The juxtaposition of the solitary figure working to produce such a modest and harmless-looking object as a book and the explosion this caused in the minds of men and women then and since led me to look for others whose intense preoccupation posted in placid pages had seized the story of our species. That a mere book should have such power!
We think of the world changing 65m years ago when an asteroid hastened the death of the dinosaurs and allowed space for the growth of the mammals. We think of the upheavals in ancient ice ages and fear global warming to come. We know about the destructions of war and the inspirational energy that can bring about peace.
There was the American revolution, the French revolution, perhaps most important of all the industrial revolution, the draining of populations from the countryside to the cities. There was the extension of the lifespan, the eruptive transformations brought by the advances of technology. The rise and rise of mass consumerism. . . A mere book seems a very unlikely contender as a world-changing catalyst.
Yet for those of us who love to read, the idea that a book can have an influence is not news. Our perceptions have been shaped through books, our store of information heaped up, our tastes extended, perhaps refined, our sense of humour tickled, our sense of well-being restored or reinforced; we have been excited, alerted, moved, consoled, felt less alone, even felt morally improved and inspired — at least for a while. We know that books can change us as individuals.
On a different level books have often been and still are the agents of creeds that have shaped and reshaped humanity. These generally religious books would, I think, have figured prominently in the reckoning for a list of the 12 most influential books in the world. At one stage I had a list dominated by the ancient Greeks, books of God, Marx and Mao and two or three books of science. It felt unsatisfactory; too ambitious and, despite the undoubted importance, not very lively as a selection.
Out of the several lists that followed, I eventually saw that a number of books by British authors had a fair claim to have changed the world. Indeed it was difficult to cut down the number to 12 — James Clerk Maxwell, Tom Paine and Dr Johnson, for instance, were hard to omit. The British have produced and still do produce a high yield in key thoughts, inventions and proposals. By omitting the definite article — these are not the 12 books — I believed a case could be made for 12 books from these islands and that is what I try to do. The British provide a surprisingly rich crop.
From the beginning I wanted to enjoy a range. Leisure and literature would, if I could make it work, figure alongside science and the constitution; changes in society as well as changes in technology would be addressed. This has meant taking a risk and, now and then, elasticating the strict meaning of the word “book”.
For instance I thought it essential, given its key constitutional importance, to include Magna Carta which, though produced by the royal chancery in 1215 as a formal royal grant, became in effect a vital and enduring book of reference, the basic book of our constitution and that of many others, most importantly of America and India.
Certain books suggested themselves, most especially Newton’s Principia Mathematica (1687), Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776), Michael Faraday’s Experimental Researches in Electricity (1855) and William Tyndale’s massive contribution to the King James Bible (1611).
It was, I thought, impossible to ignore William Wilberforce’s successful campaign for the abolition of slavery. True, it began as a four-hour-long speech in the House of Commons in 1789, but it was reproduced in print immediately afterwards and it is in its book form that its revolutionary and lasting influence resides. Nor could the emergence of women as equals in every respect be neglected and in different ways Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and Marie Stopes’s Married Love (1918) spoke authoritatively and with far-reaching influence on that.
The arts could not be omitted, I thought, and nor could leisure. William Shakespeare’s posthumously published First Folio in 1623 will be argued for as a book that has ever since changed and reshaped minds. The first Book of Rules of Association Football (1863) enabled the world to play a game which now commands a unique and previously uncharted, unimagined empire of followers, participants, fanatics and rich merchants.
Which leaves the Patent Specification for Arkwright’s Spinning Machine (1769). I was being shown over his now-derelict mills in Derbyshire and learnt then how crucially important this invention was to an industrial revolution that has never stopped. This was made possible by a patent cunningly and skilfully put on paper by Richard Arkwright. A patent, I thought, could be called an entrepreneur-inventor’s book.
One of the people I spoke to when I was thinking about this list was my friend Howard Jacobson, the novelist. He was dismayed that it held no novelists. “I’m a novelist, you’re a novelist, we love novels, novels changed my life and novels changed your life, good novels change lives every day; a list without a novel? Without one, not one, novel?” A mild paraphrase: Howard on song can be rather more emphatic than that. (Shakespeare did not satisfy him.)
I defended the list I had drawn up. I said that I wanted books that I could prove had changed, rootedly, the lives of people all over the land — people on trains, people at airports, people in clubs and pubs, women who were still campaigning for equality and enjoying the long-awaited acknowledgment of their right to orgasm, men who week in week out played, watched, celebrated and discussed a game so beautifully and simply constructed it remains a masterpiece of socio-leisure architecture, those who hold religious truths to be self-evident and those whose conscious and unconscious lives have been readjusted by the revelations from the Galapagos Islands, the industrialists and financiers who ride and lubricate international capitalism calling on the market and free trade as its two true parents, those whose lives are devoted to seeking freedoms which were given such a lead in the abolition of the slave trade, those who go to the moon, put on the light, send a fax, vote in a democratic country, fight for their rights; those whose daily lives and the reach of whose minds and ambitions have been transformed by books which set off a shot that rang around the world. Or words to that effect.
So where, I had asked myself, in preparing this list, was Middlemarch? Bleak House? Women in Love? And for any passionate fiction reader, a list of novels could go on until the end of the book.
Yet that was one of the difficulties. Though Middlemarch might well have changed the life and thought of Howard Jacobson and others, it is not as easy to quantify as an electric light or flying to the moon. Where can we weigh the good done by Middlemarch, where quantify the benefit to the world at large, where find a plausible proof that it can have a claim to have changed the world?
And yet . . . I grew up and am still, I hope, growing up partly through books. I can remember so many books that touched and, for a while, changed my life. Schoolboy tales of square-jawed, honest, Christian and true Tom Browns made me pull myself together for an hour or two while still in short trousers; the romance of Robin Hood or the Three Musketeers had me making a bow out of two yards of cane bought at the ironmonger’s and fashioning a sword from any likely slim branch of a tree which could be hacked off.
On it went and on it goes still. Did the reading of Proust enlarge my sense of the possibilities of memory in life and in fiction? I hope so. Do the sentences of Samuel Beckett still ring down there in the helpful caverns of literary memory, the majestic lives of Dickens change the landscape of enjoyment and of a fictional world of a real city? I hope so . . . and on it goes still.
Every one of you will have a different list. Some can be books rarely remembered now and modest even when they were first published, but books that somehow made us recognise what we more largely could be and changed us. But I find it difficult to take a single novel, or even, given all the benefits possible, a body of work by DH Lawrence, for instance, and track through, as I have been able to do I hope with the other books, the ways in which they met the grand challenge of changing the world out there.
Changing a single world, yes. And yes, those small fields of influence can and sometimes do grow in power over the years so that The Waste Land, which first fell largely on barren soil, became in my generation an accessible quarry of modernist mantras. But nevertheless, to hold to the argument about a book that flooded the world with newness and observable change, it was reluctantly my conclusion that to take a novel would be a testament of hope rather than a statement of what actually happens.
What I wanted the books on my list to have in common was that they changed the world to that in which we now live. They could be reduced to plausible snapshots. You could walk into a pub or an airport, go on an outing or just stay in your house, and be aware of what these books had delivered to the lives you daily led and saw.
Newton took us to the moon; Faraday gave us electricity; Darwin took away God and the gods who had been there since civilisation began; Mary Wollstonecraft started the struggle for the equality of women and Marie Stopes for their right to control and enjoy their sex and family lives.
After Wilberforce the equality of the races was on the march and Magna Carta is the keystone of opposition to the exercise of tyrannic power. Our markets operate through the laws of Adam Smith, our imaginations are most exercised by Shakespeare, our work organised by Arkwright, our language and religious thought by the King James Bible and our world-dominating sport by the FA Book of Rules.
It seems to me all but miraculous that amid the tumult of events and the melee of competing dramas, despite the uproars of wars and politics and all the bombast of the daily news, these British voices began, all of them, with the quiet strokes of a quill or a pen and were formed in seclusion to be sent out into the world, where a fuse was lit. There then followed a conceptual chain reaction, sometimes of awesome proportions, which changed the way all of us lead and experience our lives.
© Melvyn Bragg 2006 Extracted from Twelve Books that Changed the World, by Melvyn Bragg, to be published on April 10 by Hodder & Stoughton at £20. Copies can be ordered for £17.99 including postage from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585. ITV series begins on April 16
TWELVE BOOKS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD
Principia Mathematica (1687) by Isaac Newton
Married Love (1918) by Marie Stopes
Magna Carta (1215) by members of the English ruling classes
Book of Rules of Association Football (1863) by a group of former English public-school men
On the Origin of Species (1859) by Charles Darwin
On the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1789) by William Wilberforce in Parliament, immediately printed in several versions
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) by Mary Wollstonecraft
Experimental Researches in Electricity (three volumes, 1839, 1844, 1855) by Michael Faraday
Patent Specification for Arkwright’s Spinning Machine (1769) by Richard Arkwright
The King James Bible (1611) by William Tyndale and 54 scholars appointed by the king
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) by Adam Smith
The First Folio (1623) by William Shakespeare
