Life
Todhunter was born in Dublin, the eldest son of Thomas Harvey Todhunter, a Quaker merchant of English origin. He and was educated at Quaker schools in York and Mountmellick. He attended Trinity College Medical School, where he studied medicine. While at Trinity, Todhunter won the Vice-Chancellor's prize for English Verse 1864, 1865 and 1866, and the Gold Medal of the Philosophical Society 1866 for an essay. He also clerked for William Stokes while studying. Todhunter received his Bachelor of Medicine in 1867, and his Doctorate of Medicine degree in 1871.
In 1870 (one year prior to his DM) he became a Professor of English Literature at Alexandra College, Dublin. Four years later, Todhunter resigned from that position, and travelled to several places in Europe, including Egypt. He married Dora L. Digby in 1879. In 1881, he finally settled in London, where his home in Bedford Park, Chiswick was located in a small community of writers and artists, who included W.B. Yeats. He was involved in the founding of the Irish Literary Society there.
His tragedy, The Black Cat only received one performance, on 8 December 1893 at the Opera Comique, by the Independent Theatre Society—a private club formed to forestall censorship by the Lord Chamberlain's Office.
Read more about this topic: John Todhunter
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“I know nothing which life has to offer so satisfying as the profound good understanding, which can subsist, after much exchange of good offices, between two virtuous men, each of whom is sure of himself, and sure of his friend. It is a happiness which postpones all other gratifications, and makes politics, and commerce, and churches, cheap.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The great problem of American life [is] the riddle of authority: the difficulty of finding a way, within a liberal and individualistic social order, of living in harmonious and consecrated submission to something larger than oneself.... A yearning for self-transcendence and submission to authority [is] as deeply rooted as the lure of individual liberation.”
—Wilfred M. McClay, educator, author. The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America, p. 4, University of North Carolina Press (1994)
“In the course of a life devoted less to living than to reading, I have verified many times that literary intentions and theories are nothing more than stimuli and that the final work usually ignores or even contradicts them.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)