Curated playlist
Victorian novelists
- 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…
- Oscar WildeOscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde arrived in the world on the 16th of October 1854 at 21 Westland Row in Dublin, and from the very beginning his life seemed constructed for drama. Born the second of three children to two Anglo-Irish…
- Henry JamesHenry James was born on the 15th of April 1843 at 21 Washington Place in Manhattan, into a family that would produce two other towering figures in American thought: his brother William, who became a philosopher and psychologist, and his…
- 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. He was a journalist who wrote poems that outlived empires, a children's author whom Henry…
- 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…
- 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 would come to know him by a name he invented for himself: Lewis Carroll. That name…
- 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. His death certificate listed cardiac syncope as the cause, with old age as a contributing factor. He was 87.…
- George Bernard ShawGeorge Bernard Shaw refused his own first name. He insisted on being called Bernard Shaw, dropping the George after 1876. He wrote more than sixty plays across a career that ran from the 1880s until his death, and the word Shavian entered…
- Joseph ConradJoseph Conrad did not speak English fluently until his twenties, and even then he spoke it with a strong foreign accent for the rest of his life. He was born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski on the 3rd of December 1857, in Berdychiv, then…
- Robert Louis StevensonRobert Louis Stevenson was born at 8 Howard Place in Edinburgh on the 13th of November 1850, into a dynasty of lighthouse engineers, and died at the age of 44 on a tropical island at the far end of the Pacific. Between those two points…
- Arthur Conan DoyleArthur Conan Doyle arrived in Portsmouth in June 1882 with less than ten pounds to his name and no patients waiting for him. He set up at 1 Bush Villas in Elm Grove, Southsea, and while the waiting room stayed empty he wrote. What came out…
- 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, fantasy fiction, architectural preservation, and revolutionary socialism. Few…
- 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 Westminster as an outsider with debts he could not fully settle until 1849, a…
- 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 George Henry Lewes, called him her husband, and weathered the disapproval that…
- 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 who served as headmaster of Shrewsbury School before becoming Bishop of…
- John BuchanJohn Buchan was born on the 26th of August 1875 at a double villa in Perth, Scotland. That building now bears his name as part of the York Place heritage site. He grew up in Kirkcaldy and spent summers with grandparents in Broughton within…
- 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. When she was not yet thirty, her father's textile business collapsed and her father…