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Victoria becomes queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
The eighteenth birthday of Princess Victoria when she attained her legal majority, was celebrated throughout the British Empire as a national festival, & her health was toasted by a million merry circles of loyal Englishmen. King William the Fourth, in his seventy-second year of age, was stricken with mortal sickness. He lingered four weeks and then expired. It was on a morning in June, that the Archbishop of Canterbury communicated the intelligence to Victoria, &saluted her as Queen of England. -
Ten Hours Act limits the number of hours that women and children can work in factories.
children and young persons employed in manufacturing industries. It has done this in the name of the moral and physical health of the community. The slow but steady advance of the principle of interference may be traced in the titles of the successive statutes. It is needless here to discuss the wisdom of the policy, which has now received en bloc the stamp of legislative approval. -
Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
Charles Robert Darwin was an English naturalist.[I] He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection, in which the struggle for existence has a similar effect to the artificial selection involved in selective breeding. Darwin published his theory of evolution with compelling evidence in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species. -
The U.S. Civil War begins.
The American Civil War, also known as the War between the States or simply the Civil War, was a civil war 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 (mostly in the South), the Confederacy was defeated. -
In France, Victor Hugo publishes Les Miserables.
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. Hugo began to think about Les Misérables as early as 1829. He observed the specific incident that triggers the novel's action on the streets of Paris in 1845. -
Lewis Carroll publishes Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) is a novel written by English author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll. It tells the story of a girl named Alice who falls down a rabbit-hole into a fantasy world populated by peculiar and anthropomorphic creatures. -
Britain ends eighty-year practice of deporting convicts to Australia.
During the late 18th and 19th centuries, large numbers of convicts were transported to the various Australian penal colonies by the British government. One of the primary reasons for the British settlement of Australia was the establishment of a penal colony to alleviate pressure on their overburdened correctional facilities. Over the 80 years more than 165,000 convicts were transported to Australia. -
Thomas Edison invents the incandescent lamp.
"To all whom it may concern: Be it known that I, Thomas Alva Edison, of Menlo Park, in the State of New Jersey, United States of America, have invented an improvement on Electric Lamps, and in the method of manufacturing the same of which the following is a specification. The object of this invention is to produce electric lamps giving light by incandescence, which lamps shall have high resistance, so as to allow of the practical subdivision of the electric light." -
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn appears.
The story takes place in the Mississippi Valley "forty to fifty years ago," or about the time of Twain's own boyhood in Hannibal, Missouri, a town much like Huck’s hometown, St. Petersburg, Missouri. Unlike his imaginative friend Tom Sawyer, who reads chivalric adventure stories and loves to play games of make believe, Huck is a realist. He tolerates the efforts of his caretakers, the Widow Douglas and Miss Watson, to “sivilize” him, but his preference would be to live barefoot in rags. -
L. Frank Baum publishes The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
The story chronicles the adventures of a young girl named Dorothy Gale in the Land of Oz, after being swept away from her Kansas farm home in a cyclone. The novel is one of the best-known stories in American popular culture and has been widely translated. Its initial success, and the success of the 1902 Broadway musical which Baum adapted from his original story, led to Baum's writing thirteen more Oz books.
