the Authors

One of the founders of the Romantic Movement in England, his poetic works include The Rime of the Ancient Mariner as well as the fragments Christabel and Kubla Khan, the latter composed during an opium-induced dream. Also an accomplished philosopher and theologian, Coleridge was acknowledged on the foremost writer on the demonic during his time. His growing dependence on laudanum was attended by nightmares and an increasing inability to exercise his poetic power.

The famed authoress of Frankenstein, Shelley was born to the the political revolutionaries, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft; the latter would die within days following Shelley’s birth. Doted on by her father in her youth, Shelley grew arrogant and later rebellious when her father remarried, leading her to elope at the age of 16 with the married poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley and accompanied by her step-sister, Claire Clairmont. Regarded by many in literary circles as an exceptional intelligence, her personal life was blighted by scandal, the loss of three of her four children, and the drowning of her husband in 1822. Her devotion to her husband was so great that she kept Shelley’s calcified heart (which did not fall to ash on his funeral pyre) with her until her own death in 1851.

The eldest son of a baronet, Shelley became a continued source of scandal for his family due to his near manic fascination with science and the occult as well as his dangerously progressive political and philosophical radicalism. Touting the tenants of atheism and free love, Shelley abandoned his wife Harriet Westbrook in 1814 to run away with Mary Shelley (nee Godwin) who he would marry two years later after Harriet’s apparent suicide by drowning. In spite of economic hardships, family estrangements, and Shelley’s infidelities, during this union of creative genius, Shelley would produce some of his greatest works including Prometheus Unbound and St. Irvyne. In an ironic twist of fate, Shelley died by drowning only six years after his first wife’s suicide in 1816.

A shadow was cast over Poe’s early life by his father’s abandonment, his mother, Eliza’s death in 1811, and his separation from his siblings, Henry and Rosalind. Though fostered and supported by the Allan family, Poe found himself struggling under gambling debt at university, a condition that would plague Poe for most of his life. Already given to a dark imagination, his wife, Virginia’s contracting tuberculosis in 1842 filled Poe with a melancholy dread and fed the macabre romantic fancy of his work. Virginia succumbed to the disease in 1847. Fame and favorable critical reception eluded Poe throughout his lifetime, and it was only following the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death in 1849 as well as the publication of the sensational “Ludwig obituary” that his work piqued the interest of a wider audience.

At the age of 12, Dickens worked at a boot blacking factory to support his family while his father served a prison term at Marshalsea. This experience would color some of his most celebrated works such as Oliver Twist and David Copperfield which called attention to the plight of the poor and advocated for social reform. In spite of his popularity, Dickens could not escape scandal when he separated from his wife, Catherine in 1857 and suspected affair with the actress, Ellen Ternen. Three years later he burned all of his private and business correspondences. A perpetual skeptic given to the theatrical, Dickens was one of the first members of the Ghost Club, dedicated to investigating and exposing dubious paranormal phenomena.