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The American Revolution
An unordered "shot heard around the world" begins the American Revolution. British forces retreat from Lexington back to Boston and are harassed and shot at all along the way by farmers and rebels. -
William Blake publishes Songs of Innocence
Blake's categories are modes of perception that tend to coordinate with a chronology that would become standard in Romanticism. -
The French Revolution
The French Revolution was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France that had a lasting impact on French history and more broadly throughout the world. -
Charles and Mary Lamb publish Tales from Shakespeare
The book reduced the archaic English and complicated storyline of Shakespeare to a simple level that children could read and comprehend. -
Brother's Grimm begin to publish Grimm's Fairytales
Children's and Household Tales is a collection of German fairy tales first published in 1812 by the Grimm brothers, Jacob and Wilhelm. -
United States declares war on Great Britian
The United States declared war in 1812 for several reasons, including trade restrictions brought about by Britain's ongoing war with France, and the impressment of American merchant sailors into the Royal Navy. -
Jane Austen publishes Pride and Prejudice
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. -
Mary Shelley, daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, publishes Frankenstein
This novel is 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. -
Victor Hugo publishes The Hunchback of Notre Dame
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The Act was repealed in 1998 as part of a wider rationalisation of English statute law, but later anti-slavery legislation remains in force.
