… well, being forced to actually.
Wandering around my local Waterstones recently, I noticed a whole section on exam notes of various kinds: 11+ practice, SATs revision and various parts of the GCSE and A level English syllabi…syllabuses sounds more natural doesn’t it?
Anyway, I had a look and found that all the literature was 20th century, apart from the occasional Shakespeare play. It was all good literature and very interesting but stuff that if you have any leaning towards the subject you would find and read for yourself. Not so the syllabus that was in use in the 1960s. I am so grateful that I was studying English Literature then, because I had to read many volumes that left to myself I would very probably never have picked up: Milton’s Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes, Middlemarch by George Eliot and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales for example. Virtually all literature from within the last 100 years is going to be vastly more accessible to teenagers than anything written earlier but surely that is just the time to tackle what is difficult.
I am so glad I was made to experience all these important pieces of English Literature but I definitely will not be re-reading Middlemarch. It is about 800 pages long, dense and dull.