Curated category
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.
- 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…
- 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…
- 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.
- 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…
- 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.
- George Bernard ShawGeorge Bernard Shaw refused his own first name. He insisted on being called Bernard Shaw, dropping the George after 1876.
- 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.
- 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…
- 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.
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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.