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…
“There can be no doubt that Love is the test of the Beautiful; but if I had said the Beautiful is what a human being loves, a thousand facts would rise to contradict me.”
Neighbourhood:
Romantic Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality
George Darley was born in Dublin in December 1795 and died in London on 23 November 1846. He belongs among those gifted nineteenth-century writers whose lives complicate the comforting assumption that talent naturally finds its public. During his lifetime he was respected by a small number of discerning contemporaries, employed steadily enough in literary and educational work, and capable of producing poetry of extra…
“Fashionability is a kind of elevated vulgarity.”
Neighbourhood:
Irish Poets, Romantic Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Despair, Sorrow, Wonder
