Heart disease

Born on May 12, 1812, in London, Edward Lear as a teenager found artistic work drawing zoological specimens for illustrated books. One of his patrons was the earl of Derby, for whose children he devised the Book of Nonsense, published in 1846, the year after he had given drawing lessons to Queen Victoria.

Archibald Lampman was born in 1861 in Morpeth, Ontario, a village near Chatham and Ridgetown at the intersection of routes 3 and 17.

Born the daughter of a nonconformist minister in Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire, Dinah Mulock took her mother and siblings to London and supported them by writing novels, the most successful of which, John Halifax, Gentleman (1856), enabled her eventually to build Corner House in Shortlands, Kent, where she spent the rest of her life.

• Ryals, Clyde de L.. “Browning, Robert (1812-1889).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004.

• Collini, Stefan. “Arnold, Matthew (1822-1888).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004.