Thomas Babington Macaulay was born on 25 October 1800 at Rothley Temple in Leicestershire and died on 28 December 1859 at Kensington, London. He was at once a poet, essayist, parliamentarian, colonial administrator, historian, reviewer, and one of the most commanding prose stylists in nineteenth-century English. To modern readers his name often summons the grand certainty of Victorian “Whig history,” the tendency to…
“Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.”
Neighbourhood:
Folk & Ballad Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Despair, Sorrow, Longing
William Brighty Rands was born on 24 December 1823, in Chelsea, then a district on the western edge of London and already a place where commerce, domestic life, artistic ambition, and metropolitan poverty met in close quarters. He died on 23 April 1882, having lived only fifty-eight years, and his name is now far less familiar than the names of several Victorian writers whose work has dated more severely. Yet Rands o…
“Some of the best things said about it and what it foretells are little better than self-conscious talk to fill up time.”
Neighbourhood:
Children's Verse, Light Verse Poets, Nature Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Joy, Wonder, Irony
