Curated category
English male essayists
- Charles DickensCharles Dickens earned six shillings a week pasting labels onto pots of boot blacking in a tumble-down warehouse overrun with rats.
- George OrwellGeorge Orwell did not exist on any birth certificate. The man behind the name was Eric Arthur Blair, born on the 25th of June 1903 in Motihari, in the Bengal…
- 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.
- Alexander PopeAlexander Pope was born in London on the 21st of May 1688, the very year the Glorious Revolution upended the English throne.
- John MiltonJohn Milton sold the rights to one of the greatest poems in the English language for five pounds. On the 27th of April 1667, he handed Paradise Lost to the…
- 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…
- 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…
- Aldous HuxleyAldous Huxley died at 5:20 pm Pacific Standard Time on the 22nd of November 1963 - and almost nobody noticed. His death was overshadowed by the assassination…
- 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…
- 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.
- 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.
- John DrydenJohn Dryden was attacked at around 8 pm on the 18th of December 1679, beaten by hired thugs in Rose Alley behind the Lamb and Flag pub in Covent Garden.
- John RuskinJohn Ruskin was born on the 8th of February 1819 at 54 Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, London, into a household where a wine importer father read Byron…
- David AttenboroughDavid Attenborough turned 100 years old on the 8th of May 2026, and the Royal Albert Hall filled with singers, filmmakers, composers, and royalty to mark the…
- 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…