Curated playlist
19th-century English writers
- Charles DarwinCharles Robert Darwin once jotted his thoughts about marriage on two scraps of paper, drawing two columns headed "Marry" and "Not Marry". Under the case for marriage he wrote that a wife would be a "constant companion and a friend in old…
- Winston ChurchillWinston Churchill was born on the 30th of November 1874 inside Blenheim Palace, the ancestral home his family had held for generations in Oxfordshire. The building itself said something about who he was: a man descended from John…
- H. G. WellsIn 1898, Joseph Conrad hailed a fellow writer with the phrase "O Realist of the Fantastic!" The man he addressed was Herbert George Wells, born in Bromley, Kent, on the 21st of September 1866. His family called him "Bertie." Wells would…
- 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…
- John Stuart MillJohn Stuart Mill was reading Greek at the age of three. By eight he had worked through Aesop's Fables, Xenophon's Anabasis, the whole of Herodotus, and six dialogues of Plato. This was not an accident. His father, James Mill, set out with…
- John SnowJohn Snow removed a pump handle on Broad Street and changed how the world thinks about disease. The year was 1854, and cholera was killing people across London's Soho. Snow, an English physician, suspected the water rather than the air. He…
- David RicardoDavid Ricardo died on the 11th of September 1823 from an ear infection that crept into his brain and triggered septicaemia. He was 51 years old. At his death, his assets were estimated at between 675,000 and 775,000 pounds sterling. The…
- 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…
- Ada LovelaceAda Lovelace was born on the 10th of December 1815, the only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron. In 1843, Charles Babbage wrote to her: 'Forget this world and all its troubles and if possible its multitudinous Charlatans, every thing…
- 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…