Henry Nevinson

Henry Woodd Nevinson (11 October 1856 – 9 November 1941) was an English war correspondent during the Second Boer War and World War I, a campaigning journalist exposing slavery in western Africa, political commentator and suffragist.

He was born in 1856 in Leicester, the son of solicitor George Nevinson and his wife, Maria Jane, née Woodd. Nevinson studied at Shrewsbury School and later at Christ Church, Oxford. At Oxford, he came under the influence of John Ruskin's ideas. He worked as a missionary at Toynbee Hall in London's East End. After this he spent some time in Jena studying German culture. The result of this was in 1884 Nevinson published his first book, Herder and his Times, one of the first studies of Johann Gottfried Herder in English. In the 1880s Nevinson became a socialist; he befriended Peter Kropotkin and Edward Carpenter, and in 1889 joined the Social Democratic Federation.