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William Blake publishes Songs of Innocence
Songs of Innocence was originally a complete work first printed in 1789. It is a conceptual collection of 19 poems, engraved with artwork. Songs of Innocence is a collection of illustrated lyrical poetry. A few first copies were printed and illuminated by William Blake himself in 1789. Its companion volume is Songs of Experience. Blake believed that innocence and experience were "the two contrary states of the human soul", and that true innocence was impossible without experience. Songs of Innoc -
Mary Wollstonecraft critiques female educational restrictions in A Vindication of the Rights of Women.
Published in 1792, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was the first great feminist treatise. Wollstonecraft preached that intellect will always govern and sought “to persuade women to endeavour to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonimous with epithets of weakness.” -
Charles and Mary Lamb pubish Tales from Shakespeare
No better introduction to William Shakespeare's dramatic masterpieces exists than the delightful prose adaptations of Charles and Mary Lamb, first published in 1807. The two selected 20 of Shakespeare's best-known plays and set out both to make them accessible to children and to pay enthusiastic homage to the original works. Together the Lambs distilled the powerful themes and unforgettable characterizations of Shakespeare's plays into elegant narratives--classic tales in their own right. -
Brother's Grimm begin to publish Grimm's Fairytales
The first volume of their Kinder- und Hausmärchen (‘Children’s and Household Tales’), published in 1812, included 86 stories. The second, which came out in 1814, added 70 more. There were numerous later editions, deleting some stories and adding others, of what became known in English as Grimm’s Fairy Tales. They have fascinated and frightened generations of children in more than 70 languages and have inspired authors, artists, composers and film-makers. -
United States declares war on Great Britian
The War of 1812 began because of tension between the two nations over commerce restrictions and the impressment of American Sailors into the British Royal Navy. The war was concluded on February 18, 1815 with the Treaty of Ghent, which restored relations between the two nations with no territory loss for either. -
Jane Austen publishes Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" was published in 1813, though the novel was written between 1796 and 1813. The setting is in Longbourn, England. The story follows the main character Elizabeth Bennet as she deals with issues of manners, upbringing, morality, education, and marriage in the society of the landed gentry of early 19th-century England. Elizabeth is the second of five daughters of a country gentleman living near the fictional town of Meryton in Hertfordshire, near London. -
Mary Shelley, daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, publishes Frankenstein
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a novel written by Mary Shelley about a creature produced by an unorthodox scientific experiment. Shelley started writing the story when she was nineteen, and the novel was published when she was twenty-one. The first edition was published anonymously in London in 1818. Shelley's name appears on the second edition, published in France in 1823. -
Noah Webster publishes An American Dictonary of the English Language
Noah Webster, the Father of American Christian education, wrote the first American dictionary and established a system of rules to govern spelling, grammar, and reading. This master linguist understood the power of words, their definitions, and the need for precise word usage in communication to maintain independence. Webster used the Bible as the foundation for his definitions. No other dictionary compares with the Webster's 1828 dictionary. The English language has changed again and again. -
Victor Hugo publishes The Hunchback of Notre Dame
On this day in 1831, Victor Hugo finishes writing Notre Dame de Paris, also known as The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Distracted by other projects, Hugo had continually postponed his deadlines for delivering the book to his publishers, but once he sat down to write it, he completed the novel in only four months.The French title refers to the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, on which the story is centered, and is a metaphor for Esmeralda, the main character of the story. -
Slavery is abolished in British Empire
The Slavery Abolition Act 1833 was an 1833 Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom abolishing slavery throughout the British Empire (with the exceptions "of the Territories in the Possession of the East India Company," the "Island of Ceylon," and "the Island of Saint Helena", which exceptions were eliminated in 1843).The Act was repealed in 1998 as part of a wider rationalisation of English statute law, but later anti-slavery legislation remains in force.
