Curated playlist
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. He was twelve years old, and his father had just been locked inside the Marshalsea debtors' prison in…
- 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 Presidency of British India. He chose his pen name late, in a letter to his agent…
- 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. His boat, the Don Juan, had been custom-built in Genoa, and his second wife Mary…
- Alexander PopeAlexander Pope was born in London on the 21st of May 1688, the very year the Glorious Revolution upended the English throne. He arrived into a Catholic household in a Protestant nation newly hostile to anyone of that faith, and he spent…
- 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 publisher Samuel Simmons, with a promise of five more pounds if the print run sold…
- 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 face. The royal touch did nothing. He kept the amulet she gave him on a chain for the…
- 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…
- 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 of John F. Kennedy, which happened less than seven hours later that same day. The…
- 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 earlier. He left behind little wealth, a tangle of lawsuits with the royal treasury,…
- 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. Caricaturists made sport of his slight frame throughout a career that spanned four decades. Yet this small man…
- 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…
- 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. He had been walking home from Will's Coffee House, where London's literary wits…
- 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 aloud and a devout evangelical mother drilled him through the Bible from cover to…
- 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 occasion. King Charles III sent a birthday card. William, Prince of Wales,…
- 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 in his garden. He felt joy at recovering his freedom. Then a sober melancholy…