Writers & Artists
Britain’s artistic heritage is astoundingly rich and globally renowned. Literary roots stretch from Early English epics such as Beowulf through Chaucer, Shakespeare, Burns, Austen and Tolkien to today's best seller: JK Rowling. Artistic notables include Turner, Constable, Henry Moore and Damien Hirst. These literary and artistic legacies are strong, and links and artworks can be found in countless cities, museums and galleries.
Authors & Poets
Chaucer
The first big name in Britain's literary history is Geoffrey Chaucer, best known for The Canterbury Tales. This mammoth collection of fables, stories and morality tales, using travelling pilgrims (the Knight, the Wife of Bath, the Nun's Priest and so on) as a narrative hook, is considered an essential of the canon.
Shakespeare
For most visitors to Britain (and for many locals) drama means just one name: Shakespeare. Born in 1564 in the Midlands town of Stratford-upon-Avon, William Shakespeare made his name in London, where most of his plays were performed at the Globe Theatre.
He started writing plays around 1585, and his early theatrical works are grouped together as 'comedies' and 'histories', many of which are household names today – such as All's Well that Ends Well, The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Richard III and Henry V. Later in his career Shakespeare wrote the plays known collectively as the 'tragedies', including Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Hamlet and King Lear. His brilliant plots and spectacular use of language, plus the sheer size of his body of work, have turned him into a national – and international – icon.
Today, almost 400 years after he shuffled off his mortal coil, the Bard’s plays still pull in big crowds, and can be enjoyed at the rebuilt Globe on London’s South Bank and at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s own theatre in his original hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon.
Burns
Familiar to pretty much everyone in Britain are the words of Auld Lang Syne, penned by Scotland's national poet Robert Burns, and traditionally sung at New Year. His more unusual Address to a Haggis is also still recited annually on Burns Night, a Scottish celebration held on 25 January (the poet's birthday).
oLiterary Locations & Their Writers
Stratford-upon-Avon: Shakespeare
Lake District: Wordsworth
Edinburgh: Burns, Scott, Stevenson, JK Rowling
Oxford: Tolkien, Lewis Carroll, CS Lewis
Bath: Jane Austen
Wordsworth & the Romantics
As industrialisation began to take hold in Britain during the late 18th and early 19th century, a new generation of writers, including William Blake, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, drew inspiration from human imagination and the natural world (in some cases aided by a healthy dose of laudanum). Known as the 'Romantics', the best known of all was William Wordsworth; his famous line from the poem commonly known as 'Daffodils' – 'I wandered lonely as a cloud' – was inspired by a walk along the shores of Ullswater in the Lake District.
Dickens, Elliot, Hardy & Scott
During the reign of Queen Victoria (1837–1901), key novels of the time explored social themes. Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist is a tale of child pickpockets surviving in the London slums, while Hard Times is a critique of the excesses of capitalism.
At around the same time, but in a rural setting, George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Anne Evans) wrote The Mill on the Floss, whose central character, Maggie Tulliver, searches for true love and struggles against society's expectations.
Thomas Hardy's classic Tess of the D'Urbervilles deals with the peasantry's decline, and The Trumpet Major paints a picture of idyllic English country life interrupted by war and encroaching modernity.
Waverley by Scotland's greatest historical novelist, Sir Walter Scott was written in the early 19th century and set in the mountains and glens of Scotland during the time of the Jacobite rebellion. It is usually regarded as the first historical novel in the English language.
Children's Literary Favourites
Britain's greatest literary phenomenon of the 21st century is JK Rowling's Harry Potter series, a set of otherworldly adventures that have entertained millions of children (and many grown-ups, too) from the publication of the first book in 1996 to the stage play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, in 2016. The magical tales, brought vividly to life in the Harry Potter films, are the latest in a long line of British children's classics that are also enjoyed by adults. The pedigree stretches back to the works of Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland), E Nesbit (The Railway Children), AA Milne (Winnie-the-Pooh), CS Lewis (The Chronicles of Narnia) and Roald Dahl (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory).
Modern Authors
Britain – and its literature – changed forever following WWI and the social disruption of the period. This fed into the modernist movement, with DH Lawrence perhaps its finest exponent. Sons and Lovers follows the lives and loves of generations in the English Midlands as the country changes from rural idyll to industrial landscape, while his controversial exploration of sexuality in Lady Chatterley's Lover was banned until 1960 because of its 'obscenity'.
Other highlights of this period included Daphne du Maurier's romantic suspense novel Rebecca; Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, an exploration of moral and social disintegration among the English aristocracy in the 1920s and 30s; and Richard Llewellyn's Welsh classic How Green Was My Valley. After WWII, Compton Mackenzie lifted postwar spirits with Whisky Galore, a comic novel about a cargo of booze shipwrecked on a Scottish island. While in the 1950s, the poet Dylan Thomas found fame with the radio play Under Milk Wood (1954), exposing the social tensions of small-town Wales.
Post 1970s writers of note include include Martin Amis (London Fields); Ian McEwan (Atonement and On Chesil Beach); Kate Roberts (Feet in Chains); Bruce Chatwin (On the Black Hill) and Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting).
British Art
Portraits & Landscapes
In the 19th century, leading painters favoured the landscape. John Constable's best-known works include Salisbury Cathedral and The Hay Wain, depicting a mill in Suffolk (and now on show in the National Gallery, London), while JMW Turner was fascinated by the effects of light and colour, with his works becoming almost entirely abstract by the 1840s – vilified at the time but prefiguring the Impressionist movement that was to follow 50 years later.
Victorian Art
In the mid- to late-19th century, the Pre-Raphaelite movement harked back to the figurative style of classical Italian and Flemish art, tying in with the prevailing Victorian taste for fables, myths and fairy tales. An iconic work is Sir John Everett Millais' Ophelia, showing the damsel picturesquely drowned in a river, it can be seen at the Tate Britain.
William Morris saw late 19th-century furniture and interior design as increasingly vulgar, and with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones founded the Arts and Crafts movement to encourage the revival of a decorative approach to features such as wallpaper, tapestries and windows.
North of the border, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, fresh from the Glasgow School of Art, fast became a renowned artist, designer and architect. He is still Scotland's greatest art nouveau exponent.
Pop Art & Brit Art
The mid-1950s and early '60s saw an explosion of British artists plundering TV, music, advertising and popular culture for inspiration. Leaders of this new 'pop art' movement included David Hockney, who used bold colours and simple lines to depict his dachshunds and swimming pools, and Peter Blake, who designed the collage cover for The Beatles' landmark Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album.
A new wave of British artists came to the fore in the 1990s. Dubbed 'Britart', its leading members included Damien Hirst, initially famous (or infamous) for works involving pickled sharks, semi-dissected human figures and a diamond-encrusted skull entitled For the Love of God.