1387-1400
The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
1564-1616
Shakespeare
1633
John Donne – Poetry
1660-1669
The Diary of Samuel Pepys
1667
John Milton – Paradise Lost
1678
Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan.
1786
Robert Burns - poems published.
1787-1818
William Blake - Poetry
1798
Samuel Taylor Coleridge – The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. (Beginning of British Romantic Literature)
1807
Wordworth’s ‘The Daffodils’ published.
1808
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Faust
1812
Grimm's Fairy Tales
1817
Sir Walter Scott – Rob Roy published.
John Keats – First volume of poems published.

1818
Mary Shelley – Frankenstein published.
Jane Austen – Persuasion published
1837 - 1839
Charles Dickens – Oliver Twist first published in monthly installments.
1843
Charles Dickens – A Christmas Carol published.
1847
Factory Act restricts working day for children and women to 10 hours a day
Charlotte Bronte – Jane Eyre published.
Emily Bronte – Wuthering Heights published.
1848
Karl Marx - Communist Manifesto
1859
Charles Darwin – On the Origin of the Species published.
1859-1860
Wilkie Collins – The Woman in White first published in serial form.
1861
Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management published.

1862
Victor Hugo - Les Miserables
1865
Thirteenth Amendment (December 1865) published abolishing slavery in the USA
Lewis Caroll – Alice in Wonderland published.
1867
Karl Marx – Capital: Critique of Political Economy
1869
Tolstoy's War and Peace completed
1870
1870 Education Act
1874
Thomas Hardy – Far From the Madding Crowd
1884
First underground train in London
1886
Robert Louis Stevenson - The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde published.
1888
Jack the Ripper Murders
George Eastman perfects 'Kodak' camera
1891
Thomas Hardy – Tess of the D’Urbervilles.
1894
Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest was first performed in 1895.
1895
HG Wells:
1895 – The Time Machine published.
1897 – The Invisible Man published.

1898 – War of the Worlds published.
1897
Bram Stoker - Dracula
1899
Joseph Conrad – The Heart of Darkness
1902
Rudyard Kipling – Just So Stories published.
1903
First powered flight by the Wright brothers
1903 Emmeline Pankhurst founded a new organisation, the Women's Social and Political Union.
Auguste Escoffier – Le Guide Culinaire
1904
Arthur Conan Doyle – First Sherlock Holmes story published.
1908
Ford Model T car launched
E M Forster – A Room with a View
1910
E M Forster – Howard’s End
1912
Titanic sinks
Captain Scott’s Diary discovered following his death whilst returning from South Pole.
1913
First Charlie Chaplin movies
D.H. Lawrence – Sons and Lovers
George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion published.
1914
James Joyce - The Dubliners

1915
Einstein completed the General Theory of Relativity
John Buchan - The Thirty-Nine Steps
Franz Kafka – Die Verwandlung/Metamorphosis
1914-1918
First World War
1916
Harold Brighouse - Hobson's Choice
1917
Sigmund Freud - Introduction to Psychoanalysis
C.G. Jung - Psychology of the Unconscious
1917-1918
Wilfred Owen – First World War Poetry
1918
Women over the age of 30 gain the vote for the first time.
1922
BBC founded
John Galsworthy's The Forsythe Saga,
1923
P.G. Wodehouse - The Inimitable Jeeves
1924
E.M. Forster - A Passage to India,
P.G. Wodehouse - Jeeves
1925
Adolf Hitler – Mein Kampf
1925
Virginia Woolf – Mrs Dalloway

1925
F Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby
1926
John Logie Baird demonstrates concept of television
1928
Voting age for Women lowered to 21.
Mickey Mouse makes first appearance for Disney
1929
Wall Street Crash
Ernest Hemingway - A Farewell to Arms
A.W. Wheen – All Quiet on the Western Front
1932
Aldous Huxley – A Brave New World
1932
Federico Garcia Lorca – Blood Wedding
1936
Federico Garcia Lorca - The House of Barnarda Alba
1937
J R R Tolkien – The Hobbit
1937
John Steinbeck – Of Mice and Men
1938
Daphne Du Maurier – Rebecca
Graham Greene – Brighton Rock
1939
John Steinbeck – The Grapes of Wrath
1940-1947
Second World War

1945
The United Nations Charter
1945
George Orwell – Animal Farm
1945
Evelyn Waugh – Brideshead Revisited
The play ‘An Inspector Calls’ by J B Priestley first performed in the Soviet Union
1946
Cold War begins
1947
Tennessee Williams – A Streetcar named Desire
1948
The National Health Service is launched
1949
Simone de Beauvoir – The Second Sex
George Orwell – 1984
1949
Sylivia Plath – The Bell Jar published.
1951
John Wyndham – The Day of the Triffids
J.D. Salinger – The Catcher in the Rye
1951
Elizabeth David – French Country Cooking
1952
Anne Frank’s Diary
1953
The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth
Ray Bradbury – Fahrenheit 451

1953-1966
Ian Fleming – James Bond Novels
1954
William Golding – Lord of the Flies
1954-1955
J R R Tolkien – The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
1958
Truman Capote – Breakfast at Tiffany’s
1960
Harper Lee – To Kill a Mockingbird
1961
Joseph Heller – Catch-22
1961
Yuri Gagarin first man in space
Berlin Wall erected
Richard Yates – Revolutionary Road
1962
The Beatles first single Love Me Do released
Ken Kesey – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
1966
Jean Rhys – Wide Sargasso Sea
1966
Seamus Heaney – Death of a Naturalist
1967
Gabriel Garcia Marquez – One Hundred Years of Solitude
1969
First man on the moon
British troops sent to Northern Ireland

Kurt Vonnegut – Slaughterhouse Five
1972
Release of first home video game system
Richard Adams – Watership Down
1974
John Le Carre - Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
1978
On July 25, 1978, Louise Joy Brown, the world's first successful test-tube baby was born.
1979
Berners-Lee wrote his initial proposal in March 1989 for the World Wide Web
Sony launched the Walkman portable cassette playing device with headphones
Douglas Adams – The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
1982
The Falklands War – Lasts 72days
Alice Walker – The Color Purple
1984
The first commercial portable cell/mobile phone launched
JG Ballard – The Empire of the Sun
1984
Iain Banks – The Wasp Factory
1985
Steven Feynman – Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feyman! Adventures of a Curious Character
1988
Stephen Hawking – A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes
1989
Berlin Wall falls
1990
Nelson Mandela freed

1991
Pat Barker - Regeneration
1993
Sebastian Faulks – Birdsong
1994
Mandela made South Africa's first black president
1995
DVD invented
Microsoft Windows 95 released
Nelson Mandela – A Long Walk to Freedom
1996
Frank McCourt – Angela’s Ashes
1997
Dolly the sheep is the first cloned animal
1999
George Gamow – The new World of Mr. Tompkins
2001
Ian McEwan – Atonement
2001
9/11 Terrorist attacks in US
Yan Martel – Life of Pi
2002
Alice Sebold – The Lovely Bones
2003
The Iraq war starts
Khaled Hosseini - The Kite Runner
2005
7 July London terrorist bombings

Markus Zusak – The Book Thief
2005
Kazuo Ishiguro – Never Let Me Go
2005
Stieg Larsson - The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
2007
Khaled Hosseini – A Thousand Splendid Suns
2009
Frank Close - Antimatter
2012
John Green – The Fault in Our Stars