Honoré de Balzac was born in Tours in 1799 and, in spite of parental opposition. left for Paris in 1819. The next ten years were a complete failure both artistically and commercially until, in 1829, he published Les Derniers Chouans. In the next twenty years he wrote no less than eighty novels including the series entitled La Comédie Humaine. In 1850 he married a wealthy Polish lady, with whom he had been corresponding for fifteen years, and died three months later. I don't know if the two events were in any way connected.

Section: Droll Stories
This section contains potted biographies of the people whose work is included on this site. To read the biography click on the name. If the artist or writer you are interested in is not listed that means I haven't been able to find out anything about them. If you have information then please let me know and I'll include it.
The biographies aren't intended to be comprehensive; there's just enough to put some flesh on the name.
Henry Mayo Bateman (1887-1970) was born in New South Wales, Australia, but his family emigrated to England when he was a child. He is best known for his series of cartoons entitled "The man who . . . ." They show someone who has usually either committed some unspeakable social gaffe or broken a taboo and the horrified or scandalised reactions of those around him, while the transgressor is blissfully unaware he has done anything wrong.

Section: BBC
Edward Bawden was born in Braintree, Essex, in 1903. Part of his education was at the Royal College of Art, where he was later to become a tutor in the School of Graphic Design. He was versatile as a painter, designer, draughtsman, print maker, illustrator and graphic designer. Between 1940 and 1945 he was an official war artist. He was created a CBE in 1946 and died in 1989.

Section: BBC
Harry Clarke was born in Dublin in 1889. His father ran a church decorating business and so it was that he gained an early training in the arts and techniques of stained glass window production, which was to become his main life work. After studying, at local schools, he went on to Italy and London to gain further knowledge and influences. In 1915 he started his book illustration career and his magnificent work for Poe's "Tales" was published in 1919. In 1921 his father died and he and his brother took over the family business. In 1930 his brother died and Harry took over the full responsibility. But he was in poor health himself and died of tuberculosis at a Swiss sanitorium the following year, aged only forty.

Further reading: "The Life and Work of Harry Clarke" by Dr. Nicola       Gordon-Bowe [1989 Irish Academic Press]

Section: Tales of Mystery and Imagination
Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (1836-1911) was born in London and studied at Kings College, London. He was called to the bar in 1864 but his career as a barrister was not an especially successful one and his main income came from writing humorous pieces for London periodicals, under the pseudonym Bab. The pieces were later collected and published under the title "Babs Ballads". Some of them were to become the foundation for the Savoy operas. In 1871 Gibert went into partnership with Sir Arthur Sullivan to write light operas and in 1875 the impressario Richard D'Oyly Carte took them under his wing with the express intention of setting them to rival the huge success of Jacques Offenbach comic operas.
The next twenty years saw a string of major public and critical hits, on both sides of the Atlantic. A quarrel over a new carpet (yes, a carpet) effectively ended the partnership and although Gilbert tried working with fresh composers the magic was gone. He was teaching two young women to swim in the lake at his home in Wealdstone, one day, when one of them got into difficulties. Gilbert jumped into the water to rescue her and suffered a heart attack and died.

Section: The Story of the Mikado
Gustave Doré (1832-83) was born in Strasbourg. Although his major claim to fame is as an illustrator he was also very active as a painter, although the Oxford Companion to Art notes dismissively that he "did large religious paintings grandiloquent in manner and of little merit." I can't comment on that since I've never seen any of them. Walter Crane in his classic  "The Decorative Illustration of Books" is not uncritical of him in that medium, either. While acknowledging "his weird imagination, and a poetic feeling for dramatic landscapes and grotesque characters, as well as an extraordinary pictorial invention" Crane complains that "he never shows the decorative sense, nor considers the design in relation to the page." Crane considers his finest work to be the "Droll Stories", which is reassuring.
He made his initial reputation with his illustrations for the work of Rabelais and further consolidated it, throughout the rest of his life,  with work on editions of Dante, Cervantes, Perrault, Milton, La Fontaine and the Bible amongst others. One work which stands apart from his illustrations of the classics is "London, a Pilgrimage" for which Doré and the writer Blanchard Jerrold went on a grand tour of the capital, at the height of Empire, chronicling both the high and low life. Disagreeing with Walter Crane, I think the book contains his finest work. One plate in particular, prisoners exercising in Newgate yard, was used by Vincent van Gogh as a model.

Section: Droll Stories
Aubrey Hammond was born in Folkestone, Kent in 1893 and died in 1940. He took up theatrical design work in 1913, which continued after service in France during WWI. He expanded into cinema art direction in 1936, all the while providing illustrations and cartoons for numerous London periodicals.

Section: BBC
Arthur Watts (?-1935) was the son of the Surgeon-General and received his formal artistic training at the Slade School. He served in the RNVR during WWI and was awarded the DSO in 1918. He contributed humorous drawing to various periodicals. "Who Was Who", from whose pages  these scant details have been culled, offers no indications of his other talents and accomplishments. I suspect he was a gentleman of independent means.

Section: BBC
Alice Bolingbroke Woodward was born in London on 3rd October 1862. Her father was Dr Henry Woodward FRS, Keeper of Geology at the British Museum. She attended the Royal School of Art, Westminster Art School and the Académie Julian in Paris. As a child she and her sisters were given a drawing lesson by John Ruskin.  Apart from "The Mikado", other notable work included illustrations for editions of "Alice in Wonderland" and "Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens" as well as, curiously, an impression of what an Iguanodon might have looked like.

Section: Mikado
George Studdy was born in Devon in 1878 and was educated at Dulwich College, London. He was intended to be a career soldier, like his father, but the legacy of a childhood injury put a stop to that to that idea. He moved from an engineering apprenticeship to a stockbroking one, studying in the evening at art school. His speciality from the start was animal pictures and he was soon selling his work to a variety of publishers. Bonzo was born on the 8th November 1922 when he made his first appearance in "The Sketch" and continued to appear in that newspaper for the next seven years. He also featured in a number of merchandised spin-offs in the succeeding decades. George Studdy died in 1948.

Section: Bonzo
William Heath Robinson (1872-1944) was born in Stroud Green, North London. Both his grandfather and father were wood engravers, the latter eventually becoming a newspaper illustrator. Young Will early on decided on a career as an artist and studied at the Islington School of Art and the Royal Academy Schools. His inclination was towards fine art but the need to earn money lead instead to magazine and book illustration. The work for which he is famous today (and which made his name part of the English language) are his fantastical mechanical contraptions, as featured in the BBC section. If someone refers to something as a "Heath Robinson contraption" they are usually implying that the thing is cobbled together and doesn't work very well. Heath Robinson's machines, however, work perfectly well. At least in their own medium, the printed page. Men in white coats are usually to be seen monitoring their function while other men operate the machine in perfect content. In real life they could not of course possibly work, as someone who tried to build one discovered. This humorous side took up most of the second half of Robinson's life and is in complete contrast to the E A Poe poem illustrations, which were published in 1900. These are very much of their period; highly decorative Art Nouveau, heavily influenced by Mucha and Beardsley.

Further reading: "William Heath Robinson" by James Hamilton [1995, Pavilion Books, London]

Sections: BBC  E A Poe  Goblins
Harrison William Weir (1824-1906) was born in Lewes, Sussex, and studied at Camberwell. He was noted, in his day, as an animal painter, illustrator and author.

Sections: Anecdotes of Birds and Reptiles
Nicolas Clerihew Bentley (his father Edmund Clerihew Bentley invented the verse form which takes its name from him) was born in Highgate, London, on 14th June 1907. He was educated at University College School and Heatherly School of Fine Art. His principal ambition was to be a writer and he considered his work as an illustrator to be only a pleasant interlude. Other interludes were spent working in the circus and as a publicist. He fulfilled his literary ambitions by writing several fiction and non-fiction books and was a regular contributor to various London magazines and newspapers. His contributions to this site are typical of his illustration work. He died in 1978.

Sections: Nicolas Bentley
Jacob Ludwig Carl (1785-1863) and his brother Wilhelm Carl (1786-1859) were born in Hanau Hesse-Kessel and heard many fairy tales as children. They decided to write them down and then go further and go out and collect as many others, and their variants, as they could find. In 1812 they published the first volume of 'Grimm's Fairy Tales', followed eventually by two more. The work made them famous and the stories were soon translated into many languages. They gained further fame in their native Germany as librarians and philologists.

Sections: Grimm's Fairy Tales
Kay Nielsen was born in Copenhagen Denmark, in 1886, of distinguished theatrical parents. In 1904 he left for Paris to study at the Académie Julienne and soon fell under the influence of the work of the English symbolist Aubrey Beardsley and of Japanese art, which became all the rage when it was introduced to Europe in the latter part of the 19th century.
As well as 'Grimm's Fairy Tales' Nielsen also illustrated, amongst others, editions of Hans Anderson's stories and a Norse fairy tale collection called 'East of the Sun and West of the Moon'. In 1937 Nielsen went to Hollywood to work and died there, in obscurity, in 1957.

Sections: Grimm's Fairy Tales.