HOW MANY REAL PEOPLE ARE NAMED IN THE OPENING PAGES OF CHAPTER ONE?

Thomas Carlyle (4 December 1795 - 5 February 1881) was a Scottish satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher during the Victorian era.He called economics "the dismal science", wrote articles for the Edinburgh Encyclopedia, and became a controversial social commentator.

Coming from a strict Calvinist family, Carlyle was expected by his parents to become a preacher, but while at the University of Edinburgh, he lost his Christian faith. Calvinist values, however, remained with him throughout his life. This combination of a religious temperament with loss of faith in traditional Christianity made Carlyle's work appealing to many Victorians who were grappling with scientific and political changes that threatened the traditional social order.

Mary Anne (Mary Ann, Marian) Evans (22 November 1819 - 22 December 1880), better known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She is the author of seven novels, including The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1871-72), and Daniel Deronda (1876), most of them set in provincial England and well known for their realism and psychological insight.

She used a male pen name, she said, to ensure her works were taken seriously. Female authors were published under their own names during Eliot's life, but she wanted to escape the stereotype of women only writing lighthearted romances. An additional factor in her use of a pen name may have been a desire to shield her private life from public scrutiny and to prevent scandals attending her relationship with the married George Henry Lewes, with whom she lived for over 20 years.

Giovanni Battista (Giambattista) Vico or Vigo (23 June 1668 - 23 January 1744) was an Italian political philosopher, rhetorician, historian, and jurist. A critic of modern rationalism and apologist of classical antiquity, Vico's magnum opus is titled "Principles/Origins of [re]New[ed] Science about the Common Nature of Nations" (Principi di Scienza Nuova d'intorno alla Comune Natura delle Nazioni). The work is explicitly presented as a "Science of reasoning" (Scienza di ragionare), and includes a dialectic between axioms (authoritative maxims) and "reasonings" (ragionamenti) linking and clarifying the axioms. Vico is often claimed to have inaugurated modern philosophy of history, although the expression is alien from Vico's text (Vico speaks of a "history of philosophy narrated philosophically").He is otherwise well-known for noting that verum esse ipsum factum ("true itself is fact" or "the true itself is made").

Frederic Leighton, 1st Baron Leighton PRA (3 December 1830-25 January 1896), known as Sir Frederic Leighton,between 1886 and 1896, was an English painter and sculptor. His works depicted historical, biblical and classical subject matter. Leighton was bearer of the shortest-lived peerage in history; after only one day his hereditary peerage became extinct

Edward Gibbon (April 27, 1737 - January 16, 1794) was an English historian and Member of Parliament. His most important work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788. The Decline and Fall is known for the quality and irony of its prose, its use of primary sources, and its open denigration of organised religion.

Bede ( 672 / 673 - 26 May 735), also referred to as Saint Bede or the Venerable Bede (Latin: Beda Venerabilis), was a monk at the Northumbrian monastery of Saint Peter at Monkwearmouth, today part of Sunderland, England, and of its companion monastery, Saint Paul's, in modern Jarrow both in the Kingdom of Northumbria.

He is well known as an author and scholar, and his most famous work, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (The Ecclesiastical History of the English People) gained him the title "The Father of English History". In 1899, Bede was made a Doctor of the Church by Leo XIII, a position of theological significance; he is the only native of Great Britain to achieve this designation (Anselm of Canterbury, also a Doctor of the Church, was originally from Italy).

Christina Georgina Rossetti (5 December 1830 - 29 December 1894) was an English poet who wrote a variety of romantic, devotional, and children's poems. She is best known for her long poem Goblin Market, her love poem Remember, and for the words of the Christmas carol In the Bleak Midwinter.

Henry Crabb Robinson (1775-1867), diarist, was born in Bury St. Edmunds, England.

He was articled to an attorney in Colchester. Between 1800 and 1805 he studied at various places in Germany, and became acquainted with nearly all the great men of letters there, including Goethe, Schiller, Johann Gottfried Herder and Christoph Martin Wieland. He was buried in a vault in Highgate Cemetery alongside his friend Edwin Wilkins Field.

Walter Bagehot (3 February 1826 - 24 March 1877) was an English businessman, essayist, and journalist who wrote extensively about literature, government, and economic affairs.