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…
“The temper in which we perceive a fact to be accounted for is very different from that in which we construct a theory to explain it.”
Neighbourhood:
Romantic Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality
Alfred Tennyson, later Alfred, Lord Tennyson, was born on 6 August 1809 at Somersby rectory in Lincolnshire, England, and died on 6 October 1892 at Lurgashall in Sussex. During his long life he became the defining poetic voice of the Victorian age: at once a public laureate who wrote for national occasions and a private, searching poet whose work returned obsessively to bereavement, desire, religious uncertainty, mem…
“Of course, Byron’s merits are on the surface. This is not the case with Wordsworth.”
Neighbourhood:
Devotional Poets, Dramatic Poets, Nature Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Sorrow
