Percy Greg used the pseudonym 'Lionel H. Holdreth' when writing for George Jacob Holyoake's freethinking periodical, The Reasoner, in the 1850s, and he edited the paper for a while in 1859 when Holyoake was ill. Obituary in Manchester Guardian, 30 December 1889; see also more generally, Edward Royle, Victorian Infidels (Manchester UP 1974), p. 311 and passim.

Percy Greg (7 January 1836 Bury – 24 December 1889, Chelsea), son of William Rathbone Greg, was an English writer.^[1]

Percy Greg, like his father, wrote about politics, but his views were violently reactionary: his History of the United States to the Reconstruction of the Union (1887) can be said to be more of a polemic, rather than a history.

His Across the Zodiac (1880) is an early science fiction novel, said to be the progenitor of the sword-and-planet genre. For that novel, Greg created what may have been the first artistic language that was described with linguistic and grammatical terminology.^[2] It also contained what is possibly the first instance in the English language of the word "astronaut".

In 2010 a crater on Mars was named Greg^[3] in recognition of his contribution to the lore of Mars.^[4]

Bibliography

• Across the Zodiac (1880)
• History of the United States to the Reconstruction of the Union (1887)

References

External links

• Works by Percy Greg at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Percy Greg at Internet Archive

This article about a writer or poet from the United Kingdom is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

• v
• t
• e