Letters from Centuries Past

While Dante Gabriel Rossetti was best known as a painter and a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, he was also a gifted poet. He wrote many poems but initially left them unpublished. In 1862, when his wife Elizabeth Siddal died from a laudanum overdose, Rossetti, …

Most of the letters featured on this blog are found in books (mainly through Project Gutenberg or Internet Archive ) and are shown only in their transcribed form. Every now and then, however, I will reproduce the image of an original letter. For this post, I am sharing a short,…

In 1773, at the age of seventeen, Austrian-born composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was serving as a court musician in Salzburg under Archbishop Hieronymus Colloredo. While the position offered him financial stability, over time Mozart became increasingly dissatisfied with his low …

This previous post  discusses how the French painter Paul Gauguin departed for Tahiti in 1891, in search of a life unaffected by European society. He eventually made some of his best work in Tahiti, including the monumental painting Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are …

In early 1888, Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Czech composer Antonín Dvořák met for the first time in Prague, where Tchaikovsky was scheduled to conduct two concerts of his own works. The men found they had a mutual admiration for each other's music, meeting s…

In the September 1869 issue of  The Atlantic Monthly , an article was published titled  The True Story of Lady Byron’s Life , written by the celebrated American author Harriet Beecher Stowe . In it, Stowe accused Lord Byron, the legendary British poet who had died four decades e…

In 1902, commissioned by a German publisher to write a monograph about the French sculptor Auguste Rodin, the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke travelled to Paris, where he met Rodin in person. The two  immediately got along, both personally and artistically ( Rilke being 26 year…

Lewis Carroll, pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, is best known as the author of the children's classic Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass (1871). Carroll was a prolific letter-writer and maintained a correspondence wit…

The three Brontë sisters, Charlotte (born 1816), Emily (b. 1818) and Anne (b. 1820), published their work under male pseudonyms  — under Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell respectively —  in order to be taken seriously as writers. Between them, they jointly published a volume of poem…

Celebrated Russian playwright and short-story writer Anton Chekhov had five siblings— two older brothers, Alexander and Nikolai, and three younger siblings, Ivan, Maria, and Mikhail. With his brother Nikolai, who was two years older, Anton had a close but strained relationship. …

In early November 1830, accompanied by his friend Tytus Woyciechowski, 20-year-old Polish composer Frédéric Chopin left Warsaw for Vienna to start his international career. After successful performances in Vienna the previous year and the recent premiere of his Piano Concerto No…