Martin Farquhar Tupper

Born in London on 17 July 1810, he was educated at Charterhouse and Christ Church, Oxford, and was later called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn. Although trained for law, he devoted much of his life to writing, publishing poetry, prose, fiction, and religious works.

His great success came with Proverbial Philosophy, first published in 1838. Written in a striking, aphoristic style, it found an enormous readership and made him one of the best-known English-language authors of the Victorian period, especially among middle-class readers in Britain and North America.

Tupper's reputation did not last in the same way after his death at Albury, Surrey, on 29 November 1889. That sharp contrast between immense popularity in his own day and relative neglect later on is part of what makes him memorable now: he was not just a prolific writer, but a reminder that literary taste can change dramatically from one generation to the next.