Chuzzlewit, I am surprised at you. What a wrong-headed argument!
I love virtually all the books I have excised from the list. But they are fiction. They may be wonderful moving stories of the time, but certainly have little impact on the course of history.
Hence, you exile Dickens, and include Freud. But in today's prevailing view, much of Freud is fiction as well.
As for your criterion - that to make it onto your exclusive list books must have had a traceable "impact on history" (which you implicitly define, as Christopher quite rightly observed, as the history of kings & queens) -- the problem with it is that you would have to put many very bad books on your list. Mein Kampf, for example.
Influential? Yes, definitely. Should historians of ideas read it? Yes, definitely. But if an "ordinary" cultivated person had to make a choice between reading David Copperfield or Mein Kampfm,, say, should he choose Mein Kampf? Definitely NOT. (IMO, of course.)
First of all, let us examine this question of "historical influence". Take Dickens. His characters have entered our everyday language. "He's a Scrooge." "Don't be such a Pecksniff." "He talks like Mr. Micawber." etc., etc.
Take Shakespeare. People are constantly quoting Shakespeare -- without even being aware of it. Our speech is permeated with phrases drawn from Shakespeare, in other words. Only the Bible can rival Shakespeare, in terms of impact on our language.
By the way, historians use precisely this criterion -- the degree to which an author has affected the language people have used down the centuries -- as a way of determining his or her influence. I should add that one of the most flourishing fields of History these days is the study of "mentalities", which attempts to understand how the "ordinary" man, the "anonymous" man, viewed his world. It is with clues like language that the study of mentalities must work.
Joan
Edit:
P.S. And what about books that should have had an impact on history, but unfortunately did not? After all, books, like people, often do not get their just deserts in their lifetimes...
Losers can often be much more interesting, and much more profound, than winners. Also true of books as well as of people. |
