Charles John Huffam Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in a modest terraced house at 1 Mile End Terrace in Landport, Portsmouth, Hampshire, England. The second of eight children born to John and Elizabeth Dickens, his arrival came during a time of naval activity and modest aspirations in a bustling port town. His father, John, a clerk in the Navy Pay Office, was a genial, improvident man whose love for literature,…
“In the closes and wynds of that picturesque place—I am sorry to remind you what fast friends picturesqueness and typhus often are—we saw more poverty and sickness in an hour than many people would believe in a life.”
Neighbourhood:
Light Verse Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Despair, Sorrow, Spirituality
Thomas Hardy stands as one of the most significant literary figures of the Victorian and early modern periods, a writer whose novels explored the tragic dimensions of human experience with unflinching honesty and whose poetry achieved a stark beauty that influenced generations of twentieth-century poets. Born on June 2, 1840, in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, England, and dying on January 11, 1928, in Max Gate, Dorchest…
“The value of a poem consists in the amount of emotion which it contains.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Dramatic Poets, Edwardian Poets, Nature Poets, Political Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Longing, Despair