Real people in the opening pages in chapter 1

Thomas Carlyle (1795 -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.

Mary Anne (Mary Ann, Marian) Evans (1819 -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, Silas Marner , Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda, most of them set in provincial England and well known for their realism and psychological insight.

Inês Pérez de Castro (1325 -1355) was a Galician noblewoman. She is best known as lover and posthumously exhumed and declared lawful wife of King Pedro I of Portugal, and therefore Queen of Portugal by order of Pedro himself.

Frederic Leighton (1830-1896), known as Sir Frederic Leighton, Bt, 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.

Giovanni Battista (Giambattista) Vico or Vigo (1668 -1744) was an Italian political philosopher, rhetorician, historian, and jurist.

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

Alexander Selkirk (1676 -1721), born Alexander Selkirk, was a Scottish sailor who spent four years as a castaway when he was marooned on an uninhabited island. It is probable that his travels provided the inspiration for Daniel Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe.

Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830 -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.

What ideas are suggested by the following names?

• Ash: strong elastic wood of any of various ash trees; the residue that remains when something is burned

• Christabel: is a lengthy poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (an English, Romantic poet)

• Maud: Maud and other poems was Alfred Lord Tennyson's first collection

• Cropper: small farmers and tenants