author
Thomas Colley Grattan
1792–1864
A restless Irish writer who turned travel, politics, and life abroad into lively books, he moved from law to soldiering to diplomacy without losing his eye for a good story. Best remembered for his travel sketches and fiction, he brought a cosmopolitan flair to 19th-century literature.
1 Audiobook
Holland: The History of the Netherlands
by Thomas Colley Grattan
About the author
Born in Dublin in 1792, Thomas Colley Grattan was educated for the law but never took to it. Instead, he followed a much less settled path, serving in the military and spending long stretches on the Continent, experiences that fed directly into his writing.
He became known as a novelist, poet, dramatist, travel writer, and historian, but his strongest reputation rests on his travel-based work Highways and Byways and on novels including The Heiress of Bruges. His writing often drew on European settings and on the observations of someone who had seen political and social life up close.
Grattan also worked in public service and was appointed British consul at Boston in the late 1830s. That mix of literary energy, wide travel, and diplomatic experience helped give his work an easy worldliness that appealed to readers of his time. He died in London on July 4, 1864.