ENRICHMENT

All-time Essentials playlist

These are the texts that you absolutely must have heard of. They’re the ones that get referenced in popular culture all the time – the biggies! In life you want to be someone who knows about stuff; someone who isn’t ignorant of the best things that have been written and said; someone who notices references in TV shows and films; someone who understands sophisticated intellectual conversations. Knowing stuff is good. You should know about all the texts in this list. Research them all. Read a few. Impress people with your knowledge and your cleverness.

All-time Essentials

  1. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (1387)

  2. Hamlet by William Shakespeare (1599)

  3. Paradise Lost by John Milton (1667)

  4. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (1719)

  5. The Romantic poets (1780s–1820s)

    • William Blake (Songs of Innocence and of Experience)

    • William Wordsworth (Lyrical Ballads)

    • Samuel Taylor Coleridge (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner)

    • John Keats (Bright Star, To Autumn)

    • Percy Shelley (Ozymandias, To a Skylark)

    • Lord Byron (Don Juan, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage)

  6. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813)

  7. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)

  8. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (1847) - recommended read

  9. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (1847)

  10. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (1861)

  11. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (1881)

  12. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1890) - recommended read

  13. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle (1892) - recommended read

  14. Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)

  15. 1984 by George Orwell (1949)

  16. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien (1954)

Previous

KS3 Essentials
Next

20th Century Essentials