English

Born in London on July 24, 1725, John Newton joined the merchant marine as a youth and had many adventures, including harsh service to a slave-trader. Rescued from this, and while returning home, Newton underwent a sudden religious conversion in March 1748 as he steered the ship through a storm.

John Henry Newman converted from the Church of England to Roman Catholicism in 1845 and was ordained in Rome the next year. His Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), The Grammar of Assent (1870), and The Idea of a University (1873) are important treatises in nineteenth-century English thought.

Born in London but educated in convents on the Continent and in England, Edith Nesbit started out as a writer of stories. In 1880, seven months pregnant, she married Hubert Bland, a founding member of the Fabian Society when it was founded four years later.

• MacCarthy, Fiona. "Morris, William (1834–1896)." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004. Online ed. Ed. Lawrence Goldman. Oct. 2009.

Born on March 18, 1840, William Cosmo Monkhouse was educated at St. Paul's School from 1848 to 1856. He earned his living at the Board of Trade, in which he worked his way up from clerk to Assistant Secretary of the Finance Department. Privately, Monkhouse was a man of letters: a poet and a critic of art and literature. He published five volumes of verse between 1865 and 1901.