Curated playlist
18th-century English male writers
- William WordsworthWilliam Wordsworth was born on the 7th of April 1770 in what is now called Wordsworth House in Cockermouth, Cumberland, a market town sitting at the edge of the Lake District. He died on the 23rd of April 1850 at Rydal Mount, the same…
- Alexander PopeAlexander Pope was born in London on the 21st of May 1688, the very year the Glorious Revolution upended the English throne. He arrived into a Catholic household in a Protestant nation newly hostile to anyone of that faith, and he spent…
- Samuel JohnsonSamuel Johnson was touched by Queen Anne on the 30th of March 1712, when he was barely two years old, in a ritual meant to cure the scrofula scarring his face. The royal touch did nothing. He kept the amulet she gave him on a chain for the…
- Joseph PriestleyJoseph Priestley was born on the 24th of March 1733 in Birstall, near Batley, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, into a family of English Dissenters who refused to conform to the Church of England. By the time he died on the 6th of February…
- Isaac NewtonSir Isaac Newton said his mother told him he was so small at birth that he could have fit inside a quart mug. He was born prematurely on Christmas Day, the 25th of December 1642, at Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire. His father, also named…
- William HogarthWilliam Hogarth told people his pictures were meant to be read, not just looked at. A country girl arrives in London and meets a procuratress. Six scenes later she is dead from venereal disease, and a funeral closes the sequence. This was…
- Daniel DefoeDaniel Defoe died on the 24th of April 1731 in Ropemakers Alley, probably hiding from creditors, not far from where he had been born roughly seven decades earlier. He left behind little wealth, a tangle of lawsuits with the royal treasury,…
- Thomas Robert MalthusThomas Robert Malthus was born on the 13th or the 14th of February 1766 at The Rookery, a small elegant mansion near Dorking in Surrey. He arrived into a family already woven into the fabric of English intellectual life, and he would leave…
- John Hawkins (author)Sir John Hawkins began his life as an architect, following the footsteps of his father. He worked in that field until he was nearly thirty years old. Then he switched careers to become a solicitor instead. This new business thrived and…
- Humphry DavyIn 1799, Humphry Davy breathed sixteen quarts of a gas for nearly seven minutes, and it absolutely intoxicated him. He called it laughing gas, and he laughed. He was a chemist working at a medical research facility in Bristol, and he was…
- Edward GibbonIt was on the night of the 27th of June 1787, between eleven and midnight, that Edward Gibbon wrote the last lines of his life's great work in a summer-house in his garden. He felt joy at recovering his freedom. Then a sober melancholy…
- Nicholas Rowe (writer)Nicholas Rowe died on the 6th of December 1718, and within a year the King of England had sent his widow a pension. Not as condolence, exactly. As payment. The pension came in recognition of Rowe's translation of Lucan, a verse paraphrase…
- Thomas RymerThomas Rymer published a sentence in 1681 that would come back to haunt him. Writing in a political tract, he warned readers: "You are not to expect truth from an historiographer royal." He seems not to have known that he would one day…