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John Murray (1778–1843)
John Murray (27 November 1778 – 27 June 1843) was a Scottish publisher and member of the John Murray publishing house. He published works by authors such as Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Jane Austen and Maria Rundell. Life The publishing house was founded by Murray's father, who died when Murray was only fifteen years old. During his adolescence, he ran the business with a partner Samuel Highley, but in 1803 the partnership was dissolved. Murray soon began to show the courage in literary speculation which earned for him later the name given him by Lord Byron of "the Anak of publishers", a reference to Anak in the Book of Numbers. In 1807 Murray took a share with Archibald Constable in publishing Sir Walter Scott's '' Marmion''. In the same year, he became part-owner of the ''Edinburgh Review'', although with the help of George Canning he launched in opposition the ''Quarterly Review'' in 1809, with William Gifford as its editor, and Scott, Canning, Robert Southey, John Ho ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Murray III
John Murray III (1808–1892) was a British publisher, third of the name at the John Murray company founded in London in 1777. Life The eldest son of John Murray II (1778–1843) by Anne Elliott, daughter of Charles Elliot, the Edinburgh publisher, he was born on 16 April 1808. When he was four years old his father moved the firm to 50 Albemarle Street, which became a meeting-place for men of letters. He was educated at Charterhouse School and Edinburgh University, where he graduated in 1827. He completed his education by foreign travel, in Weimar delivering the dedication of Lord Byron's ''Marino Faliero'' to Goethe. Publisher There resulted the research for a series of books for tourists, the ''Murray's Handbooks for Travellers''. In 1836 Murray saw through the press the first of the handbooks, his own ''Holland, Belgium, and the Rhine''; and three more were written by himself. Subsequently, he enlisted specialists: Richard Ford (''A Handbook for Travellers in Spain''), Sir ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Hookham Frere
John Hookham Frere (21 May 1769 – 7 January 1846) was an English diplomat and author. Early life Frere was born in London. His father, John Frere, a member of a Suffolk family, had been educated at Caius College, Cambridge, and became Second Wrangler in 1763. His mother, Jane, daughter of John Hookham, a rich London merchant, was cultured and wrote verse in private. His father's sister Ellenor, who married Sir John Fenn, editor of the ''Paston Letters'', wrote educational works for children under the pseudonyms "Mrs Lovechild" and "Mrs Teachwell". Young Frere was sent to Eton College in 1785, and there began a friendship with George Canning which greatly affected his life. From Eton, he went to his father's college at Cambridge, and graduated BA in 1792 and MA in 1795. He entered public service in the foreign office under Lord Grenville, and sat from 1796 to 1802 as Member of Parliament for the borough of West Looe in Cornwall. Career From his boyhood he had admired Wi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (TV Series)
''Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell'' is a seven-part British historical fantasy TV miniseries adapted by Peter Harness from Susanna Clarke's best-selling 2004 novel of the same name. It premiered on BBC One on 17 May 2015 and ended on 28 June 2015. It was nominated for four BAFTA awards and recognised by the British Film Institute as one of the top ten most important television programmes of 2015. Plot Set in England during the Napoleonic Wars at the beginning of the 19th century, the series presents an alternative history where magic is widely acknowledged, but rarely practised. Living in the rural north, Mr Norrell (Eddie Marsan) of Hurtfew Abbey is able to make the statues of York Minster talk and move. His manservant John Childermass (Enzo Cilenti) persuades him to travel to London to help in the war against France. While there, Mr Norrell encounters a leading member of the government and makes magic respectable in the realm when he conjures a fairy, called the Gentleman (Ma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Sessions
John Marshall (11 January 1953 – 2 November 2020), better known by the stage name John Sessions, was a British actor and comedian. He was known for comedy improvisation in television shows such as ''Whose Line Is It Anyway?'', as a panellist on '' QI'', and as a character actor in numerous films, both in the UK and Hollywood. Early life John Sessions was born John Marshall on 11 January 1953, according to most sources in Largs, Ayrshire, Scotland. His family moved to Bedford, England, when he was three. His father was a gas engineer. He had an older brother, Bill, and a twin sister, Maggie. Education Sessions was educated at Bedford Modern School, an independent school for boys (now co-educational), and Verulam School, St Albans, followed by the University College of North Wales in Bangor, from which he graduated with an MA in English literature. At university, he had begun to appear to audiences with his comedy in shows such as "Look back in Bangor" and "Marshall Arts". He ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
''Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell'' is the debut novel by British writer Susanna Clarke. Published in 2004, it is an alternative history set in 19th-century England around the time of the Napoleonic Wars. Its premise is that magic once existed in England and has returned with two men: Gilbert Norrell and Jonathan Strange. Centred on the relationship between these two men, the novel investigates the nature of "Englishness" and the boundaries between reason and unreason, Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Dane, and Northern and Southern English cultural tropes/stereotypes. It has been described as a fantasy novel, an alternative history, and a historical novel. It inverts the Industrial Revolution conception of the North–South divide in England: in this book the North is romantic and magical, rather than rational and concrete. The narrative draws on various Romantic literary traditions, such as the comedy of manners, the Gothic tale, and the Byronic hero. The novel's language is a pastiche o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Susanna Clarke
Susanna Mary Clarke (born 1 November 1959) is an English author known for her debut novel ''Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell'' (2004), a Hugo Award-winning alternative history. Clarke began ''Jonathan Strange'' in 1993 and worked on it during her spare time. For the next decade, she published short stories from the ''Strange'' universe, but it was not until 2003 that Bloomsbury bought her manuscript and began work on its publication. The novel became a best-seller. Two years later, she published a collection of her short stories, ''The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories'' (2006). Both Clarke's debut novel and her short stories are set in a magical England and written in a pastiche of the styles of 19th-century writers such as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. While ''Strange'' focuses on the relationship of two men, Jonathan Strange and Gilbert Norrell, the stories in ''Ladies'' focus on the power women gain through magic. Clarke's second novel, '' Piranesi'', was published in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
George Crabbe
George Crabbe ( ; 24 December 1754 – 3 February 1832) was an English poet, surgeon and clergyman. He is best known for his early use of the realistic narrative form and his descriptions of middle and working-class life and people. In the 1770s, Crabbe began his career as a doctor's apprentice, later becoming a surgeon. In 1780, he travelled to London to make a living as a poet. After encountering serious financial difficulty and being unable to have his work published, he wrote to the statesman and author Edmund Burke for assistance. Burke was impressed enough by Crabbe's poems to promise to help him in any way he could. The two became close friends and Burke helped Crabbe greatly both in his literary career and in building a role within the church. Burke introduced Crabbe to the literary and artistic society of London, including Sir Joshua Reynolds and Samuel Johnson, who read '' The Village'' before its publication and made some minor changes. Burke secured Crabbe the impor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thomas Moore
Thomas Moore (28 May 1779 – 25 February 1852) was an Irish writer, poet, and lyricist celebrated for his ''Irish Melodies''. Their setting of English-language verse to old Irish tunes marked the transition in popular Irish culture from Irish to English. Politically, Moore was recognised in England as a press, or " squib", writer for the aristocratic Whigs; in Ireland he was accounted a Catholic patriot. Married to a Protestant actress and hailed as "Anacreon Moore" after the classical Greek composer of drinking songs and erotic verse, Moore did not profess religious piety. Yet in the controversies that surrounded Catholic Emancipation, Moore was seen to defend the tradition of the Church in Ireland against both evangelising Protestants and uncompromising lay Catholics. Longer prose works reveal more radical sympathies. The ''Life and Death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald'' depicts the United Irish leader as a martyr in the cause of democratic reform. Complementing Maria Edgewort ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Don Juan (poem)
In English literature, ''Don Juan'' (1819–1824), by Lord Byron, is a satirical, epic poem that portrays the Spanish legend of Don Juan not as a womaniser, but as a man easily seduced by women.English 151-03 ''Byron's 'Don Juan' notes'' , Gregg A. Hecimovich As genre literature, ''Don Juan'' is an , written in '''' and presented in sixteen cantos. Lord Byron derived the character, but not the story, from the same Spanish legend. Upon publication in 1819, cantos I and II were criticised as immoral, because the author B ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Albemarle Street
Albemarle Street is a street in Mayfair in central London, off Piccadilly. It has historic associations with Lord Byron, whose publisher John Murray was based here, and Oscar Wilde, a member of the Albemarle Club, where an insult he received led to his suing for libel and to his eventual imprisonment. It is also known for its art galleries and the Brown's Hotel is located at 33 Albemarle Street. History Albemarle Street was built by a syndicate of developers headed by Sir Thomas Bond. The syndicate purchased a Piccadilly mansion called Clarendon House from Christopher Monck, 2nd Duke of Albemarle in 1684, which had fallen into ruin due to neglect caused by the dissolute duke's spendthrift ways. It was sold for £20,000, a fifth less than the duke had paid for it only nine years previously despite the land values in the area increasing in the intervening period. The house was demolished and the syndicate proceeded to develop the area. At that time the house backed onto op ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Miller (British Publisher)
William Richard Beckford Miller (25 March 1769 – 25 October 1844) was one of the leading English publishers of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, known for his popular and expensive titles. He began publishing on his own in 1790 at Bond Street in London. In 1812 he retired, aged 42, selling his business and 50 Albemarle Street, his London home, to John Murray, the second publisher of that name. Origins and early life William Miller was born at Bungay, Suffolk, on 25 March 1769, the only son of Thomas Miller (1731–1804), a local bookseller and antiquarian, and Sally Kingsbury (1741–1773) of Waveney House, Bungay, daughter of a maltster. As William Miller tells in an unpublished memoir, his paternal grandfather was "a respectable Paviour", who completely repaved the streets of Norwich and Bury St. Edmund's. When a youth William showed a talent and a taste for drawing, and Sir Joshua Reynolds advised that he enter the Royal Academy as a student. His stay at the Academy ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Guineas
The guinea (; commonly abbreviated gn., or gns. in plural) was a coin, minted in United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Great Britain between 1663 and 1814, that contained approximately one-quarter of an ounce of gold. The name came from the Guinea (region), Guinea region in West Africa, from where much of the gold used to make the coins was sourced. It was the first English machine-struck gold coin, originally representing a value of 20 Shilling (British coin), shillings in Coins of the United Kingdom, sterling specie, equal to one Pound (currency), pound, but rises in the price of gold relative to silver caused the value of the guinea to increase, at times to as high as thirty shillings. From 1717 to 1816, its value was officially fixed at twenty-one shillings. In the Great Recoinage of 1816, the guinea was Legal tender#Demonetization, demonetised and the word "guinea" became a colloquial or specialised term. Although the coin itself no longer circulated, the term ''guin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
