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Gift Book
Gift books, literary annuals, or keepsakes were 19th-century books, often lavishly decorated, which collected essays, short fiction, and poetry. They were primarily published in the autumn, in time for the holiday season and were intended to be given away rather than read by the purchaser. They were often printed with the date of the coming new year, but copyrighted with the actual year of publication. History Gift books first appeared in England in the 1820s. They were modelled after the long-established literary almanacs published in France and Germany such as the '' Almanach des Muses'' (1765–1833) and Schiller's ''Musen-Almanach'' (1796–1800), but lacked some of the critical prestige of their Continental counterparts.Paula R. Feldman's introduction to a re-edition of ''The Keepsake for 1829.'' Broadview Press, 2006. The first known example is Rudolph Ackermann's ''Forget Me Not'', subtitled ''a Christmas and New Year’s Present for 1823'', published in November 1822. I ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin ( ; 12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist, geologist, and biologist, widely known for his contributions to evolutionary biology. His proposition that all species of life have descended from a common ancestor is now generally accepted and considered a fundamental concept in science. In a joint publication with Alfred Russel Wallace, he introduced his scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process he called natural selection, in which the struggle for existence has a similar effect to the artificial selection involved in selective breeding. Darwin has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history and was honoured by burial in Westminster Abbey. Darwin's early interest in nature led him to neglect his medical education at the University of Edinburgh; instead, he helped to investigate marine invertebrates. His studies at the University of Cambridge's Christ's Col ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Letitia Elizabeth Landon (14 August 1802 – 15 October 1838) was an English poet and novelist, better known by her initials L.E.L. The writings of Landon are transitional between Romanticism and the Victorian Age. Her first major breakthrough came with ''The Improvisatrice'' and thence she developed the metrical romance towards the Victorian ideal of the Victorian monologue, casting her influence on Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning and Christina Rossetti. Her influence can also be found in Alfred Tennyson and in America, where she was very popular. Poe regarded her genius as self-evident. In spite of these wide influences, due to the perceived immorality of Landon's lifestyle, her works were more or less deliberately suppressed and misrepresented after her death. Early life Letitia Elizabeth Landon was born on 14 August 1802 in Chelsea, London to John Landon and Catherine Jane, ''née'' Bishop.Byron (2004). A precocious child, Landon learned to read as a toddler ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron
George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824), known simply as Lord Byron, was an English romantic poet and peer. He was one of the leading figures of the Romantic movement, and has been regarded as among the greatest of English poets. Among his best-known works are the lengthy narratives ''Don Juan'' and ''Childe Harold's Pilgrimage''; many of his shorter lyrics in ''Hebrew Melodies'' also became popular. Byron was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, later traveling extensively across Europe to places such as Italy, where he lived for seven years in Venice, Ravenna, and Pisa after he was forced to flee England due to lynching threats. During his stay in Italy, he frequently visited his friend and fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Later in life Byron joined the Greek War of Independence fighting the Ottoman Empire and died leading a campaign during that war, for which Greeks revere him as a folk hero. He died in 1824 at the age of 36 from ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens (; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era.. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime and, by the 20th century, critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories are widely read today. Born in Portsmouth, Dickens left school at the age of 12 to work in a boot-blacking factory when his father was incarcerated in a debtors' prison. After three years he returned to school, before he began his literary career as a journalist. Dickens edited a weekly journal for 20 years, wrote 15 novels, five novellas, hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles, lectured and performed readings extensively, was an indefatigable letter writer, and campaigned vigorously for children's rights, for education, and for other social ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mary Shelley
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (; ; 30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851) was an English novelist who wrote the Gothic fiction, Gothic novel ''Frankenstein, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus'' (1818), which is considered an History of science fiction#Shelley and Europe in the early 19th century, early example of science fiction. She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her father was the political philosopher William Godwin and her mother was the philosopher and women's rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft. Mary's mother died less than a fortnight after giving birth to her. She was raised by her father, who provided her with a rich if informal education, encouraging her to adhere to his own anarchist political theories. When she was four, her father married a neighbour, Mary Jane Clairmont, with whom Mary came to have a troubled relationship. In 1814, Mary began a romance with one of her father's politica ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Samuel Griswold Goodrich
Samuel Griswold Goodrich (August 19, 1793 – May 9, 1860), better known under his pseudonym Peter Parley, was an American author. Biography Goodrich was born at Ridgefield, Connecticut, the son of a Congregational minister. Goodrich was largely self-educated, and became an assistant in a country store at Danbury, Connecticut, which he left in 1808, and later again at Hartford, Connecticut, until 1811. From 1816 to 1822 he was a bookseller and publisher in Hartford. He visited Europe from 1823 to 1824, and moved to Boston in 1826. In 1833 he bought in nearby Roxbury and built a home in what is now Jamaica Plain. There he continued in the publishing business, and from 1828 to 1842 published an illustrated annual, '' The Token'', to which he was a frequent contributor both in prose and verse. A selection from these contributions was published in 1841 under the title ''Sketches from a Students Window''. ''The Token'' also contained some of the earliest work of Nathaniel Hawt ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lydia Sigourney
Lydia Huntley Sigourney (September 1, 1791 – June 10, 1865), ''née'' Lydia Howard Huntley, was an American poet, author, and publisher during the early and mid 19th century. She was commonly known as the "Sweet Singer of Hartford." She had a long career as a literary expert, publishing 52 books and in over 300 periodicals in her lifetime. While some of her works were signed anonymously, most of her works were published with just her married name Mrs. Sigourney. During the lyceum movement that flourished in the United States in the 19th century, women named literary societies and study clubs in her honor. Biography Early life Mrs. Sigourney was born in Norwich, Connecticut to Ezekiel Huntley and Zerviah Wentworth. Their only child, she was named after her father's first wife, Lydia Howard, who had died soon after marrying Ezekiel. In her autobiography ''Letters of Life'' Sigourney describes her relation to her parents, her decision to care for them, and her intent to avoid ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Marguerite Gardiner, Countess Of Blessington
Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington (née Power; 1 September 1789 – 4 June 1849), was an Irish novelist, journalist, and literary hostess.''The Feminist Companion to Literature in English'', eds Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy (London: Batsford, 1990), p. 104. She became acquainted with Lord Byron in Genoa and wrote a book about her conversations with him. Early life Born Margaret Power, near Clonmel in County Tipperary, Ireland, she was a daughter of Edmund Power and Ellen Sheehy, small landowners. She was "haphazardly educated by her own reading and by her mother's friend Ann Dwyer." Her childhood was blighted by her father's character and poverty, and her early womanhood made wretched by a compulsory marriage at the age of fifteen to Captain Maurice St. Leger Farmer, an English officer whose drunken habits finally brought him as a debtor to the King's Bench Prison, where he died by falling out of a window in October 1817. She had left him after ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Phoebe Cary
Phoebe Cary (September 4, 1824 – July 31, 1871) was an American poet, and the younger sister of poet Alice Cary (1820–1871).She was a great poet who composed a Legend of Northland which is a very beautiful poem. The sisters co-published poems in 1849, and then each went on to publish volumes of their own. After their deaths in 1871, joint anthologies of the sisters' unpublished poems were also compiled. Phoebe Cary was born on September 4, 1824, in Mount Healthy, Ohio near Cincinnati, and she and her sister Alice were raised on the Clovernook farm in what is now North College Hill, Ohio.Kane, Paul. ''Poetry of the American Renaissance''. New York: George Braziller, 1995: 297. While they were raised in a Universalist household and held political and religious views that were liberal and reformist, they often attended Methodist, Presbyterian, and Congregationalist services and were friendly with ministers of all these denominations and others.Edwards, June.The Cary Sist ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alice Cary
Alice Cary (April 26, 1820February 12, 1871) was an American poet, and the older sister of fellow poet Phoebe Cary (1824–1871). Biography Alice Cary was born on April 26, 1820, in Mount Healthy, Ohio, off the Miami River near Cincinnati. Her parents lived on a farm bought by Robert Cary in 1813 in what is now North College Hill, Ohio. He called the Clovernook Farm. The farm was north of Cincinnati, a good distance from schools, and the father could not afford to give their large family of nine children a very good education. But Alice and her sister Phoebe were fond of reading and studied all they could. While the sisters were raised in a Universalist household and held political and religious views that were liberal and reformist, they often attended Methodist, Presbyterian, and Congregationalist services and were friendly with ministers of all these denominations and others. According to Phoebe, When Alice was 17 and Phoebe 13, they began to write verses, which we ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lydia Maria Child
Lydia Maria Child ( Francis; February 11, 1802October 20, 1880) was an American abolitionist, women's rights activist, Native American rights activist, novelist, journalist, and opponent of American expansionism. Her journals, both fiction and domestic manuals, reached wide audiences from the 1820s through the 1850s. At times she shocked her audience as she tried to take on issues of both male dominance and white supremacy in some of her stories. Despite these challenges, Child may be most remembered for her poem "Over the River and Through the Wood." Her grandparents' house, which she wrote about visiting, was restored by Tufts University in 1976 and stands near the Mystic River on South Street, in Medford, Massachusetts. Early life and education Lydia Maria Francis was born in Medford, Massachusetts, on February 11, 1802, to Susannah (née Rand) and Convers Francis. She went by her middle name, and pronounced it Ma-RYE-a. Her older brother, Convers Francis, was educated at H ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
