Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-92) is generally regarded as the greatest of the Victorian poets. He remains popular for works such as The Lady of Shalott (1832, 1842), In Memoriam (1849) and The Charge of the Light Brigade (1834), which was the partial inspiration for the...
TS Eliot was undoubtedly one of the most important poets of the 20th Century (indeed in all of English literature). He is probably best remembered for The Waste Land (1922), in which he laments the condition of his generation and of Western civilization. Other significant...
Dorothy L Sayers was a writer of detective fiction, best remembered for the aristocratic sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. Five of the eleven Wimsey novels – including the best known, The Nine Tailors (1934) – were adapted for television by the BBC (1972-75) starring the incomparable...
Matthew Arnold (1822-88) was one of the greatest Victorian poets, arguably on a par with Tennyson and Browning. Dover Beach (1867), probably written in 1851, the year of his marriage, is a particular favorite. The poem is a melancholy, even pessimistic, reflection on modern life....
John Dryden (1631-1700) is an important figure in English literary history. Following the English Civil War (1642-51) and the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, he built a reputation as the leading poet and literary critic of his day. King Charles II made him England’s...
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, born in Edinburgh in 1859, graduated with a medical degree from the city’s University. He set up practice in Portsmouth in 1882 and it was there that he wrote A Study in Scarlet (1887), the novel that introduced the world to...
John Betjeman was the UK’s Poet Laureate from 1972 until his death in 1984. His popularity is based on his poems, which are approachable and often humorous, and his many appearances on television. These days he might best be remembered for his blank verse autobiography,...
“Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.” – Charles Dickens (Hard Times) Dickens Basics Charles Dickens is, in the view of many, the greatest Victorian novelist. He’s certainly the most popular and widely read. Adaptations of...
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was one of the greatest of the Romantic poets. Like his friends Byron and Keats, he produced a remarkable body of work in a very short life. He is remembered for classic poems such as Ozymandias (1818), Ode to the West...
Daniel Defoe was born in London in or around 1660. He was a prolific writer, with more than 300 works to his name including books, pamphlets and journals. He is remembered for Robinson Crusoe (1719): the first great novel in English (although probably based on...