Henry J. (Henry John) Coke

Born in 1827 at Holkham in Norfolk, he was the son of Thomas William Coke, 1st Earl of Leicester. As a young man he entered the navy, saw service in the Chinese War of 1840–1841, and later spent time at Cambridge before setting off on a far more wandering life.

Those travels gave him much of his material. He was in Vienna during the 1848 revolution, which led to Vienna in 1848 (1849), and he later crossed North America, reaching California in time for the gold rush and turning that experience into A Ride over the Rocky Mountains to Oregon and California (1852). He also wrote fiction, including High and Low (1854) and A Will and a Way (1858).

After marrying Lady Katherine Grey Egerton in 1861, he lived a more settled life at Longford in Derbyshire. Late in life he looked back on his unusually eventful career in Tracks of a Rolling Stone (1905), a memoir that helped preserve the voice of a man who had seen an extraordinary amount of the nineteenth century firsthand.