What’s green, takes up a five-foot bookshelf, and promises to “carry you forward upon this road to the high goal toward which all of us are making our way“?
If you shout The Harvard Classics, then you’ve guessed correctly.
The 51 green volumes once widely known as the Five-Foot Shelf of Books still offer a “great company of the wisest, the wittiest, the most interesting minds of all ages and every land.” They deliver “entertainment to endless variety, inspiration, and stimulus of mind,” as promised by their compiler Dr. Charles Eliot.
Eliot (1834-1926) was president of Harvard for forty years—an unimaginable tenure today. His accomplishments were many, but none greater than his creation of The Harvard Classics, painstakingly selected from 1909 to 1917. The volumes promised an accessible, liberal education to anyone who would read them with devotion, if only for a period of fifteen-minutes a day!
Imagine an era when the average middle-class worker, despite weariness from a day’s labor, would come home and settle into an armchair after the evening’s meal to relish the “classics.” And yet that was the intended audience of this groundbreaking compilation.
In our day of instant accessibility (e.g., Project Gutenberg), we can’t imagine how these little books opened the world to their readers. His sampling was astonishingly broad. He bypassed the easily accessible 19th-century fiction, so that women writers of that period are not represented—a criticism often rendered. But he included texts from the Ancient to the Moderns representing virtually all disciplines and every part of the world. He even included texts from what today would be called the World Religions.
Many of the “classics” are represented: Ulysses, The Arabian Nights, Franklin, Emerson, Robert, Goethe, Plutarch, Shakespeare, Helmholz, Voltaire, Hobbes, Adam Smith, Dante . . . the list goes on.
But where did a person start to read within this five-foot shelf of books? Eliot tackled that problem too, organizing the literature thematically, drawing up reading plans and courses of study, and adding a volume (the 51st) of Introductory Lectures.
Beyond these, a thin volume published by his editors in 1930 included a highly usable list for “boys and girls from twelve to eighteen years of age.” Laid out day by day across the calendar are topics in boldface with an engaging paragraph of description to intrigue the student, plus reference to volume, and page. Here’s two entries for August:
August 25. Britain Saved by a Full Moon.
We to-day know that there is a direct relation between the moon and tides. When Julius Caesar went to conquer Britain his transports were wrecked because he did not know the tides on the English Coast; a knowledge of which might have changed the whole course of history.
Read from Kelvin’s Tides (lecture August 23, 1882), vol. 30, pp. 274-285
August 19. Roses Boiled in Wine
Astonishing treatments and cures are related by Ambrose Paré, famed surgeon of the fifteenth century. One remedy, for instance, used to cure a distinguished nobleman, was red roses boiled in white wine—and it was effective.
Read from Paré Journeys in Diverse Places, vol. 38, pp. 50-58.
Discounting a stiffness of language, these descriptions will likely intrigue a young person today, not to mention the average inquisitive citizen.
The Harvard Classics spawned a series of successors, including Encyclopedia Britannica’s Great Books of the Western World, volumes that many of us 50s kids drooled over: who, we wondered, other than a library could ever own such a treasure?
But that’s what separates The Harvard Classics. They were intended, and priced, for families.
If you are lucky enough to have an edition in the attic, get it out. Dust it off and have your kids find a spot. Look for the little book that prescribes a literary journey for each day of the year. You’ll thank Charles Eliot for helping you design this new-old Classical Curriculum.
