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Victoria becomes queen of the United Kingdom, Great Britain and Ireland.
Victoria served as the queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 1837 until 1901. In 1876 she also became empress of India. During her reign the English monarchy took on its modern ceremonial character. -
William Wordsworth becomes poet laureate
In 1813, Wordsworth moved from Grasmere to nearby Ambelside. He continued to write poetry, but it was never as great as his early works. After 1835, he wrote little more. In 1842, he was given a government pension and the following year became poet laureate. Wordsworth died on 23 April 1850 and was buried in Grasmere churchyard. His great autobiographical poem, 'The Prelude', which he had worked on since 1798, was published after his death. -
Alfred, Lord Tennyson becomes poet laureate
In 1850, with the publication of In Memoriam, Tennyson became one of Britain's most popular poets. He was selected Poet Laureate in succession to Wordsworth. In that same year, he married Emily Sellwood. They had two sons, Hallam and Lionel. -
Japan opens trade to the West
On March 31 1854 representatives of Japan and the United States signed a historic treaty. A United States naval officer, Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry, negotiated tirelessly for several months with Japanese officials to achieve the goal of opening the doors of trade with Japan. -
Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
The first printing of Charles Darwin's book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, sold out in a matter of days. Darwin considered the volume a short abstract of the ideas he'd been developing about evolution by natural selection for decades. He'd been building on his ideas since his five-year journey in the 1830s to the South American coast, the Galapagos Islands. -
The U.S. Civil War begins.
When President Lincoln planned to send supplies to Fort Sumter, he alerted the state in advance, in an attempt to avoid hostilities. South Carolina, however, feared a trick; the commander of the fort, Robert Anderson, was asked to surrender immediately. Anderson offered to surrender, but only after he had exhausted his supplies. His offer was rejected, and on April 12, the Civil War began with shots fired on the fort. Fort Sumter eventually was surrendered to South Carolina. -
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. -
Thomas Edison invents the incandescent lamp.
Edison's eventual achievement was inventing not just an incandescent electric light, but also an electric lighting system that contained all the elements necessary to make the incandescent light practical, safe, and economical. -
Mark Twain's Adeventures of Huckleberry Finn appears.
In the decades after Twain's death in 1910, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn gains the status of a masterpiece. Novelist Ernest Hemingway remarks that "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn," and other writers as diverse as American poet T.S. Eliot and African American novelist Ralph Ellison add their acclaim. -
Queen Victoria dies.
Queen Victoria was the longest reigning British monarch in history, ruling the United Kingdom from 1837 to 1901. Her death on January 22, 1901 at age 81 was mourned around the world and signaled an end to the Victorian Era.
