1.
Julia Ward Howe
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Julia Ward Howe was an American poet and author, best known for writing The Battle Hymn of the Republic. She was also an advocate for abolitionism and was a social activist, Howe was born in New York City. She was the fourth of seven born to an upper middle class couple. Her father Samuel Ward III was a Wall Street stockbroker, well-to-do banker and her mother was the poet Julia Rush Cutler, related to Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox of the American Revolution. She died of tuberculosis when her daughter was five years old and she was educated by private tutors and in schools for young ladies until she was sixteen. Her eldest brother Samuel Cutler Ward traveled in Europe and brought home a private library and she had access to these modern works, many contradicting the Calvinistic world view presented by her father. She became well read and intelligent, though as much a social butterfly as she was a scholar and she was brought into contact with some of the greatest minds of her time because of her father’s status as a successful banker. She interacted with Charles Dickens, Charles Sumner, and Margaret Fuller, sam married into the prominent Astor family, allowing him great social freedom that he shared with his sister. The siblings were cast into mourning time when their father died in 1839, shortly afterwards, brother Henry died, then Samuels wife Emily died, along with their newborn child. Julia was visiting Boston in 1841 when she met Samuel Gridley Howe and they announced their engagement quite suddenly on February 21. Howe had courted her for a time, but he had recently shown an interest in her sister Louisa. In 1843, they married despite their age difference. She gave birth to their first child while honeymooning in Europe and she bore their last child in 1858 at the age of forty. They had six children, Julia Romana Howe, Florence Marion Howe, Henry Marion Howe, Laura Elizabeth Howe, Maud Howe, Julia was likewise an aunt of novelist Francis Marion Crawford. Howe lived and raised her children in South Boston, while her husband pursued his advocacy work and she hid her unhappiness with their marriage behind a cheerful demeanor and singing at parties, earning the nickname the family champagne from her children. She made frequent visits to Gardiner, Maine where she stayed at The Yellow House and she was unhappy with her surroundings, so she took lectures, and studied foreign languages, and wrote plays and dramas. Julia had published essays on Goethe, Schiller and Lamartine before her marriage to Howe, in the New York Review and her book Passion-Flowers was published in December 1853. The book collected intensely personal poems and was written without the awareness of her husband and her second anonymous collection, Words for the Hour, appeared in 1857
2.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
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Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt, Rossetti was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement, most notably William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. His work also influenced the European Symbolists and was a precursor of the Aesthetic movement. Rossettis art was characterised by its sensuality and its medieval revivalism and his early poetry was influenced by John Keats. His later poetry was characterised by the complex interlinking of thought and feeling, especially in his sonnet sequence, poetry and image are closely entwined in Rossettis work. Rossettis personal life was linked to his work, especially his relationships with his models and muses Elizabeth Siddal, Fanny Cornforth. The son of émigré Italian scholar Gabriele Pasquale Giuseppe Rossetti and his wife Frances Mary Lavinia Polidori, Rossetti was born in London, England and his family and friends called him Gabriel, but in publications he put the name Dante first in honour of Dante Alighieri. He was the brother of poet Christina Rossetti, critic William Michael Rossetti and his father was a Roman Catholic, at least prior to his marriage, and his mother was an Anglican, ostensibly Gabriel was baptized as and was a practicing Anglican. During his childhood, Rossetti was home educated and often read the Bible, along with the works of Shakespeare, Dickens, Sir Walter Scott, the youthful Rossetti is described as self-possessed, articulate, passionate and charismatic but also ardent, poetic and feckless. Like all his siblings, he aspired to be a poet and attended Kings College School and he also wished to be a painter, having shown a great interest in Medieval Italian art. He studied at Henry Sass Drawing Academy from 1841 to 1845, when he enrolled in the Antique School of the Royal Academy, after leaving the Royal Academy, Rossetti studied under Ford Madox Brown, with whom he retained a close relationship throughout his life. Following the exhibition of William Holman Hunts painting The Eve of St. Agnes, the painting illustrated a poem by the little-known John Keats. Rossettis own poem, The Blessed Damozel, was an imitation of Keats, together they developed the philosophy of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood which they founded along with John Everett Millais. Their approach was to return to the abundant detail, intense colours, the eminent critic John Ruskin wrote, Every Pre-Raphaelite landscape background is painted to the last touch, in the open air, from the thing itself. Every Pre-Raphaelite figure, however studied in expression, is a portrait of some living person. Rossettis first major paintings in oil display the realist qualities of the early Pre-Raphaelite movement and his Girlhood of Mary Virgin and Ecce Ancilla Domini portray Mary as a teenage girl. I saw at once that he was not an orthodox boy, the mixture of genius and dilettantism of both men shut me up for the moment, and whetted my curiosity. Although his work subsequently won support from John Ruskin, Rossetti only rarely exhibited thereafter, in 1850, Rossetti met Elizabeth Siddal, an important model for the Pre-Raphaelite painters
3.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
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Algernon Charles Swinburne was an English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic. He wrote several novels and collections of such as Poems and Ballads. A controversial figure at the time, Swinburne was a sado-masochist and alcoholic and was obsessed with the Middle Ages, Swinburne wrote about many taboo topics, such as lesbianism, cannibalism, sado-masochism, and anti-theism. His poems have many common motifs, such as the Ocean, Time, several historical people are featured in his poems, such as Sappho, Anactoria, Jesus and Catullus. Swinburne was born at 7 Chester Street, Grosvenor Place, London, on 5 April 1837 and he was the eldest of six children born to Captain Charles Henry Swinburne and Lady Jane Henrietta, daughter of the 3rd Earl of Ashburnham, a wealthy Northumbrian family. He grew up at East Dene in Bonchurch on the Isle of Wight, as a child, Swinburne was nervous and frail, but was also fired with nervous energy and fearlessness to the point of being reckless. He attended Eton College, where he first started writing poetry, at Eton, he won first prizes in French and Italian. He returned in May 1860, though he never received a degree, Swinburne considered Northumberland to be his native county, an emotion reflected in poems like the intensely patriotic Northumberland, Grace Darling and others. He enjoyed riding his pony across the moors through honeyed leagues of the northland border, in the period 1857–60, Swinburne became one of Lady Pauline Trevelyans intellectual circle at Wallington Hall. After his grandfathers death in 1860, he stayed with William Bell Scott in Newcastle, in 1861, Swinburne visited Menton on the French Riviera to recover from excessive use of alcohol, staying at the Villa Laurenti. From Menton, Swinburne travelled to Italy, where he journeyed extensively, in December 1862, Swinburne accompanied Scott and his guests, probably including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, on a trip to Tynemouth. At Oxford, Swinburne met several Pre-Raphaelites, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Swinburne was an alcoholic and algolagniac and highly excitable. Thereafter, he lost his youthful rebelliousness and developed into a figure of social respectability and it was said of Watts that he saved the man and killed the poet. Swinburne died at the Pines on 10 April 1909 at the age of 72 and was buried at St. Boniface Church, Bonchurch on the Isle of Wight. Common gossip of the time reported that he had a crush on the explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton. The English language is poor in rhymes, and most English poets. Swinburnes work was quite popular among undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge. T. S. Eliot read Swinburnes essays on the Shakespearean and Jonsonian dramatists in The Contemporaries of Shakespeare and The Age of Shakespeare and Swinburnes books on Shakespeare and Jonson
4.
Elizabeth Siddal
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Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal was an English artists model, poet and artist. She was painted and drawn extensively by artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, including Walter Deverell, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and her husband and she featured prominently in Rossettis early paintings of women. Named Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall, after her mother, Lizzie Siddall was born on 25 July 1829, at the home at 7 Charles Street. Her parents were Charles Crooke Siddall, who claimed his family descended from nobility, and Eleanor Evans, from a family of English and Welsh descent. At the time of her birth, her father had a business but around 1831, her family moved to the borough of Southwark, in south London. In Southwark the rest of Lizzie Siddalls siblings were born, Lydia, to whom she was close, Mary, Clara, James. Although there is no record of Lizzie Siddall having attended school, she could read and write, the spelling Siddall was changed to Siddal when Dante Gabriel Rossetti dropped the second l. She was first noticed by Walter Deverell in 1849, while she was working as a milliner in Cranbourne Alley, whether Siddal had any artistic aspirations is unknown, though she loved poetry. She was employed as a model by Deverell and through him was introduced to the Pre-Raphaelites, though she was later touted for her beauty, Siddal was originally chosen as a model because of her plainness. At the time, Deverell was working on an oil painting depicting a scene from Twelfth Night, showing Orsino, Feste. Like the rest of the Pre-Raphaelites, Deverell took his inspiration and he based his Orsino on himself, Feste on his friend Dante Rossetti. All that remained was to find a girl who could dress as a boy, deverells Twelfth Night was the first painting Lizzie Siddal ever sat for. While posing for Millais Ophelia in 1852, Siddal floated in a full of water to represent the drowning Ophelia. Millais painted daily into the winter putting lamps under the tub to warm the water, on one occasion the lamps went out and the water became icy cold. Millais, absorbed by his painting, did not notice and Siddal did not complain, after this she became very ill with a severe cold or pneumonia. Her father held Millais responsible and, under the threat of legal action and it was thought that she suffered from tuberculosis, but some historians believe an intestinal disorder was more likely. Others have suggested she might have been anorexic while others attribute her poor health to an addiction to laudanum or a combination of ailments, Elizabeth Siddal was the primary muse for Dante Gabriel Rossetti throughout most of his youth. The number of paintings he did of her are said to number in the thousands, Rossettis drawings and paintings of Siddal culminated in Beata Beatrix which shows a praying Beatrice painted in 1863, a year after her death
5.
Emily Dickinson
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Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American poet. Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, although part of a prominent family with strong ties to its community, Dickinson lived much of her life in reclusive isolation. After studying at the Amherst Academy for seven years in her youth, considered an eccentric by locals, she developed a noted penchant for white clothing and became known for her reluctance to greet guests or, later in life, to even leave her bedroom. Dickinson never married, and most friendships between her and others depended entirely upon correspondence, Dickinson was a recluse for the later years of her life. While Dickinson was a private poet, fewer than a dozen of her nearly 1,800 poems were published during her lifetime. The work that was published during her lifetime was usually altered significantly by the publishers to fit the conventional rules of the time. Dickinsons poems are unique for the era in which she wrote, they contain short lines, typically lack titles, many of her poems deal with themes of death and immortality, two recurring topics in letters to her friends. Her first collection of poetry was published in 1890 by personal acquaintances Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, a complete, and mostly unaltered, collection of her poetry became available for the first time when scholar Thomas H. Johnson published The Poems of Emily Dickinson in 1955. Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born at the homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts, on December 10,1830, into a prominent. Her father, Edward Dickinson was a prominent lawyer in Amherst, two hundred years earlier, her patrilineal ancestors had arrived in the New World—in the Puritan Great Migration—where they prospered. Emily Dickinsons paternal grandfather, Samuel Dickinson, had almost single-handedly founded Amherst College, in 1813, he built the homestead, a large mansion on the towns Main Street, that became the focus of Dickinson family life for the better part of a century. On May 6,1828, he married Emily Norcross from Monson and they had three children, William Austin, known as Austin, Aust or Awe Emily Elizabeth Lavinia Norcross, known as Lavinia or Vinnie By all accounts, young Emily was a well-behaved girl. On an extended visit to Monson when she was two, Emilys Aunt Lavinia described Emily as perfectly well & contented—She is a good child &. Emilys aunt also noted the affinity for music and her particular talent for the piano. Dickinson attended primary school in a building on Pleasant Street. Her education was ambitiously classical for a Victorian girl and her father wanted his children well-educated and he followed their progress even while away on business. When Emily was seven, he wrote home, reminding his children to school, and learn, so as to tell me. While Emily consistently described her father in a manner, her correspondence suggests that her mother was regularly cold
6.
English poetry
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This article focuses on poetry written in English from the United Kingdom, England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. The article does not include poetry from other countries where the English language is spoken, the earliest surviving English poetry, written in Anglo-Saxon, the direct predecessor of modern English, may have been composed as early as the 7th century. This is generally taken as marking the beginning of Anglo-Saxon poetry and it is possible to identify certain key moments, however. The Dream of the Rood was written before circa AD700, by and large, however, Anglo-Saxon poetry is categorised by the manuscripts in which it survives, rather than its date of composition. While the poetry that has survived is limited in volume, it is wide in breadth, beowulf is the only heroic epic to have survived in its entirety, but fragments of others such as Waldere and the Finnesburg Fragment show that it was not unique in its time. Other genres include much religious verse, from works to biblical paraphrase, elegies such as The Wanderer, The Seafarer, and The Ruin, and numerous proverbs, riddles. With one notable exception, Anglo-Saxon poetry depends on alliterative verse for its structure, with the Norman conquest of England, beginning in 1111 the Anglo-Saxon language rapidly diminished as a written literary language. The new aristocracy spoke predominantly Norman, and this became the language of courts, parliament. While Anglo-Norman or Latin was preferred for high culture, English literature by no means died out, other transitional works were preserved as popular entertainment, including a variety of romances and lyrics. With time, the English language regained prestige, and in 1362 it replaced French and Latin in Parliament, the reputation of Chaucers successors in the 15th century has suffered in comparison with him, though Lydgate and Skelton are widely studied. A group of Scottish writers arose who were believed to be influenced by Chaucer. The rise of Scottish poetry began with the writing of The Kingis Quair by James I of Scotland, the main poets of this Scottish group were Robert Henryson, William Dunbar and Gavin Douglas. The Renaissance was slow in coming to England, with the generally accepted start date being around 1509 and it is also generally accepted that the English Renaissance extended until the Restoration in 1660. However, a number of factors had prepared the way for the introduction of the new learning long before this start date. A number of medieval poets had, as noted, shown an interest in the ideas of Aristotle. The introduction of printing by Caxton in 1474 provided the means for the more rapid dissemination of new or recently rediscovered writers and thinkers. Caxton also printed the works of Chaucer and Gower and these books helped establish the idea of a poetic tradition that was linked to its European counterparts. In addition, the writings of English humanists like Thomas More and Thomas Elyot helped bring the ideas, the establishment of the Church of England in 1535 accelerated the process of questioning the Catholic world-view that had previously dominated intellectual and artistic life
7.
Matthew Arnold
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Matthew Arnold was an English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools. He was the son of Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby School. Matthew Arnold has been characterised as a writer, a type of writer who chastises. The Reverend John Keble, who would one of the leaders of the Oxford Movement. Thomas Arnold admired Kebles hymns in The Christian Year, only reversing himself with exasperation when this old friend became a Romeward-tending High Church reactionary in the 1830s. In 1828, Arnolds father was appointed Headmaster of Rugby School and his family took up residence. In 1831, Arnold was tutored by his uncle, Rev. John Buckland in the village of Laleham. In 1834, the Arnolds occupied a home, Fox How. William Wordsworth was a neighbour and close friend, in 1836, Arnold was sent to Winchester College, but in 1837 he returned to Rugby School where he was enrolled in the fifth form. He moved to the form in 1838 and thus came under the direct tutelage of his father. He wrote verse for the manuscript Fox How Magazine co-produced with his brother Tom for the enjoyment from 1838 to 1843. During his years there, he won prizes for English essay writing. His prize poem, Alaric at Rome, was printed at Rugby, in 1841, he won an open scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford. During his residence at Oxford, his friendship ripened with Arthur Hugh Clough, Arnold attended John Henry Newmans sermons at St. Marys but did not join the Oxford Movement. His father died suddenly of disease in 1842, and Fox How became his familys permanent residence. Arnolds poem Cromwell won the 1843 Newdigate prize and he graduated in the following year with a 2nd class honours degree in Literae Humaniores. In 1845, after an interlude of teaching at Rugby, he was elected Fellow of Oriel College. In 1847, he became Private Secretary to Lord Lansdowne, Lord President of the Council, in 1849, he published his first book of poetry, The Strayed Reveller
8.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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Elizabeth Barrett Browning was one of the most prominent English poets of the Victorian era, popular in Britain and the United States during her lifetime. Born in County Durham, the eldest of 12 children, Elizabeth Barrett wrote poetry from about the age of six and her mothers collection of her poems forms one of the largest collections extant of juvenilia by any English writer. At 15 she became ill, suffering intense head and spinal pain for the rest of her life, later in life she also developed lung problems, possibly tuberculosis. She took laudanum for the pain from an age, which is likely to have contributed to her frail health. In the 1830s Elizabeth was introduced to society through her cousin. Her first adult collection of poems was published in 1838 and she wrote prolifically between 1841 and 1844, producing poetry, translation and prose and she campaigned for the abolition of slavery and her work helped influence reform in the child labour legislation. Her prolific output made her a rival to Tennyson as a candidate for poet laureate on the death of Wordsworth, Elizabeths volume Poems brought her great success, attracting the admiration of the writer Robert Browning. Their correspondence, courtship and marriage were carried out in secret, following the wedding she was indeed disinherited by her father. The couple moved to Italy in 1846, where she would live for the rest of her life and they had one son, Robert Barrett Browning, whom they called Pen. She died in Florence in 1861, a collection of her last poems was published by her husband shortly after her death. Elizabeths work had a influence on prominent writers of the day, including the American poets Edgar Allan Poe. She is remembered for such poems as How Do I Love Thee. some of Elizabeth Barretts family had lived in Jamaica since 1655. Their wealth derived mainly from Edward Barrett, owner of 10,000 acres in the estates of Cinnamon Hill, Cornwall, Cambridge, Elizabeths maternal grandfather owned sugar plantations, mills, glassworks and ships that traded between Jamaica and Newcastle. What the family believed to be their genealogy in relation to Jamaica is unclear, the family wished to hand down their name, stipulating that Barrett should always be held as a surname. In some cases inheritance was given on condition that the name was used by the beneficiary, given this strong tradition, Elizabeth used Elizabeth Barrett Moulton Barrett on legal documents and before she was married often signed herself Elizabeth Barrett Barrett or EBB. Elizabeths father chose to raise his family in England while his business enterprises remained in Jamaica, the fortune of Elizabeths mothers line, the Graham Clarke family, also derived in part from slave labour, and was considerable. Elizabeth Barrett Moulton-Barrett was born on 6 March 1806, in Coxhoe Hall and her parents were Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett and Mary Graham Clarke, Elizabeth was the eldest of 12 children. All lived to adulthood except for one girl, who died at the age of three, when Elizabeth was eight, the children all had nicknames, Elizabeth was Ba
9.
Robert Browning
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Robert Browning was an English poet and playwright whose mastery of the dramatic monologue made him one of the foremost Victorian poets. His poems are known for their irony, characterization, dark humour, social commentary, historical settings, Brownings early career began promisingly, but was not a success. His reputation took more than a decade to recover, during which time he moved away from the Shelleyan forms of his early period, in 1846 Browning married the older poet Elizabeth Barrett, who at the time was considerably better known than himself. So started one of historys most famous literary marriages and they went to live in Italy, a country he called my university, and which features frequently in his work. By the time of her death in 1861, he had published the crucial collection Men and Women, the collection Dramatis Personae and the book-length epic poem The Ring and the Book followed, and made him a leading British poet. He continued to write prolifically, but his reputation rests largely on the poetry he wrote in this middle period. Unusually for a poet, societies for the study of his work were founded while he was still alive, such Browning Societies remained common in Britain and the United States until the early 20th century. Brownings admirers have tended to temper their praise with reservations about the length and difficulty of his most ambitious poems, particularly The Ring and the Book. Nevertheless, they have included such eminent writers as Henry James, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, G. K. Chesterton, Ezra Pound, Jorge Luis Borges, among living writers, Stephen Kings The Dark Tower series and A. S. Byatts Possession refer directly to Brownings work, today Brownings critically most esteemed poems include the monologues Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, Fra Lippo Lippi, Andrea Del Sarto, and My Last Duchess. Robert Browning was born in Walworth in the parish of Camberwell, Surrey and he was baptized on 14 June 1812, at Locks Fields Independent Chapel, York Street, Walworth, the only son of Sarah Anna and Robert Browning. His father was a clerk for the Bank of England. Brownings paternal grandfather was an owner in Saint Kitts, West Indies. Brownings father had sent to the West Indies to work on a sugar plantation. Brownings mother was the daughter of a German shipowner who had settled in Dundee in Scotland, the evidence, however, is inconclusive either way. Roberts father, a collector, amassed a library of around 6,000 books. As such, Robert was raised in a household of significant literary resources and his mother, to whom he was very close, was a devout nonconformist and a talented musician. His younger sister, Sarianna, also gifted, became her brothers companion in his later years and his father encouraged his childrens interest in literature and the arts
10.
1859 in literature
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This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1859. – Tidskrift för hemmet, the first womens magazine in the Nordic countries, is established by Sophie Leijonhufvud, february 1 – George Eliots Adam Bede, her first full-length novel, is published by John Blackwood in the United Kingdom. April 30 – Charles Dickenss new weekly magazine All the Year Round is published for the first time in London, june–July – Frances Harpers The Two Offers, the first English-language short story by an African American author, is published in the first volume of The Anglo-African Magazine. November 26 – Wilkie Collinss sensation novel The Woman in White, an early example of mystery fiction, begins serialization in All the Year Round
