Sydney Thompson Dobell was born on 5 April 1824 at Cranbrook in Kent, into a family whose circumstances placed him close to the commercial and dissenting middle-class culture of provincial England rather than to the aristocratic literary world. His father, Thomas Dobell, was a wine merchant, and the business of buying, selling, accounting, travelling, and maintaining credit would remain an important fact of Sydney’s…
“Every year makes me feel more thoroughly what we all recognise in theory—that there is no happiness but in being good and doing good, and that self is in all men the great obstacle to both these things.”
Neighbourhood:
Romantic Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality
Katharine Tynan Hinkson, born Katharine Tynan on 23 January 1861 and dead on 2 April 1931, was one of the most industrious and visible Irish writers of her generation. Poet, novelist, reviewer, memoirist, editor, children’s writer, and biographer, she published with a speed and abundance that can make her career seem almost bewildering to a modern reader. Her name is most often associated with the first phase of the…
“There is an Irish way of paying compliments as though they were irresistible truths which makes what otherwise would be an impertinence, delightful.”
Neighbourhood:
Edwardian Poets, Irish Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Spirituality