Thinkers Timeline

William Shakespeare was an English writer. He is often called the greatest writer in the English language. He was born in 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon, a small town in England. He died there in 1616. We do not know everything about his life. He came from a fairly ordinary family. His father was a glove-maker and a local official. Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway when he was eighteen. They had three children. At some point Shakespeare moved to London. There he worked in the theatre. He was an actor, a writer, and part-owner of a theatre company. The company built a famous theatre called the Globe. Shakespeare wrote plays for it, and the plays were performed for large, mixed crowds. In about twenty years, Shakespeare wrote around 38 plays and over 150 short poems called sonnets. His plays include tragedies, comedies, and histories. Some of the most famous are 'Hamlet', 'Romeo and Juliet', 'Macbeth', and 'King Lear'. Shakespeare was successful in his own time. He made enough money to buy a large house back in Stratford. After he died, two friends collected his plays into one book, called the First Folio, in 1623. Without that book, many of his plays might have been lost forever.

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) was an English philosopher who lived through one of the most turbulent periods in British history — the English Civil War, the execution of King Charles I, and the Interregnum. He spent years in exile in France and worked as a tutor to the future King Charles II. His most famous work, Leviathan (1651), is one of the foundational texts of Western political philosophy. In it he argued that without government, human life would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short — and that people therefore have a rational self-interest in submitting to the authority of a sovereign state. He is considered one of the founders of modern political science and social contract theory.

John Milton was an English poet, political writer, and government official. He wrote one of the greatest poems in the English language, Paradise Lost. He was also one of the most important defenders of free speech, religious liberty, and republican government in the 17th century. He was born in 1608 in London. He died there in 1674, aged 65. He came from a comfortable middle-class family. His father was a scrivener (a kind of legal copyist and money-lender) who loved music. Milton received an unusually thorough education. He studied at St Paul's School in London, then at Christ's College, Cambridge, where he earned his master's degree in 1632. After Cambridge, he spent six years in private study at his father's country house, reading widely in classical Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and modern languages. He became one of the most learned poets in English history. In 1638-1639 he travelled in Italy. He met Galileo, then under house arrest. The meeting impressed him. He returned to England as the country was sliding into civil war. He chose the side of Parliament against King Charles I. He wrote pamphlets defending republican government, religious liberty, and free speech. His pamphlet Areopagitica (1644) is one of the great defences of free expression in any language. When the king was executed in 1649 and a republic established, Milton served as Latin Secretary to the new government. He wrote official letters to foreign powers and defended the regicide in major published works. He went blind in his early forties, possibly from glaucoma, while still in government service. When the monarchy was restored in 1660, Milton was in danger. He went into hiding briefly. He was eventually pardoned but lost his position. He spent his last years in poverty and obscurity, dictating his greatest poems to assistants. Paradise Lost was published in 1667. Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes followed in 1671.

John Locke was an English philosopher. He is one of the most influential political thinkers in world history. He was born on 29 August 1632 in a small village in Somerset, in the south-west of England. His father was a country lawyer who had fought on the side of Parliament in the English Civil War. Young John grew up during that war, watching England struggle over who should rule. He was a brilliant student. He went to Westminster School in London and then to Christ Church, Oxford. He stayed at Oxford as a teacher for many years. He studied medicine and science as well as philosophy. He worked with the famous scientist Robert Boyle. He was one of the first members of the Royal Society, Britain's most important scientific group. His medical training later saved the life of his friend and patron, Lord Ashley, by performing an operation to remove a cyst from his liver. Lord Ashley (later the Earl of Shaftesbury) became a powerful politician. Locke worked as his secretary, adviser, and family doctor. This brought Locke deep into English politics. When Shaftesbury fell out with King Charles II in the early 1680s, Locke too was in danger. He fled to the Netherlands in 1683. He stayed there for six years, writing the books that would make him famous. In 1688, King James II was overthrown in what English people called the Glorious Revolution. William and Mary took the throne. Locke returned home safely. In 1689 and 1690, he published three of the most important books of his age: A Letter Concerning Toleration, Two Treatises of Government, and An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Each changed its field. He never married. He spent his last years at a country house in Essex, writing and corresponding with scholars across Europe. He died on 28 October 1704, aged 72.

Aphra Behn was an English writer. She is the first woman known to have earned her living by writing in English. Almost every fact about her early life is uncertain. She was born around 1640, probably in Kent in the south of England. Her family was not rich. Her father may have been a barber called Johnson. As a young woman, she travelled to Surinam, a small English colony in South America (it later became Dutch). There she seems to have met people whose stories she used later in her writing. By 1664 she was back in England. She married a man called Behn, possibly a German or Dutch merchant. He died or left her within a few years. She then used the name Mrs Behn for the rest of her life. In the 1660s, King Charles II sent her to Antwerp in the Netherlands as a spy. Her job was to get information about English enemies. She sent messages back to London using the code name 'Astrea'. The king did not pay her enough. She ended up in debt. She may have spent time in a debtors' prison in London. From about 1670 she began writing plays. They were witty, often funny, and sometimes about sex. She wrote about 19 plays in total. Her most famous play is The Rover (1677). She also wrote poems, novels, and translations. Her novel Oroonoko (1688) is one of the first novels in English. It tells the story of an African prince sold into slavery. She died on 16 April 1689, aged about 48 or 49. She is buried at Westminster Abbey, a rare honour for a writer. Virginia Woolf later said that every woman who writes owes something to Aphra Behn.

Isaac Newton (1643-1727) was an English mathematician, physicist, and natural philosopher. He was born prematurely in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, and his father died before he was born. He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, but when the university closed because of an outbreak of plague in 1665, he returned to his family farm and spent roughly eighteen months there during which he made several of the most important discoveries in the history of science. He developed the mathematical foundations of calculus, began developing his theory of gravity, and conducted his first experiments on light and colour. He returned to Cambridge and eventually became a professor there. His great work, the Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, set out his three laws of motion and his theory of universal gravitation. It was recognised immediately as one of the greatest intellectual achievements in history. He also served as Master of the Royal Mint, reforming the English currency, and as President of the Royal Society. He was famously difficult in his personal relationships and spent enormous amounts of time on alchemy and biblical interpretation, interests that are less often mentioned than his physics.

Adam Smith (1723-1790) was a Scottish philosopher and economist. He was born in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, and studied at the University of Glasgow and then at Oxford. He became a professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow, where he taught ethics, politics, and economics. He is best known for two books: The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), which is about how human beings understand right and wrong through imagining how others feel, and The Wealth of Nations (1776), which examined how economies work and what makes countries rich or poor. He lived during a time of enormous economic change: the beginning of the industrial revolution in Britain and the rapid growth of international trade. He was trying to understand these changes and work out what principles should guide economic life. He has often been called the father of modern economics, though his ideas are more complex than they are often presented to be.

Jeremy Bentham was an English philosopher and legal reformer. He was the founder of modern utilitarianism. He was born on 15 February 1748 in London, into a wealthy lawyer's family. He was a child prodigy. He started learning Latin at age three and entered Oxford University at twelve. He qualified as a lawyer but never practised law. He thought the English legal system was a mess of confused rules that harmed the people it was meant to serve. He spent the rest of his life trying to reform it. He inherited enough money to live without working. For nearly 60 years, he wrote almost every day. He produced thousands of pages on law, government, punishment, economics, and ethics. Much of his work was not published during his lifetime. He would start a book, follow his thoughts into new topics, and leave the book unfinished. His friends and disciples, including James Mill and later James's son John Stuart Mill, edited and published large parts of his work. Bentham's main book, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, appeared in 1789. It set out his core principle: the measure of a good action or a good law is whether it produces the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. This principle, called the 'principle of utility', became the foundation of utilitarianism. His influence on law and politics in Britain was enormous. He helped design prisons, wrote model constitutions for foreign governments, and shaped the reform movements of the early 19th century. He had unusual ideas. He designed a new kind of prison, the Panopticon, that has since become a famous image of surveillance. He argued against laws punishing homosexual acts, centuries before this became widely accepted. He left instructions for his body to be preserved after death and displayed in a wooden cabinet. His preserved body, called the 'auto-icon', is still on display at University College London, which he helped inspire. He died on 6 June 1832 in London, aged 84.

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) was a British writer, philosopher, and early advocate for women's rights. She grew up in poverty and educated herself by reading widely and working as a teacher and governess. In 1792 she published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman — one of the first serious arguments that women deserved the same education and political rights as men. She died at the age of 38, shortly after giving birth to her daughter Mary, who would later write Frankenstein. Wollstonecraft's ideas were ignored or mocked for much of the century after her death, but she is now recognised as one of the founders of modern feminism.

Mary Shelley (1797-1851) was an English novelist whose Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, written when she was eighteen years old, is widely regarded as the founding work of science fiction and one of the most influential novels in the English language. She was born in London to William Godwin, the political philosopher, and Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Her mother died days after giving birth to her, and Mary grew up in a household filled with books and visitors from the radical circles of her father. At sixteen she eloped with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. In the summer of 1816, during a cold and rainy holiday at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, Lord Byron proposed that each member of their company write a ghost story. Over the following months Mary wrote Frankenstein, published in 1818. Her life was marked by loss: three of her four children died in infancy or childhood, her husband drowned in 1822, and she was left at twenty-four to raise her surviving son alone and to support herself by writing. She produced further novels, including The Last Man, a post-apocalyptic narrative written after Percy's death, as well as travel writing, short stories, biographical essays, and careful editions of her husband's poetry. She died of a brain tumour in 1851, aged fifty-three.

Mary Anning (1799-1847) was an English fossil collector and self-taught palaeontologist whose discoveries on the cliffs of Lyme Regis in Dorset transformed scientific understanding of the deep past. She was born into a poor Dissenting Protestant family that made part of its living by selling curiosities — fossils and shells — to summer visitors on the south coast of England. Her father Richard taught her and her brother Joseph how to find fossils in the crumbling cliffs of the Blue Lias. He died when she was eleven, leaving the family in debt. Mary took up fossil hunting as a trade to support her mother and brother. At about twelve, she and Joseph uncovered the first complete ichthyosaur skeleton known to science, a marine reptile that had been unknown before. Over the following decades Mary made many further extraordinary finds on her own: the first complete plesiosaur, the first British pterosaur outside the usual fossil record, important ichthyosaurs, and fossil fish with preserved ink sacs. She learned enough anatomy, geology, and classical languages to read the scientific papers written about her finds — and to correct them. The gentlemen geologists who bought her specimens and published descriptions of them sometimes credited her by name and sometimes did not. She died of breast cancer at forty-seven, still poor despite the scientific importance of what she had found.