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Victoria becomes queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
Ascending to the throne at only eighteen years old, Queen Victoria ruled the United Kingdom for nearly 64 years, the longest of any British monarch. During her reign, Great Britain became a powerful industrial nation and boasted an empire that stretched across the globe. Despite the early loss of her beloved husband, Queen Victoria provided a reassuring stability during much of the nineteenth century. -
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Charles Dickens publishes Oliver Twist in periodical form.
Oliver Twist is the second novel Dickens ever wrote, and it was published in installments between 1837 and 1839. Many novels at the time were published serially, meaning that each chapter was issued separately, once a month, over the space of a year or two. Instead of spending a lot of money producing novels in volume form, publishers allowed up-and-coming writers to publish their novels in installments. The audience would get hooked and keep coming back to buy. -
William Wordsworth becomes poet laureate.
His poetry is perhaps most original in its vision of the organic relation between man and the natural world, a vision that culminated in the sweeping metaphor of nature as emblematic of the mind of God. The most memorable poems of his middle and late years were often cast in elegaic mode; few match the best of his earlier works. By the time he became widely appreciated by the critics and the public, his poetry had lost much of its force and his radical politics had yielded to conservatism. -
Potato famine begins in Ireland; close to one million people die of starvation or famine-related diseases; massive emigration begins.
A few days after potatoes were dug from the ground, they began to turn into a slimy, decaying, blackish "mass of rottenness." Expert panels convened to investigate the blight's cause suggested that it was the result of "static electricity" or the smoke that billowed from railroad locomotives or the "mortiferous vapours" rising from underground volcanoes. In fact, the cause was a fungus that had traveled from Mexico to Ireland. -
Ten Hours Act limits the number of hours that women and children can work in factories.
The debate over limiting women and children to working ten hours a day was a rather contentious one in Parliament. Lord Ashley attempted unsuccessfully to insert a ten hour clause into the Factory Act of 1844. A Bill that was nearly identical to the Factory Act of 1847 was presented to Parliament by Lord Ashley in 1846 but was defeated by a coalition of conservatives and free traders. The Bill that would eventually pass as the Factory Act of 1847 was presented to Parliament by John Fielden. -
Japan opens trade to the West.
The United States was to be permitted to establish a consulate at Shimoda, a small port on Honshu near Edo Bay, but there was no provision allowing U.S. citizens to take up permanent residence, and U.S. citizens and merchant vessels were allowed to enter only two small ports, Shimoda and Hakodate. -
The U.S Civil War begins.
Fought from 1861 to 1865 between the United States and several Southern slave states that had declared their secession and formed the Confederate States of America. The war had its origin in the fractious issue of slavery and after four years of bloody combat, the Confederacy was defeated, slavery was abolished, and the difficult Reconstruction process of restoring unity and guaranteeing rights to the freed slaves began. -
In France, Victor Hugo publishes Les Miserables.
When Les Misérables was published in Brussels in 1862, it was an immediate popular success in spite of negative reaction by critics, who considered it overly sentimental, and the government, who banned it. Les Misérables is a melodramatic novel written from the premise that any man can rise above his circumstances to reach perfection. The plot of the novel is suspenseful from start to finish; it follows both Jean Valjean's and society's struggles with good and evil. -
Lewis Carroll publishes Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
The tale is filled with allusions to Dodgson's friends (and enemies), and to the lessons that British schoolchildren were expected to memorize. The tale plays with logic in ways that have made the story of lasting popularity with adults as well as children. It is considered to be one of the most characteristic examples of the genre of literary nonsense, and its narrative course and structure has been enormously influential, mainly in the fantasy genre. -
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn appears.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has proved significant not only as a novel that explores the racial and moral world of its time but also, through the controversies that continue to surround it, as an artifact of those same moral and racial tensions as they have evolved to the present day.
