Curated category
19th-century English poets
- Charles DickensCharles Dickens earned six shillings a week pasting labels onto pots of boot blacking in a tumble-down warehouse overrun with rats.
- John KeatsJohn Keats had been publishing poetry for less than four years when tuberculosis killed him in Rome at the age of 25. His last request was a tombstone…
- 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.
- Lord ByronLord Byron got up at two in the afternoon. By the time he sat down to dinner, the house around him resounded with the unarbitrated quarrels of ten horses…
- 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.
- 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…
- Alfred, Lord TennysonAlfred Tennyson was born on the 6th of August 1809 in Somersby, a small village in Lincolnshire, and by the time he died on the 6th of October 1892, lines…
- Samuel Taylor ColeridgeSamuel Taylor Coleridge coined the phrase "suspension of disbelief" - and for much of his life, he seemed to be asking the world to practice it on his behalf.
- William MorrisWilliam Morris arrived in the world on the 24th of March 1834, and by the time he died on the 3rd of October 1896, he had left his mark on textiles, poetry…
- 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…
- Robert BridgesRobert Seymour Bridges, born on the 23rd of October 1844, spent the first four decades of his adult life doing something that might seem strange for a man…