Introduction

There is a particular kind of pleasure that belongs only to the reader who comes to a great survey for the first time — the pleasure of standing at the edge of something vast and feeling, rather than merely knowing, that it stretches further than the eye can follow. Edward Albert’s history of English literature is exactly that kind of book. It was first published in 1923, issued by Thomas Y. Crowell in New York, and it carried on its title page the modest but telling subtitle A Practical Text-Book. That word practical is worth pausing over before you read a single page of the main text, because it tells you almost everything about what Albert was trying to do and why, more than a century after its first appearance, this volume still rewards careful reading by anyone who loves the English language and the long, turbulent, astonishing tradition of writing that has been produced in it.

Albert was associated with George Watson’s College in Edinburgh, and he is also credited as the author of A Practical Course in English. Beyond these facts, the biographical record is thin, and this introduction will not attempt to fill the silence with invention. What we can say with confidence is that the book itself reveals a mind of considerable range and genuine enthusiasm — a teacher’s mind, in the best sense of that phrase, meaning a mind that has thought hard about how knowledge is transmitted, what order it should be presented in, and what a reader needs not just to understand a subject but to feel at home in it. The epigraph Albert chose for the volume is drawn from the Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach, the apocryphal text also known as Ecclesiasticus: Let us now praise famous men... Such as found out musical tunes, and recited verses in writing... Their bodies are buried in peace; but their name liveth for evermore. It is a quietly magnificent choice, and it sets the emotional register of everything that follows. This is not a book that treats literature as a series of problems to be solved or a syllabus to be endured. It is a book that treats literature as a form of human survival — the means by which the dead continue to speak, and by which the living are enlarged.

The scope of the undertaking is genuinely formidable. Albert begins in the fifth century, with the departure of the Romans from Britain and the arrival of the Anglo-Saxon peoples who would eventually give the English language its deep grammatical bones and its taste for the concrete and the forceful. He traces the literature produced in that early period — the heroic poetry, the religious verse, the slow emergence of prose — and then follows the tradition forward through the Norman Conquest, through the medieval flowering of Chaucer and the mystery plays and the great prose romancers, through the Renaissance and the extraordinary explosion of drama and lyric poetry that accompanied it, through the Augustan age of wit and formal elegance, through the Romantics and the Victorians, and into the early twentieth century. It is, in other words, a complete account of the literary history of a language — not a partial survey, not a collection of essays on favorite authors, but a sustained and systematic attempt to show how one tradition grew from another, how each age both inherited and rebelled against what came before it, and how the whole vast accumulation of English writing forms something that can, with effort and patience, be understood as a single story.

That story, as Albert tells it, begins in conditions of almost complete obscurity. The opening chapters are frank about this. Of the actual facts concerning the origin of English literature, Albert writes, we know little indeed. Nearly all the literary history of the earliest period, as far as it concerns the lives of actual writers, is a series of skillful reconstructions based on the texts, fortified by some scanty contemporary references, and topped with a mass of conjecture. This is not a confession of failure. It is an invitation to a particular kind of intellectual adventure — the adventure of reading texts whose authors are unknown, whose dates are uncertain, whose manuscripts survived by what can only be described as a series of accidents, and whose language is so remote from modern English that it must be approached almost as a foreign tongue. The four great manuscripts that preserve the bulk of Old English poetry — the Beowulf manuscript, the Junian manuscript, the Exeter Book, and the Vercelli Book — were discovered at intervals between 1651 and 1832, scattered across Europe, some of them unique survivals of traditions that might otherwise have vanished entirely. The fact that we have them at all is remarkable. The fact that Albert can use them to construct a coherent and illuminating account of a literary culture is more remarkable still.

You can read it straight through, from the Anglo-Saxon period to the modern, and if you do, you will experience something genuinely cumulative — a growing sense of how each literary generation was shaped by the pressures of history, religion, politics, and language, and how writers responded to those pressures with the particular resources available to them at their particular moment. This is the most rewarding way to read the book, and it is the way this edition is designed to encourage. But you can also use it as a companion to your own reading — picking it up when you encounter an unfamiliar author or period, reading the relevant section, and then returning to the primary text with a richer sense of context. And you can use it as a reference, moving between the index and the body of the text to track a theme or a form across multiple periods. All three modes of reading are legitimate, and the book supports all three with equal generosity.

What Albert asks of you, in any of these modes, is a willingness to hold a great deal of information lightly — to let names and dates and titles accumulate without demanding that you memorize them, and to trust that the pattern will emerge if you keep reading. The book is dense, in the way that all genuine surveys of large subjects must be dense, but it is never obscure. Albert’s prose is clear, his judgments are direct, and his enthusiasm for his subject is evident on almost every page. When he finds a work dull, he says so — the Cædmon poems, he notes with characteristic candor, are on the average trudging mediocrities which are frequently prosaic and dull. When he finds a work remarkable, he says that too, and with equal directness. This willingness to evaluate, rather than merely describe, is one of the qualities that distinguishes the book from the kind of neutral survey that tells you everything about a work except whether it is worth reading.

The other thing Albert asks of you is patience with the early chapters. The Old English period is the most demanding section of the book, partly because the literature itself is remote and partly because the scholarship surrounding it is, as Albert acknowledges, heavily dependent on reconstruction and conjecture. But the reward for that patience is considerable. By the time you have followed Albert through the heroic poetry, the religious verse, the dramatic monologues of the Exeter Book, and the slow emergence of prose under the influence of King Alfred and the Church, you will have a sense of the English literary tradition that most readers never acquire — a sense of its actual origins, its genuine strangeness, and the extraordinary distance it has traveled. The literature of the Anglo-Saxon period is not a polite prelude to the real story. It is the real story’s foundation, and Albert treats it as such.

The Living Argument of a Literary Tradition

One of the things that makes this book more than a reference work — more than a useful tool, however useful it undeniably is — is the implicit argument that runs through it from beginning to end. That argument is never stated as a thesis, never announced in a preface or summarized in a conclusion. It emerges instead from the cumulative effect of Albert’s choices: what he emphasizes, what he quotes, what he calls remarkable, what he calls disappointing, and above all how he connects one period to the next. The argument, put simply, is that English literature is not a collection of isolated masterpieces but a continuous conversation — a conversation conducted across centuries, in which each generation of writers is responding not only to the world around it but to the writers who came before.

This is not a novel idea, but Albert demonstrates it with unusual concreteness. When he discusses the influence of the Norman Conquest on English literature, he is not merely noting a historical fact. He is showing how the collision of two linguistic traditions — the Germanic English and the Latin-inflected French — produced a language of extraordinary richness and flexibility, a language capable of expressing both the blunt physical world of the Anglo-Saxon kenning and the elaborate courtly refinements of the French romance. When he traces the development of English drama from the liturgical plays of the medieval Church through the mystery cycles and the morality plays to the secular drama of the Renaissance, he is showing how a form grows by accumulation and transformation, each generation inheriting the conventions of the last and bending them toward new purposes. When he discusses the Romantic poets, he is showing how a reaction against one set of literary values — the Augustan emphasis on reason, decorum, and social observation — produced a new set of values that were themselves, in time, reacted against.

This sense of literature as a living argument, conducted over centuries, is what gives the book its intellectual excitement. It is also what makes it genuinely useful to the general reader, as opposed to the student who is reading it under compulsion. If you come to this volume already knowing something about English literature — if you have read Shakespeare and Milton and Keats and Dickens and feel at home in those worlds — the book will give you a new way of understanding what you already know. It will show you the roots of things you have taken for granted, the traditions behind the innovations, the arguments that the great writers were responding to when they made their most distinctive choices. And if you come to the book knowing relatively little — if you are at the beginning of a serious engagement with English literature and are looking for a map of the territory — it will give you something even more valuable: a framework within which everything you subsequently read will find its place.

Albert is particularly good on the relationship between literature and the historical conditions that produced it. He does not reduce literature to history — he does not suggest that a poem is merely a symptom of its age, or that understanding the historical background is a substitute for reading the work itself. But he insists, rightly, that literature cannot be understood in isolation from the world in which it was written. The Christianizing of the pagan English, beginning in Kent in 597, had profound effects on the literature of the Old English period — not simply because it introduced new subjects and new forms, but because it introduced a new conception of what writing was for. The printing press, the Reformation, the rise of a literate middle class, the expansion of empire, the Industrial Revolution, the emergence of the novel as the dominant literary form — all of these historical developments are present in Albert’s account, not as distractions from the literature but as the conditions that made the literature possible and gave it its particular character.

There is also, running through the book, a quiet but persistent attention to the question of what makes literature last. Albert is not interested in mere popularity or contemporary success. He is interested in the qualities that allow a work to survive its own moment — to speak to readers who live in different circumstances, hold different beliefs, and use a different version of the language in which the work was written. This is, of course, one of the central questions of literary criticism, and Albert does not pretend to have answered it definitively. But his repeated returns to the question — his willingness to ask, of each period and each major work, what it is that gives this writing its enduring power — give the book a philosophical depth that goes beyond the merely informational.