He was apprenticed as a legal scrivener or copyist and began, using a hoard of ancient manuscripts which had been in his father's possession, to write poems and fake their physical manifestation, attributing them to an invented fifteenth-century priest whom he called Thomas Rowley. He sought, unsuccessfully, the patronage first of Robert Dodsley , then of Horace Walpole . Meanwhile he began to develop a promising literary career in other, non-medieval directions: journalism and political satire.

He was a man of the world as well as a poet. In youth he worked as a page in a noble household, then as a mercenary in European armies. By 1367 he was working for the Court as a civil-servant administrator, and he also served as a diplomat and intelligence agent in troubled political times. He spent several years in charge of the port of London and the excise duties it levied, and in July 1389 he was appointed Clerk of the King's Works to Richard II , a post he held for nearly two years.

After studying medicine in Moscow, APC began publishing short stories and later plays. His heavily symbolic writing treats with pathos and humour a threatened upper class stifled by inactivity and ennui.

From the age of twenty he held a positon at Court and a seat in Parliament . After becoming an earl he served in the Privy Council and as British ambassador at The Hague, where he remained until 1732. The year after that he became a leading member of the opposition to the rule of Sir Robert Walpole . In this capacity he was a leading parliamentary speaker and contributer to anti-ministerial newspapers such as Common Sense. He opposed the introduction of theatre censorship through the office of the Lord Chamberlain. At Walpole's fall he remained in opposition, until in late 1744 he was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, where his chief aim, successfully achieved, was to prevent Irish backing for the Second Jacobite Rebellion. He supported the naturalization act which would have given Jews full civil rights in Britain (passed on 5 April 1753 but repealed on 7 November).

Besides her preaching and religious organising activities, KC also worked as a seamstress.

While CC was attending Oxford University, a student production of one of her plays brought her into contact with an agent, Margaret Ramsay , who encouraged her to write for radio. From 1962 to the early 1970s, several of her plays were broadcast on BBC Radio. She continued writing plays for radio until the early 1980s.

With a secondary school teaching diploma in English, HC began teaching in 1959, the year before she began working on her doctoral thesis, at the lycée (a selective secondary school which prepares for university entrance) at Arcachon (in the Gironde in southwestern France). While pursuing her doctorate she worked as a teaching assistant at the University of Bordeaux between 1962 and 1964. By the end of 1964, she was maître-assistante (assistant professor) at the Sorbonne . In 1967 she became maître de conférences (associate professor) at the University of Nanterre , where she only stayed for one year before the opening of the new University of Paris VIII .

Her philanthropy included teaching sabbath school, superintending the female branch of a ragged school, volunteering at a sick children's hospital, and working for the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women (SPEW). She later reflected that her frustration at the inefficiency of these organizations led her to the study of social reform; she never ceased her agitation for social change.

Between 1835 and 1856, on the advice of Mary Cowden Clark, who had observed his skill at reading aloud, CCC gave lectures on literature, including several on Shakespeare . Some of these were later published. He and his wife were collaborators on his editions of Shakespeare and on Recollections of Writers, which she published with both their names in 1878, the year after his death.

EFC painted miniatures, which she exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1799. She told the RLF in 1811 that in addition to publishing from an early age she taught drawing.

JC worked as a hedge-setter, gardener, and day labourer. Between 1820 and 1835 he published several volumes of poetry.

When Olivia was in her twenties, Sydney found her a job as a governess to two little girls in the family of General Brownrigg of Dublin.

AMC 's passion for astronomy led to her success and recognition in the field of this predominantly masculine science. Though she was never officially employed as an astronomer, she declined an offer to work for the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. In addition, she was one of the candidates nominated to succeed Maria Mitchell as professor at Vassar College .

At home she busied herself in more conventional ways, with charity work in her parish, interest in the new Poor Law, and a local appointment as Surveyor of Highways.

EC was active in a number of local societies and charities: probably in 1812 she founded, for example, the Society for Clothing the Infant Poor , and she worked for a childbirth society and an annual bazaar. She was also a flower artist of some note, whose drawings were used by Walter Hood Fitch and W. G. Smith in Illustrations of the British Flora, 1880. Her Valentine cards, fashioned out of cut paper for all unmarried guests at her annual Valentine's party, were works of art. By cutting several sheets of paper at once she made multiple copies, and two albums of original examples belonging to two of her sons, together with a collection of designs, survive in the Suffolk Record Office.

At home she kept what amounted to a salon.

FC ran a daily afternoon school for both black and white children in Natal.

STC is best known as a Romantic poet, but he also produced verse-drama, plays, literary criticism, translations, philosophical, and autobiographical works. He edited The Watchman, a radical Christian periodical, for a while, and in later years he and Sara Hutchinson together edited The Friend.

Early in her teens MMC began work as a domestic servant in Tavistock for a General Hughes and his family.

MC worked both as a field labourer and at indoor jobs like laundering clothes and brewing beer. As a washerwoman she went to her clients' houses to work. She emphasizes the physical hardship of this labour (which actually made her hands bleed); she also notes the double shift performed by women with their own housework to do on top of what they get paid for.

In 1841 WC began work as a tea importer's clerk; bored by the position, he published his first story. His father, landscape painter William Collins , was impressed by his son's determination to write, and allowed him to leave the office and enrol as a student at Lincoln's Inn . Called to the bar in 1852, the younger Collins never practised, although a fascination with law is evident in his fiction.

As a philosopher, AC founded the school of positivism. In an attempt to discover the laws governing social systems and social change, he founded the discipline of sociology—a term he coined. The aim of this new science was to provide a basis for a harmonious social state, and despite his rejection of theology and metaphysics, he sought to establish a religion of humanity.

Congreve was twenty-one when on 22 December 1691 he licensed his first book, a short novel called Incognita: or, Love and Duty Reconcil'd, which was published the following year. He moved quickly into song-writing and editing (in conjunction with Dryden ), and finished the draft of his first play, The Old Batchelor, by August 1692. His four comedies and one tragedy made him an acknowledged master of the stage. After The Way of the World, which opened in March 1700, Congreve wrote no more plays, though he continued to produce poetry and opera librettos, and published his collected works in 1710. In December 1704 he and Sir John Vanbrugh received a licence to run the new theatre in the Haymarket , which, however, was dogged in its early years by acoustics problems.