John Cordy Jeaffreson

Born in 1831, John Cordy Jeaffreson was an English author best known for nonfiction that turned professional and social history into entertaining reading. His books include A Book About Doctors and A Book About Lawyers, works that helped build his reputation as a writer who could make learned subjects accessible to a broad audience.

He also wrote fiction and biographies, and sources connected with his books describe him as a barrister-at-law as well as an author. That legal background likely helped shape the confident, well-informed tone of his historical writing.

Jeaffreson died in 1901. Today he is remembered chiefly for his readable Victorian prose and for the way he gathered anecdote, character sketch, and historical detail into books that were meant to inform without ever becoming dry.