English writer and cleric John Gray was BOTD in 1866. Born in London to a working-class family, he was apprenticed at 13 in a metalworks factory, continuing his education in evening classes. In 1882, he passed the Civil Service exams and joined the Foreign Office, where he worked as a librarian. He began writing poetry, and met literary gay couple Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, who published his first poetry collection Silverpoints in 1893. He joined the Aesthetic movement, befriending celebrity homosexuals Oscar Wilde (with whom he is thought to have an affair) and Aubrey Beardsley. Gray’s relationship with Wilde was so well-known that he was rumoured to have inspired the title character in Wilde’s scandalous novella The Picture of Dorian Gray. Gray was also a talented translator, particularly the works of French Symbolist poets Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé. A convert to Catholicism, he moved to Rome in 1898 to study for the priesthood. He settled in a parish in Edinburgh with his long-term romantic partner Marc-André Raffalovich, living together until Raffalovich’s death in 1934. Heartbroken, Gray died a few months later, aged 68.