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…
“To torture a fly, to tease a pet, but still more, to tease a playmate, to try to make another creature give up a part of its freedom, just to please our whims (without giving in return something it is glad to receive) is an offence in the eyes of God.”
Neighbourhood:
Children's Verse, Light Verse Poets, Nature Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Joy, Wonder, Irony
George Crabbe was born on 24 December 1754 in Aldeburgh, a small Suffolk fishing port on the North Sea coast, and died on 3 February 1832 at Trowbridge in Wiltshire. He lived through a period of extraordinary literary and political change: the later eighteenth century’s polished, rule-conscious verse gave way to Romanticism’s exaltation of imagination, nature, and individual feeling; the French Revolution altered Eur…
“A great lie is like a great fish on dry land; it may fret and fling and make a frightful bother, but it cannot hurt you. You have only to keep still, and it will die of itself.”
Neighbourhood:
Augustan Poets, Nature Poets, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Spirituality
