1667 Milton’s Paradise Lost
1668 Dryden’s Essays
1678 Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress
1711 Addison’s Spectator
1719 Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe
1726 Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels
1733 Pope’s Essay on Man
1755 Johnson’s Dictionary
1791 Boswell’s Life of Johnson
1833 Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus
1859 Darwin’s Origin of Species
Mrs O’Connor would then take each item in turn and spend one entire Saturday morning of two and a half hours talking to us about it. Thus, at the end of three years, with approximately thirty-six Saturdays in each school year, she would have covered the one hundred items.
And what marvellous exciting fun it was! She had the great teacher’s knack of making everything she spoke about come alive to us in that room. In two and a half hours, we grew to love Langland and his Piers Plowman. The next Saturday, it was Chaucer, and we loved him, too. Even rather difficult fellows like Milton and Dryden and Pope all became thrilling when Mrs O’Connor told us about their lives and read parts of their work to us aloud. And the result of all this, for me at any rate, was that by the age of thirteen I had become intensely aware of the vast heritage of literature that had been built up in England over the centuries. I also became an avid and insatiable reader of good writing.
Dear lovely Mrs O’Connor! Perhaps it was worth going to that awful school simply to experience the joy of her Saturday mornings.