George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin in 1856, but lived in England for his entire adult life. Shaw wrote more than fifty plays including Caesar and Cleopatra (1898), Major Barbara (1905), Man and Superman (1905), The Doctor's Dilemma (1906) and Saint Joan (1923). He might...
DH Lawrence was born in 1885 in the bleak coal mining town of Eastwood, near Nottingham. His childhood home is now the DH Lawrence Birthplace Museum: worth a visit on your next literary tour of England. Lawrence wrote a total of twelve novels – including...
Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay (Mumbai) in 1865, but he lived in England for most of his adult life. Today he’s probably best remembered for the short story The Man Who Would be King (1888), the poem Gunga Din (1890) and the novel Kim...
Who can resist Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends from Hundred Acre Wood? AA Milne wrote just two sets of Pooh stories: Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) and The House at Pooh Corner (1928) plus two collections of children’s poems: When We Were Very Young (1924) and Now We Are...
Although Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854, he was as a student at Magdalen College, Oxford from 1874 to 1878 and then moved to London. So a literary tour of England should take in the controversial sculpture “A Conversation with Oscar Wilde” on...
Elizabeth Gaskell spent her formative years in Knutsford (15 miles south of Manchester) where she’s commemorated by the Gaskell Memorial Tower in the town center. Knutsford was the inspiration for Cranford (1851-53) in her novel of the same name, lovingly dramatized in the BBC’s 2007-10 mini-series...
Dr Samuel Johnson is most famous for A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), containing over 40,000 words, which took him nine years to compile. It brought Johnson great popularity and success, but he was also a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, literary critic and biographer. Dr...
Charles Darwin wrote numerous books based on his travels and studies, but he is surely best remembered for The Voyage of the Beagle (1839) and On the Origin of Species (1859). Darwin was born in the lovely town of Shrewsbury in 1809 and lived there...
“There are mysteries which men can only guess at, which age by age they may solve only in part.” – Bram Stoker Literary Whitby It can be argued whether or not Abraham (Bram) Stoker is a major figure in the history of English literature, despite the extraordinary...
In the mid-18th Century Thomas Gray was famous. His masterpiece – still popular and widely admired – is Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751) for which he found inspiration in the graveyard of St Giles’ Church in Stoke Poges (20 miles west of London)....