Victorian

Henry Francis Lyte was born on June 1, 1793, at Ednam, Scotland, and educated at Portora Royal School, Enniskillen, County Fermanagh (the alma mater of Oscar Wilde and Samuel Beckett, in Northern Ireland) and Trinity College, Dublin, where he won the Chancellor's Prize for English verse three years in a row, and from which he graduated in 1814.

Born in 1809, Kasiprasad Ghose graduated from Hindu College, Calcutta, in 1828, and went on to edit a weekly newspaper, The Hindu Intelligence. His only volume of poems, The Shair and Other Poems, came out in 1839. He died in 1873.

Toru Dutt was born on March 4, 1856, in Rambagan, 12 Manicktollah Street, Calcutta, to father Govin Chunder Dutt and mother Kshetramoni, a family that become Christians in 1862. Toru was the youngest child, arriving after sister Aru and brother Abju (who died in 1865). Their cousin was the poet and civil servant Romesh Chunder Dutt.

Robert Stephen Hawker was born on Dec. 3, 1803, to Jacob Stephen Hawker and Jane Elizabeth Drewitt. He was educated at Liskeard and Cheltenham Grammar Schools, and Pembroke College and Magdalen College, Oxford, receiving his B.A. in 1828. Hawker brought out his first book of poems, Tendrils, in 1821, and won the Newdigate Prize at Oxford for a poem on Pompeii in 1827.

Born at Poole, Dorset, on January 30, 1837, as Julia Augusta Davies, Augusta Webster spent her young years on the ship Griper, stationed at such places as Banff Castle and Penzance, and then in 1851, at Cambridge. Her education was informal but she studied at the Cambridge School of Art.

Anna Letitia Waring was born at Plas-y-Velin, Neath, on April 19, 1823. She left her parents' faith, the Society of Friends, for Anglicanism, into which she was baptised on May 15, 1842. Her life-long avocations were the study of the Bible (in self-taught Hebrew), the writing of hymns, a love of animals, and charitable work for prisoners.

Alexander Macgregor Rose was born August 17, 1846, in Tomantoul, Banffshire. He graduated from the University of Aberdeen in 1867 and became, in 1870, Master of the Free Church School in Gairloch, Rossshire. After returning to Aberdeen to study Divinity from 1871, he was ordained on Sept. 9, 1875, and became minister at the Free Church of Evie and Rendall, Orkney.

Born at Keswick on October 13, 1844, Ernest James Myers received his education in classics at Cheltenham and Balliol College Oxford. He became a fellow of Wadham College in 1868, where he taught for three years, and then moved to London for twenty years to make his living as a translator and editor.

Born March 31, 1844, in Selkirk, Scotland, Andrew Lang was educated at Selkirk Grammar School, Edinburgh Academy, the University of St. Andrews, the University of Glasgow, and Balliol College, Oxford, from which he graduated with a B.A. (honours) in 1866. He took up a fellowship at Merton College in Oxford from 1868 to 1875, in which year he married Lenora Blanche Alleyne.

Isa Craig, born Oct. 17, 1831, in Edinburgh, was largely self-educated in literature. By 1853, she worked at and contributed poems to the newspaper the Scotchman. Her first book, Poems by Isa, came out in 1856. She left Scotland for London in 1857, where she was employed as secretary for the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science.