Historical Trivia

 Robert Browning: (1812-1889) English poet Robert Browning was born on 1812. He was the son of well to do official of the Bank of England. Till the age of 14, he had no formal education though he studied at home with the help and encouragement of his father, a highly cultivated man with an excellent library. His parents made no objection to their son choosing poetry as a career.   At the age of 14 Browning had fallen under the spell of Percy Bysshe Shelley. His first published poem was ‘Pauline’ in 1833, ‘Restless’ in 1835 was a definite advance but it was not well received though Elizabeth Barrett found in it ‘the expression of a new mind’. In 1840 ‘Sordello’ was published which was perhaps the most ambitious and disastrous of his early poems. It was widely criticized as obscure and Browning never really threw off this don’t of obscurity.   He published privately a number of small publications including some of his best known poems. ‘Soliloquy in the Spanish Cloister’, ‘the Pied Pip

Alan Turing: (1912-1954) Introduction :- Alan Turing is best known for the decryption of the codes of The Enigma (German cipher device). He was born on 23 rd June 1912 in Maida Vale, London his father Julius Matheson Turing was a civil servant in India and his mother was Sara Turing (daughter of chief engineer of the Madras and Maratha Railway). Works :- Turing was one of the people who worked on the first computers. He was the first person to think of using a computer to do things that were too hard for a person to do. He created the Turing machine in 1936. The machine was imaginary, but it included the idea of a computer program. During World War II , Alan worked in the design of the ACE (automatic computing engine) at the National Physical Laboratory. He presented a paper design of a stored program computer. “Although it was possible to build ACE, there were delays in starting the project. In late 1947, he returned to Cambridge, the pilot ACE was built without him, it was

William Blake: (1757-1827) William Blake's portrait by Thomas Phillips.  He was an English poet , painter , engraver and a mystic , he was born on 28 November 1757 in SoHo (now Broad wick ST), London. He was third child of his parents from 7. William Blake was one of the greatest figures in English literature and art. Blake was the son of a stocking maker, and was apprenticed to an engraver in 1771. In 1782, at the age of 25, he married a girl named ‘ Catherine Boucher ’. She was the daughter of a Battersea market gardener. She was a devoted wife and remained as a loyal companion to him throughout his life of great poverty and neglect. Blake’s earliest poems were ‘ Poetical Sketches ’, privately printed in 1783. He wrote those poems between the ages of 12 and 20, many of them are clearly derivative but the best, such as the song ‘ How sweet I roam’d from field to field ’ (composed at the age of 14) and ‘ My skills and fine array ’ are his very fine poems. In 1789 he brought o

Alexander Pope: (1688-1744) English poet Alexander Pope was born in London on  21 May 1688 , His mother ( Edith )  was the daughter of William Turner  and his father had a well accomplished business of wholesale linen, both were Catholics, and at that time to be a Catholic, especially from an ambitious man, was a serious disability. But this was only one pope’s difficulties. At the age of 12 as a result of a tubercular disease he grew up only four feet 6 inches in height.  Studios when young, he was in large measure self educated. Pope's earliest poems, though not free from imitation, were of an astonishing maturity. His grasp of the couplet form was approaching mastery, while his observant eye and telling for description was already far beyond the ordinary.  One of his ambitious poems was ‘ Essay on Criticism ', published anonymously in 1711, in which he showed the genius for satire that was later to dominate his work. With this poem he made for himself a prominent place

William  Shakespeare : (1564-1616) William Shakespeare , English poet and dramatist was born in Stanford-on Evan in April 1564.  From the Parish records and various legal documents we got some detail about his family affairs and business dealings but we don’t know much about the circumstances which led him to write his great works and made him immortal in the English literature world.  He was the son of a leading tradesman of Stanford.  He therefore, received his education at the town’s grammar school. He married to a girl named Anne Hathaway.  He emerged in the early 1590s as an important young play-writer and poet, and a member of the leading company of actors. In 1958, Francis Meres, a lawyer wrote of him as Britain's greatest dramatist, excelling in every type of drama and poetry. It is difficult to date Shakespeare's plays because his company was reluctant to have his plays printed lest they should then be performed by rival companies. Only seventeen of his plays were pu