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Victoria becomes queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
Queen Victoria was the Queen of Great Britain and Ireland from 1837 until 1901. She was on the throne longer than any other king or queen in the history of the United Kingdom. She was born in 1819 and became queen at the age of 18, on the death of her uncle, William IV. -
William Wordsworth becomes poet laureate.
Born on April 17, 1770, in Cockermouth of the Lake District of northern England, William Wordsworth is one of the most important English poets and a founder of the Romantic Movement of English literature. He became widely successful and was named poet laureate in 1843, succeeding Robert Southey. William Wordsworth died on April 23, 1850 of pleurisy. He is buried at St. Oswald's Church, in Grasmere. -
Potato famine begins in Ireland; close to one million people die of starvation or famine-related diseases; massive emigration begins.
In Ireland, the Great Famine was a period of mass starvation, disease and emigration between 1845 and 1852.During the famine approximately 1 million people died and a million more emigrated from Ireland, causing the island's population to fall by between 20% and 25%.The proximate cause of famine was a potato disease commonly known as potato blight. -
Alfred, Lord Tennyson becomes a poet laureate.
Tennyson was appointed to the position of Poet Laureate, which he held until his own death in 1892, by far the longest tenure of any laureate before or since. He fulfilled the requirements of this position by turning out appropriate but often uninspired verse, such as a poem of greeting to Princess Alexandra of Denmark when she arrived in Britain to marry the future King Edward VII. -
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, and other regions on the British ship H.M.S. Beagl -
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 (the "Union" or the "North") and several Southern slave states that had declared their secession and formed the Confederate States of America (the "Confederacy" or the "South"). -
In France, Victor Hugo publishes Les Miserables.
Hugo spent the next decade in exile with his family and Mme. Drouet on the islands of Jersey and Guernsey. During these years, he wrote satires about Louis Napoleon, returned to his poetry and published several novels including Les Misérables, which he had begun years earlier. 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. -
Mohandas K. Gandhi is born in India.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, commonly known as Mahatma Gandhi, was the preeminent leader of Indian nationalism in British-ruled India. Employing non-violent civil disobedience, Gandhi led India to independence and inspired movements for non-violence, civil rights and freedom across the world. -
Thomas Edison invents the incandescent lamp.
Thomas Alva Edison invented a carbon filament that burned for forty hours. Edison placed his filament in an oxygenless bulb. Edison evolved his designs for the lightbulb based on the 1875 patent he purchased from inventors, Henry Woodward and Matthew Evans. -
Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn appears.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a novel by Mark Twain, first published in England in December 1884 and in the United States in February 1885. Commonly named among the Great American Novels, the work is among the first in major American literature to be written throughout in vernacular English, characterized by local color regionalism.
