The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More(74)

                              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.