George Eliot (1819 – 1880) George Eliot (1819-1880) is regarded as one of the greatest Victorian novelists, especially noted for her insightful psychological characterisation. Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot) was born in Chilvers Coton, Warwickshire. Her father was a carpenter who rose to be a land agent. She was educated at home and in several schools she developed a strong evangelical piety. However, later Eliot rejected her dogmatic faith. When her...

George Bancroft (1800 – 1891) George Bancroft was born at Worcester, Mass., Oct. 3, 1800. His father, the Rev. Dr. Aaron Bancroft, was a minister of much ability, and a man of fine literary taste. Dr. Bancroft prepared an excellent Lift of Washington, which he published in 1807. Without doubt, the tastes of the father had something to do with the literary tendencies of his son. George Bancroft’s education was ample....

Geoffrey Chaucer Geoffrey Chaucer is remembered as the author of The Canterbury tales, which ranks as one of the greatest epic works of world literature. Chaucer made a crucial contribution to English literature in using English at a time when much court poetry was still written in Anglo-Norman or Latin. Geoffrey Chaucer was born in London. Little is known of his early education, but his works show that he could read...

Bernard Shaw (1856 – 1950) Bernard Shaw was born in 1856 in Dublin, in a lower-middle class family of Scottish-Protestant ancestry His father was a failed corn-merchant, with a drinking problem and a squint; his mother was a professional singer, the sole disciple of Vandeleur Lee, a voice teacher claiming to have a unique and original approach to singing. When Shaw was just short of his sixteenth birthday, his mother left...

Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky (1821 – 1881) Dostoyevsky was a Russian novelist, highly acclaimed as one of the greatest of all novelists, who penetrated the human mind and heart with exceptional insight and whose fiction has had profound influence on the modern intellectual climate. Born in Moscow on November 11, 1821, Dostoyevsky was the son of a former army doctor. At the age of 17, he was sent to the military academy...

Francis Beaumont (1584 – 1616) Francis Beaumont third son of Francis Beaumont, justice of the Court of Common Pleas, was born at Grace-Dieu, Leicestershire, in 1584. He entered Broadgates Hall (now Penibroke College), Oxford in 1597 with his brothers Henry and John, but left with-out taking a degree and entered the Inner Temple to study law in 1600. It seems, however, that he studied little, and there is no evidence of...

Francis Bacon (1561-1626) Francis Bacon was the son of Nicolas Bacon, the Lord Keeper of the Seal of Elizabeth I. He entered Trinity College Cambridge at age 12. Bacon later described his tutors as “Men of sharp wits, shut up in their cells of a few authors, chiefly Aristotle, their Dictator.” His father died when he was 18. He turned to the law and at 23 he was already in the...

Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886) Emily Dickinson was an American lyrical poet, and an obsessively private writer — only seven of her some 1800 poems were published during her lifetime. Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a family well-known for educational and political activity. Her father, an orthodox Calvinist, was a lawyer and treasurer of Amherst College, and also served in Congress. She was educated at Amherst Academy (1834-47) and...