Curated category
19th-century English novelists
- Charles DickensCharles Dickens earned six shillings a week pasting labels onto pots of boot blacking in a tumble-down warehouse overrun with rats.
- Percy Bysshe ShelleyPercy Bysshe Shelley was drowned in a storm off the Italian coast on the 8th of July 1822, age 29, before most of the world had ever read a word he wrote.
- Mary ShelleyMary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born on the 30th of August 1797 in Somers Town, London, and she died on the 1st of February 1851 at Chester Square.
- Rudyard KiplingRudyard Kipling was born on the 30th of December 1865 in Bombay, and by the time he died in 1936, he had become something no single label can hold.
- Jane AustenJane Austen wrote major novels before the age of 22, yet she was not published until she was 35. When her first book appeared in 1811, the title page did not…
- Lewis CarrollCharles Lutwidge Dodgson was born on the 27th of January 1832 at All Saints' Vicarage in Daresbury, Cheshire, the third oldest of 11 children, and the world…
- Thomas HardyThomas Hardy died at Max Gate on the 11th of January 1928, but not before dictating one final poem to his wife from his deathbed.
- Benjamin DisraeliBenjamin Disraeli climbed what he called "the top of the greasy pole" to become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, not once but twice, despite arriving at…
- George EliotGeorge Eliot was the pen name of a woman who lived openly with a man who was married to someone else. From 1854 to 1878 Mary Ann Evans shared a home with…
- John Russell, 1st Earl RussellJohn Russell, 1st Earl Russell stood barely five feet five inches tall, and his political opponents never let him forget it.
- Samuel Butler (novelist)Samuel Butler was born on the 4th of December 1835 at the rectory in Langar, Nottinghamshire. His father Rev Thomas Butler had been a son of Dr Samuel Butler…
- Harriet MartineauHarriet Martineau was born on the 12th of June 1802 in Norwich, England, the sixth of eight children in a Unitarian family of French Huguenot ancestry.