Go to the Longman Website and check out the Victorian Timeline. Share something here that you learned, that intrigues you. (Please include your name.)

 

1901: Quenn Victoria died on January 22, 1901. Edward VII faced the unenviable task of succeeding not just a beloved monarch, but also an enduring icon of British culture. Despite having wielded emormous political and economic power during her lifetime, Victoria maintained very conservative and traditional idea abouta women's proper role, as her letters and diaries make it clear.-- This was the end of the Victorian Age. Chris Yelvington

 

1899-1902: One of the most important events in South African history was the Anglo-Boer War which occured later in the Victorian Age. Although the primary war involved Britain and the Boer Republics, almost all the people of South Africa was involved in the conflict one way or another. - David Ruhlman

 

1895: The Importance of Being Earnest had just made Wilde the most celebrated man in London; however, he shortly became the most persecuted. Wilde's libel case against the father of his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, backfired when his private affairs were made public; Wilde was subsequently prosecuted for committing indecent acts (homosexuality) and sentenced to two years of hard labor. Prison shattered Wilde's health, and he wrote only one more poem before dying destitute in 1900. -- Stephanie Vasse

 

1888: "Jack the Ripper," as he signed his notes to the police, savagely murdered five prostitutes in the autumn of 1888, disemboweling them with surgical precision.  He was never caught, or even identified, and theories about his identity and motives abound to this day.  Although written two years before the murders, Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde explores the dark sides of both London and human nature that Jack the Ripper brought to light.  -- I thought this was interesting because I watched a thing on the history channel about Jack the Ripper and they believe he was rich and possibly a doctor, since knowledge of the surgical procedures he performed was not easy to come by. They narrowed it down to two men.  I thought it was interesting. --Amanda Zaharis

 

1888: Just to comment further on Jack the Ripper, I saw a show on the History channel about him. Despite how horrible and gory his crimes were,the show said that they actually focused attention on the horrible conditions of the poor lower class of London. Before then, the conditions were overlooked by society. The crimes allowed people to see how much things needed to change. 

 

1851: For five months in the spring and summer of 1851, London hosted the Great Exhibition, a world's fair of industrial and technological accomplishments. Queen Victoria's husband, Prince Albert, was a chief organizer of what became (despite some foreign exhibits) a celebration of British industry, culture, and empire. The main exhibit was the exhibition hall itself: the Crystal Palace, a glass and metal structure covering 18 acres of Hyde Park.

• I googled the Crystal Palace, and the building was immensly impressive by today's standards.  It looks like an incredibly ornate and architecturally beautiful convention center, and that is kind of what it was for the time.  ~Megan Tucker 

 

1871: Whereas in the Origin of Species Charles Darwin avoided discussing the origins of humanity, The Descent of Man makes explicit what was implicit in his earlier argument: man is an animal, subject to the same laws of evolution and natural selection as any other animal. The Descent of Man also develops Darwin's theory of sexual selection, an evolutionary process in tandem with natural selection.

     I though this was interesting because Darwin's theories, from the book described above, are still taught in the present day. Even in biology classes here at UAH. -Drew Holmes

 

1843:  Published in the same year as the first Christmas card, Charles Dickens' wildly popular A Christmas Carol helped to institutionalize the holiday as a festive celebration of home and family. Ironically, the commerical values that Dickens' morality tale rejects would soon saturate the holiday itself: by the end of the century Christmas had become big buisness. -Caitlyn Murphy

 

1847: Charlotte Bronte's complex portrait of Jane—self-reliant, intelligent, passionate, rebellious—contradicts the Victorian ideal of the woman as an "angel in the house." Jane Eyre also critiques patriarchal power in Victorian England, as Jane questions and resists the presumptive authority of the men—hypocrites and egoists—in her life. - Anissa Singh

 

1865: Lewis Carroll (pseudonym of Charles Dodgson, an Oxford mathematician) originally entitled his classic children's tale Alice's Adventures Under Ground. The full title he settled on was Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. He wrote the story for his young friend Alice Liddell, the model for the book's heroine. A sequel, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, appeared in 1871. Dodgson's stories refuse to teach either moral lessons or social etiquette and thus reject the didacticism of much Victorian children's literature. -Chelsey Turner 

 

1900: by 1900 "as many as 97% of both sexes" were able to read. I thought this was really interesting. Because so many in society could read now, it became popular with all classes, not just those who could afford it. Reading was a big entertainment of the time. "readers would rent novels and narrative poems-just as people rent movies today"

~Brittany Crafts

 

1860-- There was a large debate between representatives of the religious community and defenders of Darwin.  The defender of Darwin was T.H. Huxley and the attacker was Bishop Wilberforce.  The debate was sponsored by the British Association for the Advancement of Science.  This was interesting because it helped lay the foundation for scientific advancement without some moral and ethical restraints.--Rob Wilson

 

1869:  Matthew Arnold was disturbed by Mill's On Liberty.  Arnold, in response, wrote his own book called Culture and Anarchy.  Mill's On Liberty focused on doing as one likes and focusing on one's self.  Arnold discusses the importance of "sweetness and light" in hopes of "rescuing" Victorian society from the selfish society Mill's encouraged.  ~Jessica Barnes

 

1855:  The missionary explorer David Livingstone discovered and named Victoria Falls.  On a later expedition to central Africa, he went missing and was later reported dead.  Then in 1871, another explorer Henry Morton Stanley found him and greeted him with the still-famous greeting, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume."-- I've heard that line before, and this caught my eye; this interested me because a few days earlier last week, I saw pictures of Victoria Falls and Dr. Livingstone when we talked about this same thing in my art history class. -- Valerie Connally 

 

1832: With the memory of the French Revolution still fresh, Parliament passed the First Reform Act in order to ease escalating class tensions in Britain. The Act extended the right to vote to men with households worth 10 pounds; it also granted fairer representation in Parliament to the growing northern cities of industry. With the passage of the Act, the Victorian middle classes began to exert a political influence to match their growing social and cultural power. ---- This is interesting because the first reform act and the first term of victoria age are the year which industrial capitalist has power.--------Yuki Okubo

 

1843: Literature- Dickens' A Christmas Carol

Published in the same year as the first Christmas card, Charles Dickens' wildly popular A Christmas Carol helped to institutionalize the holiday as a festive celebration of home and family. Ironically, the commercial values that Dickens' morality tale rejects would soon saturate the holiday itself: by the end of the century, Christmas had become big business.  -Jen Brown

 

1882: The Married Women's Property Act gave a woman the right to hold property in her own name, independent of her husband. Until the Act, English law dictated that a woman's personal property became her husband's upon marriage. There were still some legal constraints imposed upon married women (for example, they could not yet maintain a separate residence), but the 1882 Act was a major step toward Caroline Norton's dream of equality under the law. -Whitley Scruggs

 

 

1830:      "Britain's first passenger railway was a huge commercial success, triggering the construction of hundreds of other railway lines over the next several decades. Some Victorians, like Fanny Kemble, marveled at the speed of railway travel and the power of the steam engine. Others, like Charles Dickens, criticized the environmental damage and social havoc wreaked by the railway's increasingly rapid expansion."

-Nathan Bledsoe

 

1847: I have read Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte so many times and never realized how political it is. Jane's whole character, "self-reliant, intelligent, ambitious, rebellious," totally contradicts Victorian society's view of women. Not only does the novel do this, but it also critiques the British government by illustrating the way that Jane resists man's power over her. ---Rebecca Hilt

 

1834 - The New Poor Law, as the Poor Law Amendment Act was commonly called, offered relief to the poor through a system of workhouses. To discourage the able-bodied from seeking parish welfare, the workhouse maintained a standard of living below that of the lowest-paid worker. As both Henry Mayhew and Friedrich Engels attested, that standard was already very low indeed. Charles Dickens believed the squalid conditions of the workhouse therefore punished precisely those—impoverished children, the sick, the elderly—who most genuinely needed relief.

-Mitchell Hunt

 

1865

Literature

Carroll's Alice in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll (pseudonym of Charles Dodgson, an Oxford mathematician) originally entitled his classic children's tale Alice's Adventures Under Ground. The full title he settled on was Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. He wrote the story for his young friend Alice Liddell, the model for the book's heroine. A sequel, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, appeared in 1871. Dodgson's stories refuse to teach either moral lessons or social etiquette and thus reject the didacticism of much Victorian children's literature.

i love lewis carroll's alice in wonderland and it was interesting to discover it was sort of a rebellious childrens story ------Bailey English

 

 

1884 - "The Third Reform Act extended voting rights to county householders, enfranchising the rural working class, 17 years after the urban working class. Voting rights continued to be tied to property ownership until the 1918 enfranchisement of all men over 21 and women over 30. The age difference was abolished in 1928." The fight for equality has been going on for much longer than we like to think, and situations such as this show that people were seeking equality before the 1900s.

 

1849- "Early in the century, as Frances Power Cobbe describes, Victorian women had no access to higher education. Bedford College for Women was established in 1849, one year after lectures for women at King's College evolved into, appropriately enough, Queen's College. By the end of the century, there were women's colleges at both Oxford and Cambridge."

• I found this interesting just because it's so crazy when you actually stop and think about the fact that up until this point education among women was very rare and certainly not embraced by the culture. We just take education and the right to be educated no matter your gender so much for granted today and it's hard to imagine it any other way, but this idea of equal gender rights is still quite a modern idea if you really look at it. On a slight side note, but also dealing with the rights of women, although they could be educated in 1849, the Women's property Act (allowing women to hold property in their own name) wasn't passed until 1882. It's interesting to see the slow progression of women's rights and just how long it took to actually get many of those rights for them. It really was very slow progress! ~Tiffany Arnold

 

1854 - "As hostilities between Russia and Turkey escalated, Britain and France declared war on Russia in order to check its westward advance. The allies did win the war in 1856, but only after a series of military errors, described most famously by Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade." Some 20,000 British soldiers died in the Crimea, most of them from disease, despite the heroic efforts of Florence Nightingale and her fellow nurses." - I find the history of this era very interesting. - Drew Stockman

 

1833- Politics: Factory Act: "Following the revelations of the Parliamentary "Blue Books," the Factory Act of 1833 prohibited children under the age of nine from working in textile mills. Children under 12 could be employed no more than nine hours per day; children under 18, no more than 12 hours. Over the next 70 years, Parliament would pass other measures to improve the industrial working conditions described so grimly by Dickens, but not until 1901 were children under 12 entirely prohibited from working in factories."

     This was a very intersting Act. It is good to see that they finally set some limitations on how long children could work. It is also kinda of disturbing that they would allow children under 12 to even work. As we can see, we have come  along way since then. -- Patrick Streeter

 

1899 Boer War - War between the British and the South African Boers.  This is another moment inwhich the Imperial British army was entrenched in a long war with poor guerillas.  The British eventually succeeded but at the price of beening heavily embarassed by their losses.  I beleived this was an improtant event in history because it showed that those countries under British rule were able to stand up to the large army and deal massive amounts of damage.  -- Qadium Qayum

 

1870 Forester Education Act: Devised by William Edward Forrester, the Education Act of 1870 established a national system of free compulsory education for all elementry-age children.  However, secondary education remained expensive at private boarding schools such as Rugby, the setting of Tom Brown's School Days.  Thirty years later, the Balfour Act of 1902 instituted public secondary education.  -Nicole Barnes

 

1854: Crimean War. Of course the first name that comes to mind for me is Florence Nightingale. She is one of my heroes. She is the main reason women are in the nursing field, and she helped to improve the horrible conditions of hospitals. Her courage and spunk are still an inspiration to women today. ~ Rachel Gregory

 

1837:  Queen Victoria Crowned--On the death of King William IV, his 18 year-old neice Alexandrina Victoria became queen. She ruled for the next 64 years, the longest reign of any British monarch. She oversaw the rapid expansion of the British empire during this time. In 1877, she assumed the title of empress of India; by the end of the century, her empire included one quarter of the world's population. -Miranda Nelson

 

1854 - The overall failure of the Crimean and War and other smaller military disbutes around the world led to the reorganization of the military, especially pertaining to its supplies. - Seth Whited