn’t either overlong or a parody. Lang’s color fairy books. A good translation of “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea”. The original Sherlock Holmes stories. The Epic of Gilgamesh (which I have not read myself, but intend to one of these days). Grimms’ Fairy Tales. “The Lord of the Rings”, which may be relatively recent but is still a seminal work in English literature.
I hated Charles Dickens in school, but years later I read “A Christmas Carol” and found it to be a far deeper and stronger story than its myriad of clumsy adaptations, satirs, and parodies make it seem.
Burroughs’ “Tarzan of the Apes” is very very much a work of its time and WILL offend some modern-day readers, but it’s still a fine example of turn-of-the-century “adventure fiction”. Likewise his first two Pellucidar books, “At the Earth’s Core” and “Pellucidar”. I never was much interested in “John Carter of Mars”, but YMMV.
Let’s not leave out the non-fiction: Bruce Catton’s “Centennial History of the Civil War” is worth everyone’s time. “The Longest Day,” by Cornelius Ryan, is THE book about D-Day. Walter Lord’s two books about the sinking of RMS Titanic, “A Night to Remember” and “The Night Lives On.” Pythagoras on mathematics. Euclid on geometry (the story of ‘non-Euclidean geometry’ is a tour de force in thinking outside the box). Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” and “The Descent of Man”.
Anything and everything by the Big Three of Golden Age science fiction writers: Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein.
Oh, and here’s a fun thought for an assignment: Open “Bartlett’s Quotations” to a random page. Pick a quotation from that page and research its original setting — who said it, when, why, and what does it mean?