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…
“To me truth seems to lie between these two extremes. History is neither, but it partakes of the nature of both.”
Neighbourhood:
Folk & Ballad Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
William Oldys, born on 14 July 1696 and dead on 15 April 1761, belongs to that remarkable class of literary figures whose influence exceeds their modern fame. He was a poet only intermittently, an editor often anonymously, a biographer by patient accumulation, a bibliographer before bibliography had fully become a profession, and an antiquary whose chief subject was the survival of the written past. To encounter Oldy…
“We hardly ever find the worth of books till we lose them; and it is then too late to value them.”
Neighbourhood:
Georgian Poets, Light Verse Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Wonder, Peace
