Bookplanet: Melvyn Braggs picks his 12 books that changed the world - what's yours?

A practical guide to shattering the earth
Reviewed by Peter Ackroyd
12 BOOKS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD by Melvyn Bragg

THE PUBLISHERS’ catalogues have been filled, for some years, with lists of books on significant objects or events that have “changed the world” — from the cultivation of tulips to the calculation of longitude, from flowers and eggs to medicines and Islamic inventors.

Among this welter of items, however, books would seem to have a definite advantage in the claim to pre-eminence. The Western world, after all, became the world of the book. In this volume Melvyn Bragg reduces the field to 12 books in particular, all of them by English or Scottish authors. Ours is not to reason why, at least concerning the number or the nature of the books chosen. There must be people, somewhere, who know about such things.

Bragg begins his narrative with a celebration of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica . The case for its inclusion is indisputable. Newton’s great work has had a more profound effect upon the technological or scientific aspects of human life than any other. His theorems of celestial dynamics are still at work in the course of Nasa space exploration.

But his narrative is in no sense literature. Great books do not necessarily have anything to do with literature. In its English translation it is, for the layman, difficult and unpleasing in the extreme.

And this may not be entirely the fault of the reader. Newton deliberately introduced difficulty so that his principles might remain obscure to the vulgar. Yet the book is, in a sense, inspired. It is a work of the imagination, creating a visionary world that has yet to be unravelled. There are no works of fiction — or, at least, novels — on this list, with good reason. The favoured few cannot simply offer entertainment or solace. Novels do not change anything. They rarely modify the principles of human perception. Of course it can be claimed that The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy permanently altered the relationship of author to reader, and that the works of Daniel Defoe fatally, if fruitfully, muddled the boundaries between fact and fiction. In the larger scheme of things, however, these authors may be considered unimportant.

The honoured books must be deemed to have changed the consciousness of the world, either in an immediate or in a gradual and unobtrusive manner. The Bible is of course the principle candidate for that honour. No other book has had such a prolonged or permanent impact upon human sensibility; it was written with letters of fire, even though in most cases its various authors remain quite unknown. Its English translation, included here, is the single most important testimony of the power of English prose. The King James Bible is the spring, the wellhead, of all subsequent writing. It entered the public imagination. It became in itself an institution.

The works of William Shakespeare are also included, in the form of the first Folio of his drama. It has been supposed that Shakespeare’s plays first instigated the dramatic examination of human consciousness. On that ground alone they deserve their place.

But books are related to each other. They whisper to one another. They interrupt one another. That is why one of the 12, Marie Stopes’s Married Love , appeared in the same period as the novels of D. H. Lawrence. They are emanations from the spirit of the age.

The same may be said of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species , also included. It has often been compared to the similarly long and intricate narratives of Charles Dickens. Dickens and Darwin both share the 19th-century interest in particular detail and absorbing theme. Dickens is not on the list, of course, although it could be argued that The Old Curiosity Shop changed the expression of grief in the English-speaking world.

It was a stroke of genius to include The Rule Book of Association Football, compiled by “A Group of Former English Public School Men” in 1863.

That sport now straddles the world, and has become the greatest source of comfort and identity for nation-states since the Treaty of Versailles. The rules were devised by a few graduates from Oxbridge in a London pub, the Freemasons’ Tavern by Lincoln’s Inn Fields; since that local birth, football has, in Bragg’s words, become “a form of universal language”.

It was a happy inspiration, too, to include Richard Arkwright’s Patent Specifications for the Construction of a Spinning Machine. It inspired the factory system, for better or worse, and is a testament to that English tradition of inspired practicality which is the cradle for many of these 12 books.

The inclusion of Magna Carta is no less pertinent, although it must be considered to be a document, rather than a book. (There was no room here for the Domesday Book.) Its 63 clauses reaffirmed the ancient rights of the English people and have been invoked ever since — from the Fifth Amendment of the American Constitution to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. If “changing the world” means anything, it means that.

Some books of course have a more immediate effect, emphasised by the inclusion of William Wilberforce’s On the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and Michael Faraday’s Experimental Researches in Electricity. One encouraged the development of freedom, while the other instigated the extension of energy. Both earned the gratitude of humankind. On this count, however, there was a good case for including Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man. If Mary Wollstonecraft can earn the palm with her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, why not Paine’s more universal treatise that materially helped to instigate the American Revolution? But, as Bragg suggests, “every one of you will have a different list”. There are, in any case, too many lists in the world. If we are to have one more, it might as well be comprised of things worthwhile. This book may not change the world, but it will entertain a small part of it.