Best British Classic

[wicked_lovely4…]

what is the best british classic, in your opinion?

[Everyman]

No single work.

The following would all be strong contenders.  In no particular order; just as they occur to me

King Lear, Shakespeare

Paradise Lost, Milton

Canterbury Tales, Chaucer

Middlemarch, George Eliot

Bleak House, Dickens

Emma, Jane Austen

Honorable Mention:

Vanity Fair, Thackeray

Wuthering Heights, Bronte

Idylls of the King, Tennyson

Pride and Prejudice, Austen

Elegy in a Country Churchyard, Gray

Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Hardy

Kim, Rudyard Kipling

The Way We Live Now, Trollope

Life of Samuel Johnson, Boswell

Beowulf

The Faerie Queen, Spenser,

Pilgrims Progress, Bunyan

Holy Sonnets, Donne

Essays of Elia, Charles Lamb

Lines Composed a Few Miles aboveTintern Abbey , Wordsworth

Hamlet, Shakespeare

Ode to the West Wind, Shelley

Ode on a Grecian Urn, Keats

The Waste Land, and Four Quartets, Eliot

Shooting and Elephant, George Orwell (also Politics and the English Language)

Most other works by any of the above authors, particularly the poets.

[Timbuktu1]

I enjoyed Utopia by Thomas More but nothing tops King Lear.

[ashred1226]

I would have to agree with the notion that there is no such thing as a very best. Much of what I love depends on the mood I am currently in to be quite honest. But Shakespeare is wonderful, Austen too. Milton is fantasic! Tolkien! Lewis Carroll, CS Lewis I would say though probably is at the top of my list...an no I am not a Christian, in-fact I am Wiccan...but that is for another dicussion. Bacon is also fantastic!