Charles Harding Firth was born in Sheffield on 16 March 1857, into a family whose prosperity, civic conscience, and intellectual ambitions helped to shape his future. His father, Mark Firth, was a prominent steel manufacturer, philanthropist, and public figure whose wealth was tied to the industrial transformation of nineteenth-century Sheffield. Yet the younger Firth’s enduring interests lay not in the furnaces and…
“The time has gone by when one man could sit down in his study and undertake to write a continuous history of England or France; and it will not come again in our days.”
Neighbourhood:
Folk & Ballad Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
Sir Richard Fanshawe, born on 12 June 1608 and dead in Madrid in June 1666, lived one of the most various and hazardous lives available to a seventeenth-century English man of letters. He was at once a poet, translator, civil servant, soldier-administrator, parliamentarian, courtier, prisoner, exile, and ambassador. His name has never become as immediately familiar as those of John Milton, Andrew Marvell, or John Dry…
Neighbourhood:
Cavalier Poets, Devotional Poets, Love Poets, Metaphysical Poets, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Sensuality, Wonder, Fear
