Curated category
19th-century atheists
- Percy Bysshe ShelleyOn a summer day in 1804, Percy Bysshe Shelley stood before the wooden paling fence at Eton College. He held a bag of gunpowder he had stolen from the school…
- Virginia WoolfAdeline Virginia Woolf entered the world on the 25th of January 1882 within a grand house in South Kensington, London. Her father was Sir Leslie Stephen, a…
- Karl MarxOn the 14th of March 1883, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, Friedrich Engels left Karl Marx alone in his armchair for scarcely two minutes.
- Friedrich EngelsFriedrich Engels was born on the 28th of November 1820 in Barmen, Prussia. He grew up in a house surrounded by factories and workers' tenements within the…
- Vladimir LeninVladimir Ilyich Ulyanov was born on the 22nd of April 1870 in Streletskaya Ulitsa, a street in the city of Simbirsk. He grew up as the third child among…
- Mikhail BakuninMikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin was born on the 30th of August 1814 into Russian nobility. His family owned the Priamukhino estate in the Tver region, which…
- Vissarion BelinskyVissarion Belinsky was born in Sveaborg, a fortress town that is now part of Helsinki. He grew up in the small Russian town of Chembar, where his father…
- Peter KropotkinPeter Kropotkin was born in Moscow on the 9th of December 1842. He entered the Page Corps, an elite school for imperial attendants, at age eight after Tsar…
- Bertrand RussellBertrand Arthur William Russell was born at Ravenscroft, a country house in Trellech, Monmouthshire, on the 18th of May 1872.
- Jane Ellen HarrisonJane Ellen Harrison was born in Cottingham, Yorkshire on the 9th of September 1850. Her father worked as a timber merchant while her mother died of puerperal…
- Harriet MartineauHarriet Martineau was born on the 12th of June 1802 in Norwich, England. Her mother Elizabeth hired a wet nurse to feed her infant daughter because she could…