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Inspiring inquiry through picture books. — Kath Murdoch

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Inspiring inquiry through picture books. — Kath Murdoch

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"The bridge will only take you halfway there, to those mysterious lands you long to see. Through gypsy camps and swirling Arab fair, and moonlit woods where unicorns run free. So come and walk awhile with me and share the twisting trails and wondrous worlds I've known. But this bridge will only take you halfway there. The last few steps you have to take alone."
Well before I became interested in inquiry-based learning, I was passionate about the role of literature - particularly picture books - in the classroom. I will never forget a lecture given by Walter McVitty when I was in my first year of study at teacher's college here in Melbourne. I think he planted the seed for what would be a life-long love affair with children's books. In one gentle, poignant moment in the lecture he modeled the way one might read to a baby, snuggled on its parent's lap, having its head softly stroked while the book was read aloud. Years later, when I found myself doing that exact thing with my own babies - I was grateful to McVitty for the fire he sparked in me as a wide-eyed, young student teacher. There is a magic in books that remains unsurpassed by any other medium. Story is one of the most powerful ways we can find out about the world - and the best stories leave us with more questions than answers. To be honest, I think not a day should go by without the joy of sharing literature as a class. A great book is hard to beat as a vehicle for building community.

So I am always taken aback when teachers with whom I work struggle to name a picture book or novel they have recently shared with their children - let alone how they plan to use literature to help students make deeper connections within an inquiry . Perhaps we are simply overwhelmed by the volume and diversity of available texts (youtube clips, memes, infographics, slideshows, images...) so it becomes harder for the humble picture book to find its way into our planning and teaching. Or perhaps we place too great an emphasis on gathering 'information' in order to answer questions - which naturally leads to a stronger focus on non fiction texts.

The inquiry classroom needs to be a habitat for story. The compelling pull of narrative can often lead us to understanding the world more deeply than any 'data' ever can. I think literature serves 3 key purposes for the inquiry teacher:

As 'mentor texts' for inquiry thinking itself...there are so many beautiful books that are structured around questions or whose central characters ask questions and demonstrate an inquiry stance.

To PROVOKE inquiry - stories that confront our thinking, that introduce us to ideas we had never considered, books that are so delightfully complex or ambiguous that we just want to keep asking and delving deeper.

To contribute to students' understanding of key CONCEPTS being explored. Fiction itself is, of course, born of life-experience. Using literature to help children make connections to themselves and to the data being gathered across the whole inquiry can be a very powerful way of deepening understanding. This is a far cry from the days of simply reading any old books about the 'topic'... stories need to be carefully selected for their resonance with the key concepts underpinning the inquiry.

Here are just a few favourites that reflect these purposes - with an emphasis on modelling and inspiring the act of inquiry itself. I would love to hear yours!

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Inspiring inquiry through picture books.

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"The bridge will only take you halfway there, to those mysterious lands you long to see. Through gypsy camps and swirling Arab fair, and moonlit woods where unicorns run free. So come and walk awhile with me and share the twisting trails and wondrous worlds I've known.

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The Maps We Wandered Into As Kids - The Awl

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The Maps We Wandered Into As Kids - The Awl

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The Maps We Wandered Into As Kids

If I ruled the world, or at least a publishing company, all books would contain as much supplementary information as possible. Nonfiction, fiction - doesn't matter. Every work would have an appendix filled with diagrams, background information, digressions and anecdata. And of course, maps. Lots and lots of maps. This predilection probably sprang from the books I read as a kid - books like The Phantom Tollbooth, The Hobbit and The Princesss Bride - all of which feature engaging maps that serve as gateways to imaginary lands. Here, say these maps, you're in this other world now.

Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth
In the beginning of The Phantom Tollbooth, listless youngster Milo wakes up one morning to find a tollbooth has appeared in his room. He also finds a letter that includes "[o]ne (1) map, up to date and carefully drawn by master cartographers, depicting natural and man-made features." The "master cartographers" here is, actually, the book's illustrator, cartoonist Jules Feiffer (with some author assist). Feiffer's involvement with Phantom Tollbooth came about incidentally - he and Norton Juster were neighbors in a Brooklyn Heights apartment bulding. Soon they became close friends,roommates and collaborators. As Feiffer remembers it, he would illustrate passages as Juster read them aloud. But the map was a bit of a sticking point. Feiffer hated to draw two things, horses and maps, and The Phantom Tollbooth included both. Juster sketched out the map's basic dimensions, which Feiffer then traced and made over into his signature style. If Juster made him draw a map (and at least a few horses), Feiffer was able to sneak in a jab in return: the Whether Man's appearance, a bald doughball in a toga, is based on Juster. In the 50th-anniversary edition of the book, the author jokes, "This was quite unfair, since everyone knows I never wear a toga."

As a map: It's a perfect example of where hand-drawn aesthetics work best in maps - across a small area mapped specifically for visitors, as the exaggerated landmarks are given weight over exacting spatial accuracy. In this way the unfamiliar can be easily spotted and identified. It's a style commonly seen in attraction maps, like Anika Mottershaw's Map of London or theme-park maps, like this one of Walt Disney World.

A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh
The map of the Hundred Acre Wood appears in the first Winnie-the-Pooh book entitled, wait for it, Winnie-the-Pooh. Created by E.H. Shepard (who also illustrated The Wind in The Willows), the map is meant to appear drawn by Christropher Robin, with "Drawn by me and Mr Shepard helpd" written at the bottom and the cardinal directions on the compass marked as P-O-O-H. The storybook woods are based on the actual Five Hundred Acre Wood in Ashdown Forest, near Milne's country home in Sussex. The original sketch for the map was owned, curiously enough, for a long time by Pat McInally, known in some circles for having the only perfect Wonderlic Test score and also being the first Harvard grad to play in the Super Bowl, which he did for the Cincinnati Bengals in 1981 (zing at you, Ryan Fitzpatick). McInally's collection, including that preparatory sketch, is currently up for sale at Peter Harrington's rare book shop in London, yours if you happen to have a spare £115,000 - that's $182,241.73 - to burn.

As a map: The key difference between a map like this one and the one from The Phantom Tollbooth is purpose. While Feiffer's map is intended for exploration, Christopher Robin-E.H. Shepard's map is a documentation of a known land. In an imaginary world, what's beyond the borders doesn't matter so much. Here the only indication of the world beyond is the "To North Pole" note, an obvious sort of landmark for a child's map. With its focus on the "here" and elision of the "there," a map of an imaginary world is not unlike early maps, such Hecataeus' map of the world, drawn in approximately 500 BC, with its amorphous borders of "ocean." Both Hecataeus and Christopher Robin are making the same point - sure there's probably other stuff, but this is what's important.

William Goldman's The Princess Bride
The Floren and Guilder kingdoms described in The Princess Bride are located "between where Germany and Sweden are today." For any other geographic particulars about the countries, the reader has to consult the map found in the endpapers (in some editions, a fold-out map in the center), drawn by William Goldman (if other illustrators made the map, I haven't been able to find a reference to them). The map is a doozy - jammed full of details, landmarks, labels, and with no perspective whatsoever. I mean, the Sun is on this map. The trees are the same size as the ships.

As a map: The map is deliberately evoking the feel of a Medieval illuminated manuscript, as this is an exaggerated version of how many maps looked around the times of princesses and feudal castles. Though examples of these kingdom-level maps are abundant and accessible, I'd like to particularly draw your attention to collection of sixteenth-century maps of Jerusalem, made available by The Jewish National University Library. The gallery beautifully illustrates the diversity to be found in this type of region-specific map. While none of them include the Sun, like Goldman's map, they often use multiple perspectives to show the mapped lands.

L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz
All told, Baum drew forty individual maps of Oz to accompany his novel. This is the major one, though, showing the entirety of the land and its surrounding areas. The Emerald City, in the center, is surrounded by four distinct countries. The countries are bordered by deserts (Great Sandy Waste is the obvious winner here and a great potential new name for the litterbox). Beyond the deserts like a number of intriguing countries that make at best a passing appearance in the story, such as Merryland and the Country of Gargoyles. "Kansas" of course appears nowhere.

As a map: A straightforward map if ever there was. One thing to note, though: the compass is reversed, East and West are switched. This is an L. Frank Baum original error! The first copy of this map was on a glass slide, when Baum went to make a paper copy he traced it backwards. It's a great example of a political map - it's easy to imagine it as a pulldown over the chalkboards of Oz classrooms. I'd direct you to a political map to look at for comparison, but we all know what those look like. Instead, let's take a peek at the map drawn for Gregory Maguire's Wicked. First of all, while there's no North arrow, the cardinal directions have been corrected from Baum's original. This map gives a more nuanced view of Oz, complete with a legend and some topographical definition. If the first map was a classroom pulldown, this is the map on the quiz at the end of the chapter on which you have to label all the features.

J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit
Like The Wizard of Oz, The Hobbit contains many, many maps. Most of them were drawn by Tolkien's son, Christopher, but Thror's Map was drawn by Tolkien himself. In the story, Gandalf gives this map to Bilbo at the beginning of the story, the impetus for our hero's "unexpected journey" to recover the dwarves' treasure from Smaug, the dragon of Erebor.

As a map: Drawn more or less to scale, Tolkien's map shows locations in relation to each other with only sparse detail - only what you absolutely need to know to get where you're going, no hints of what else is out there. A modern example would be something like this charming map called " Getting Drunk on Passyunk." Only the information you require, all of the in-betweens omitted. It's the sort of map you might draw on a napkin for a friend from out of town who isn't sure where she's going. "Oh, sure, once you leave my house, you take a left. When you get to the donut shop make another left, then veer right at the house with the spaceship mailbox. If you get to the traffic circle, you've gone too far. Presto: you're at Erebor!"

Ellen Raskin's The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I Mean Noel)
Okay, so this one isn't a map of an imaginary land - the United States wasn't conjured out of Raskin's imagination - but it is a lovely chapter title page. I include it here because a) Ellen Raskin is the bee's knees and b) this was one of my favorite books as a young girl (I borrowed it from the library so often that the librarians finally just gave it to me one day). In this case, the map serves as a symbol of what's happening in the book: Protagonist Mrs. Caroline Fish Carillon's search for her missing husband is centered on her only clue, a half-heard phrase from a drowning man, "Noel(glub) see (blub) all... I (glub) new...". The power of words, right? Anyway: she takes the final word as an indicator of location and crisscrosses the country to check every town that starts with "New."

As a map: This typographic style of map has become incredibly popular over the past few years, particularly as a way to show a city by its neighborhoods. But a map made completely of words is nothing new. Edwin Morgan's Chaffinch Map of Scotland, a poem published in 1965, uses the regional variations of names for a common songbird to create a map of his country. Howard Horowitz's poem "Manhattan," reproduced here, appeared in The New York Times in 1997. Flickr user amapple has created a small but impressive set of maps focusing on such linear features as the Mississippi River and the Silk Road. Typographic mapping makes an impact even when the words aren't locations. National Geographic included a type map of US surnames in its February 2011 issue, and an an interactive viewer is available on their website. My last name is everywhere.

On a final note, I'll point out a notable map omission from recent literature: I couldn't believe The Hunger Games didn't include a map of Panem!!! This is exactly what I meant when I said that books should have as much supplementary information as possible. But evidently, there are a lot of us spatial types out there, and an assortment of reader-drawn maps have popped up. My favorite belongs to Livejournal user "aimmyarrowshigh," who describes the process she used to determine national borders and each district's location. The result is a spectacular map that would make any cartographer proud.

Previously: Blame It On Volcanoes and Pictures Of You From Space

Victoria Johnson is The Awl's resident cartographer. Hobbit and The Princess Bride maps via .

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If I ruled the world, or at least a publishing company, all books would contain as much supplementary information as possible. Nonfiction, fiction - doesn't matter. Every work would have an appendix filled with diagrams, background information, digressions and anecdata. And of course, maps. Lots and lots of maps.

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Blog: On maps in children's books (and how much we love them) · Readings.com.au

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Blog: On maps in children's books (and how much we love them) · Readings.com.au

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On maps in children's books (and how much we love them) by Emily Gale

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What it is about maps in children's books that we love so much? For me it's the very immediate suggestion that this author has created an entire, detailed world for the reader. They've thought of everything, from the twists and turns of a river, to...

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A Summary and Analysis of the ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ Fairy Tale | Interesting Literature

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A Summary and Analysis of the ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ Fairy Tale | Interesting Literature

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'Little Red Riding Hood' was, Charles Dickens said, his first love. It is one of the most universally known fairy tales: if you were to ask 100 people to name a fairy tale, 'Little Red Riding Hood' would be one of the most popular answers. And much like a number of other fairy tales, which seem to have grown up around older oral tales ('Rumpelstiltskin', for instance, is reckoned to be a whopping 4,000 years old), 'Little Red Riding Hood' can be traced back to the 10 th century when it was circulating as a French oral tale, and also existed as a fourteenth-century Italian story named 'The False Grandmother', though it only became popular under this name in the 1690s, when it appeared in the work of the French fabulist Charles Perrault. It rapidly established itself as one of the best-loved and familiar fairy stories in the western world. Yet what is the meaning of 'Little Red Riding Hood'? Before we venture an answer to this - via an analysis of the story's key features - it's worth recapping the plot in a brief summary.

A young village girl who lives with her mother is given a little red riding-hood to wear, and everyone starts to refer to her as 'the Little Red Riding-Hood' on account of it. One day, the girl's mother asks her to go and visit her grandmother, who lives in the next village, through the forest. Little Red Riding-Hood is given some food to take with her to give to her grandmother. She sets off, and on the way, while travelling through the woods, she meets a talking wolf, who asks her where she's going. Little Red Riding-Hood tells him that she's going to visit her grandmother, and the wolf asks where her grandmother lives. Little Red Riding-Hood tells him she lives in the first house in the village, on the other side of the mill. The wolf says he'll head there himself, taking a different route, and they can have a competition to see who can get there first.

While Little Red Riding-Hood takes her time walking to her grandmother's house, picking nuts and flowers in the forest, the wolf legs it as fast as he can. When he gets there, he knocks at the door and pretends it's the woman's granddaughter bearing food for her. The grandmother, who is in bed unwell, tells the wolf, believing him to be Little Red Riding-Hood, to pull the latch and come in. The wolf does so, and immediately falls upon the grandmother, devouring her. Then he gets into bed and pretends to be the woman he's just so rudely gobbled up.

When Little Red Riding-Hood eventually hobbles into view, and knocks at the door, the wolf pretends to be the girl's grandmother, whose voice sounds hoarse because 'she' has a sore throat. Little Red Riding-Hood pulls the latch and enters the house, and is surprised by her grandmother's big arms ('all the better for embracing you, my child!' her 'grandmother' replies), her deep voice ('all the better for greeting you'), her big ears ('all the better for hearing you'), her big eyes ('all the better for seeing you'), and her big teeth ('all the better to eat you with!'). And with that, the wolf eats Little Red Riding-Hood, and that's the rather less-than-happy ending of this classic fairy tale.

Or rather, that is how many versions of the tale of Little Red Riding-Hood end. But Little Red Riding-Hood doesn't always die. Should the wolf be allowed his dessert (he has, after all, already devoured the grandma), or should he get his just deserts? Should 'Little Red Riding-Hood' have a happy ending, or should Little Red Riding-Hood meet a grisly end?

Surprisingly, it was the Victorian Dinah Mulock Craik who allowed the poor girl to be eaten up, while the Brothers Grimm - hardly queasy about the idea of children meeting a gruesome death - have the wolf fall asleep after he's lunched on Little Red Riding-Hood and her grandmother, only for a huntsman to turn up and cut open the wolf's stomach, freeing the (remarkably still living) young girl and her grandparent. Other versions let the girl live. One French version from 1868 has her saved at the last minute, thanks to the remarkable deus ex machina involving a wasp stinging the wolf's nostril, the sound of which gives a signal to a tomtit, which warns a nearby huntsman that something's up, so he promptly shoots an arrow through the window, ending any further plans for lupine feasting. Some people went to considerable lengths to avoid Little Red Riding Hood ending up as lunch.

But since she does tend to end up being eaten by the wolf, it's worth asking what the moral of this fairy tale is supposed to be - assuming it has a moral. A number of fairy tales are about the dangers of going off into the woods alone and talking to strange men (or, for that matter, talking wolves): compare here 'Goldilocks and the Three Bears'. Little Red Riding-Hood goes out into the big bad world unsupervised, and is taken advantage of by the predatory wolf, which, thanks to her loose tongue, kills both her and her grandmother. Little Red Riding-Hood is too innocent: she fails to realise that divulging the whereabouts of a vulnerable old woman might put her grandmother in danger, and then fails to run there as quickly as possible, in the hope of warning her grandmother or foiling the wolf's plans (though it could be countered that a little girl would find it hard to outrun a wolf running at full pelt!). The Brothers Grimm made the moral clearer, with Little Red-Cap being told by her mother not to stray from the path. It is the girl's failure to follow this instruction that leads to her encounter with the big bad wolf, and her subsequent fate (though as we've seen, she's brought back from the dead, or at least from the wolf's belly, in the Grimms' version).

But it is that final conversation between the wolf and Little Red Riding-Hood which remains iconic. It turns out that this, too, is older than the 1690s version of the fairy tale published by Perrault. The Opies draw a link between this exchange and one found in the Elder Edda (thirteenth century), which sees the Norse night-god Loki explaining the somewhat unfeminine attributes of the 'woman' who is being offered to the giant Thrym as his bride. The bride is really Thor in disguise (the similarities between this tale and Little Red Riding-Hood are already becoming apparent), so the mischievous Loki has to do some serious sales patter here:
'These maids of Asgard,' said the Giants to each other, 'they may be refined, as Thrym's mother says, but their appetites are lusty enough.' 'No wonder she eats, poor thing,' said Loki to Thrym. 'It is eight days since we left Asgard. And Freya never ate upon the way, so anxious was she to see Thrym and to come to his house.' 'Poor darling, poor darling,' said the Giant. 'What she has eaten is little after all.' Thor nodded his head toward the mead vat. Thrym ordered his servants to bring a measure to his bride. The servants were kept coming with measures to Thor. While the Giants watched, and while Loki nudged and nodded, he drank three barrels of mead. 'Oh,' said the Giants to Thrym's mother, 'we are not so sorry that we failed to win a bride from Asgard.' And now a piece of the veil slipped aside and Thor's eyes were seen for an instant. 'Oh, how does it come that Freya has such glaring eyes?' said Thrym. 'Poor thing, poor thing,' said Loki, 'no wonder her eyes are glaring and staring. She has not slept for eight nights, so anxious was she to come to you and to your house, Thrym.'
All the better for conning you with, we might say.

We've been calling her 'Little Red Riding-Hood', but of course that's only a nickname. In the version of the fairy tale included by the Opies in their indispensable The Classic Fairy Tales , the Christian name of Little Red-Riding Hood is given as 'Biddy'.

As Dickens recalled in his short sketch 'A Christmas Tree': 'I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding-Hood, I should have known perfect bliss. But, it was not to be.' In summary, Little Red Riding-Hood is one of those fictional characters whom we meet in childhood and who remain as archetypes emblazoned on our imaginations. How we should analyse the story's ultimate moral remains unclear, but it may well have stemmed from that age-old advice parents pass on to their children: don't talk to strange men. Or wolves. But we've somehow lost that last bit.

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A Summary and Analysis of the 'Little Red Riding Hood' Fairy Tale

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The meaning of a classic story 'Little Red Riding Hood' was, Charles Dickens said, his first love. It is one of the most universally known fairy tales: if you were to ask 100 people to name a fairy tale, 'Little Red Riding Hood' would be one of the most popular answers.

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A Short Analysis of ‘Ring-a-Ring o’ Roses’ | Interesting Literature

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A Short Analysis of ‘Ring-a-Ring o’ Roses’ | Interesting Literature

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'Ring-a-Ring o' Roses' is a well-known nursery rhyme. But this intriguing little quatrain has attracted some surprising speculation and its origins are often erroneously attributed. What does this short rhyme mean? And where did it come from? What is this ring o' roses and what is it being used for? And why does everyone fall down? The questions multiply.

Ring-a-ring o' roses,
A pocket full of posies,
A-tishoo! A-tishoo!
We all fall down.

Although 'Ring-a-ring o' roses' is probably familiar to most readers and has been a part of many childhoods for a number of generations, the words as we know them only became standardised surprisingly recently: Iona and Peter Opie, in their endlessly illuminating The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (Oxford Dictionary of Nusery Rhymes) , record that as recently as 1898, when Lady Gomme collected various nursery rhymes, there were a staggering twelve versions in circulation, and only one of these bore any real resemblance to the four-line song cited above. Indeed, before 1881, the Opies surmise, the modern wording of the rhyme may have not been 'found in children's literature' at all before this date. Yet 'Ring a ring a rosie' was in circulation, according to William Wells Newell in his Games and Songs of American Children (1883), nearly a century earlier, in 1790. The sneezing and falling down were added later. An illustrated edition of Mother Goose by Kate Greenaway, published in 1881, has 'Hush! hush! hush! hush!' in place of those a-tishoos, though her version of the rhyme ends with the children falling or being 'tumbled' down.

And clearly the song meant to accompany a dance, wherein children hold hands and dance round in a 'ring' or circle. But it may have been that the idea of falling down originated in a curtsey that was performed at the end of the dance - rather than actually collapsing on the ground, the children may have originally merely bowed.

But the most famous origin-story involving 'Ring-a-Ring o' Roses' is that the rhyme refers to the Great Plague, specifically the one of the seventeenth century that devastated London in 1665 and prompted the inhabitants of the infected Derbyshire village of Eyam to isolate themselves from the rest of the country, so as to minimise the spread of the disease. This interpretation of the rhyme sees the 'ring-a-ring o' roses' representing the red marks or lesions - which, in this interpretation, show up like 'rings' on the skin - which are (again, supposedly) associated with the symptoms of bubonic plague. The posies in the pocket are the herbs and flowers people carried to ward off the disease (because until relatively recently people believed that disease was caused by smell). Similarly the 'a-tishoo!' is a symptom of plague, since victims supposedly sneezed when in the grip of the disease. Finally, of course, the falling down represents the death of the plague victim.

This interpretation doesn't stand up to even the most perfunctory analysis. For one thing, this list of symptoms doesn't match those which accompany bubonic plague (which is marked less by sneezing or red ring-like lesions as by black swellings underneath the armpit and groin - indeed, 'bubonic' is from bubo, meaning 'groin'). For another, the earliest version of this rhyme, as we've already seen, doesn't surface until the end of the eighteenth century, over a hundred years after the Great Plague (though it's worth remembering that far less destructive outbreaks of plague did continue until surprisingly recently). The modern version which brings all of these supposed 'markers' of plague together is just over a century old. It seems highly unlikely that the 'plague' analysis of 'Ring-a-Ring o' Roses' contains the secret to the rhyme's true origin. What does, then?

The Opies, again, prove helpful here. For there are numerous analogues for 'Ring-a-Ring o' Roses' both in English and in other European languages in the nineteenth century. Consider this Yorkshire rhyme recorded in 1882:

Here we go round by ring, by ring,
As ladies do in Yorkshire;
A curtsey here, a curtsey there,
A curtsey to the ground, sir.

A German children's rhyme of 1848 begins 'Ringel, Ringel Reihe!' and roughly translates as:

Ring-a-ring o' roses,
We are three children,
Sitting under the elder bush,
All of us going hush, hush, hush!

Once again it's hushing rather than sneezing going on, suggesting the outbreak of sternutation that figures in the modern English version of the rhyme is a new addition that is unlikely to be of the same vintage as the Great Plague. But what these rhymes all have in common is that they centre on children holding hands and dancing round in a circle or ring, something that is part of many ancient cultures (consider T. S. Eliot's description of Tudor folk dancing round and round the bonfire in 'East Coker', or another famous rhyme, 'Here we go round the mulberry bush'). The dance ends with a curtsey or bow to the other participants, hence the falling down, while the sneezing may be linked to the flowers. Is the song more about hay fever than plague? Perhaps. But perhaps it won't do to over-analyse the rhyme and look for universal or coherent meaning in nursery rhymes, any more than it does when analysing the nonsense verse of Lewis Carroll. Perhaps the ring of roses is simply a poetic description of the physical act of dancing in a circle (the children are the roses), they form a little 'pocket' of flowers by dancing in a ring, and then when the dance stops they curtsey. This is less gripping, perhaps, than the interpretation which places the rhyme's origins in the Great Plague, but most nursery rhymes elude such reductively simplistic explanations. But maybe that's actually more satisfying. It's better to retain a little mystery in these things.
Image: Ring a Ring a Roses by Myles Birket Foster (1825-1899), via Wikimedia Commons.

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A Short Analysis of 'Ring-a-Ring o' Roses'

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The origins of a classic nursery rhyme 'Ring-a-Ring o' Roses' is a well-known nursery rhyme. But this intriguing little quatrain has attracted some surprising speculation and its origins are often erroneously attributed. What does this short rhyme mean? And where did it come from? What is this ring o' roses and what is it being...

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October 18 in Literature: Moby-Dick is Published in London | Interesting Literature

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October 18 in Literature: Moby-Dick is Published in London | Interesting Literature

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1785: Thomas Love Peacock is born. He was the author of several satirical novels such as Headlong Hall (1815) and Nightmare Abbey (1818), and was also the father-in-law of the fascinating Victorian writer, George Meredith. Peacock also provides us with the first recorded use of the word 'kakistocracy', which means 'government by the worst citizens'.

1851: Moby-Dick is first published in London. Herman Melville's best-known novel actually spelled the start of a decline in his writing career: the book sold badly in his lifetime and, after several more attempts at writing, he gave up fiction in his later years. The novel is now regarded as an American classic - and, of course, it inspired the name for the Starbucks coffee chain.

1859: Henri Bergson, French philosopher, is born. His philosophical writings will influence a number of key modernist writers, including T. E. Hulme, Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot. Particularly influential is his idea of 'duration', which concerns the psychological experience of time as opposed to objective and regulated 'clock time'.

1865: Logan Pearsall Smith, an American-born British critic, is born. He coined the lovely word 'milver' for 'a person with whom one shares a strong interest in a particular topic; esp. wordplay'. He also penned the wise words: 'People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.'

1967: Disney's The Jungle Book, based on Rudyard Kipling's 1894 book, is released. It was the last film Walt Disney produced - he died during its production, a year earlier. We've compiled some facts about The Jungle Book here.
Image: Photo of Herman Melville, Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

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October 18 in Literature: Moby-Dick is Published in London

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The most significant events in the history of books on the 18th of October 1785: Thomas Love Peacock is born. He was the author of several satirical novels such as Headlong Hall (1815) and Nightmare Abbey (1818), and was also the father-in-law of the fascinating Victorian writer, George Meredith.