Tim Jeal

Tim Jeal
Publicity picture for Dulwich Festival 2006
Born	(1945-01-27) 27 January 1945 (age 72) London?
Occupation	novelist, biographer
Nationality	United Kingdom
Period	1960s–
Genre	fiction; biography
Subject	notable Victorian men
Notable works	Baden-Powell (book)

Tim Jeal (born 27 January 1945 in London, England) is a biographer of notable Victorians and is also a novelist. His publications include a memoir and biographies of David Livingstone (1973), Robert Baden-Powell (1989), and Henry Morton Stanley (2007). Jeal was formally educated in London and Oxford, and lives in North London. He has a wife and three daughters.

Jeal's mother was Norah Pasley, daughter of Sir Thomas Pasley Bt, and Constance Wilmot Annie Hastings, who was the daughter of the 13th Earl of Huntingdon. Jeal was educated at Westminster School, London, and Christ Church, Oxford. From 1966 to 1970, he worked for BBC Television in the features group. Jeal is the parent, with his wife Joyce Jeal, of three daughters.

Jeal has been writing books since the 1960s, for London and New York-based publishers. Although most of his works are fictional, he is best known for his biographies.

His biography, Livingstone (1973) was the first to describe the explorer/missionary's faults and failings and to reveal the man behind the icon. It became the basis for a BBC TV documentary and a film for the Discovery Channel.Livingstone has never been out of print since first publication in 1973 and in 2013 was reissued in a revised and expanded edition by Yale University Press.

In Baden-Powell (1989), Jeal offers a revisionist account of Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts, restoring his reputation which had deteriorated during the 20th century. However, Jeal also speculated that Powell was a homosexual, even a repressed one, and this sparked a great deal of attention in the popular press culminating in scouting organizations reissuing an earlier biography of Powell by William Hillcourt to dilute attention and sales of Jeal's book. In 1995 Jeal's book was the basis for a TV documentary in the Channel Four series Secret Lives entitled Lord Baden-Powell: The Boy Man.