Centennial Hauntings: Pope, Byron and Eliot in the year 88 [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION: THE YEAR 88 1988 was a remarkable year for anniversaries, centenaries, bi-, ter-and quatercentenaries, as we discovered as the year progressed and more people, other events and different causes turned up to be remembered — from the Armada in 1588 to the invention of the pneumatic tyre, the making of the first English moving-film and the gruesome murders of Jack the Ripper in 1888. In the Netherlands as in Britain there were celebrations and commemorations of the beginning of the 1688-1689 Revolution (the occasion of another book, Fabrics and Fabrications: The Myth and Making of William and Mary, in this series). It was a year in which the deaths of artists and writers — John Bunyan in the year of the 1688 Revolution, Thomas Gainsborough a hundred years later, and Edward Lear and Matthew Arnold a hundred years ago — were remembered, and births celebrated (other writers as diverse as Katherine Mansfield, Raymond Chandler and Eugene O'Neill were born in 1888). Above all 1988 gave us an opportunity to celebrate the birth at hundred year intervals of three of the greatest poets in the English language — Alexander Pope in 1688, Lord Byron in 1788 and T.S. Eliot in 1888. In the course of the year someone on the BBC remarked that precisely three hundred years ago nostalgia had been invented by a German philosopher — an assertion that we have failed to verify and confirm. According to the OED the use of the word "nostalgia", to describe a morbid melancholic state of home-sickness, was not to be found in the vocabulary of English doctors (and doctors were the first to bandy the word about since it was primarily considered to be a medical complaint) before the end of the eighteenth century (1770 and 1780 are the dates of the earliest quotations). Anniversary hunting and haunting could be considered an equally morbid exercise in nostalgia, a looking into and even a longing for the past as an escape from present ills. But we do not think that this is what we are up to. Principally we are concerned with Pope, Byron, and Eliot not because their time has been, but because it has yet to come.