Various texts from the Victorian Web

< http://www.victorianweb.org/index.html>

§Movements and Currents in Nineteenth-Century British Thought

Since the 1830s the Victorians and those who have followed them have identified several opposed trends, tendencies, movements, or loosely organized schools of Victorian thought. Here are some of them:

1. Progressive vs. Conservative

At the very beginning of Victoria's reign, John Stuart Mill argued that contemporary British thought divided into progressive and conservative schools derived from Jeremy Bentham and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Following Mill's lead, modern critics have identified followers of each strain or party.

Progressives, Liberals, or Rationalists: James Mill (Mill's father), Mill himself John Bright

Conservatives, Tories, or Reactionaries: Carlyle, Disraeli, Pugin, Newman, Arnold, Ruskin, Morris

2. Radical Progressive vs. Tory Radical vs. Conservative

Another take on political schools recognizes that the terms , liberal, radical, and conservative mean different things in the twentieth century than they did in the last.

Progressives, Liberals, or Rationalists: James Mill (Mill's father), J. S. Mill, Thomson, Bradlaugh, John Bright. Characteristic beliefs: middle-class fear of government intervention, emphasis upon freedom of action. In today's political context, this once extreme left-wing movement from the early nineteenth century would be considered reactionary or a party of extreme right.

Tory Radicals, Christian Socialists, Marxists: Carlyle, Arnold, Ruskin, Morris. Characteristic beliefs: need for strong central government, welfare or interventionist state; anti-aristocractic; ambivalent attitude toward middle class.

Conservatives, Tories, or Reactionaries: Carlyle, Disraeli, Pugin, Newman, Keble, Pusey, Hopkins Characteristic beliefs: pro aristocracy, medieval revival, social hierarchy, established (or official) state religion.

3. Hebrew vs. Hellene (or Moral vs. Aesthetic)

Using Matthew Arnold's opposition of an emotional, fundamentalist (or Puritanical) Evangelical Protestantism to an elite Hellenic school, a series of scholar-critics, of whom Graham Hough and David DeLaura are the most important, have proposed the following kind of opposition:

Hebrews: Ruskin, Carlyle, Dickens, Eliot, Mrs. Gaskell, the Brownings. Characteristic forms: prophetic modes, social protest, autobiographies emphasizing conversion, dense, often grotesque image and analogy, contemporary, often middle-class subjects.

Hellenes: Newman, Arnold, D. G. Rossetti, Swinburne, Pater, Wilde. Characteristic forms: would-be elitist subjects, emphasis on clarity, greater use of classical myth, secular version of Tractarian notions of reserve.

4. Believers vs. Nonbelievers

Orthodox Believers: Newman, Keble, Ruskin (early), C. Rossetti, E. B. Browning, MacDonald, Hopkins

Idiosyncratic, unorthodox believers -- usually liberal Christians: Dickens, MacDonald, Ruskin (after 1870), Tennyson, R. Browning (?)

Nonbelievers: Bentham, Mill, Carlyle, Darwin, Huxley, Clough, Arnold, Ruskin (late 1850s through 1860s), D. G. Rossetti, Morris, Swinburne, Hardy, Eliot, Thomson

Buckley, J. H. The Victorian Temper: A Study in Literary Culture. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1964.

DeLaura, David J. Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England: Newman, Arnold, and Pater. Austin: U of Texas P, 1969.

Houghton, Walter E. The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870. New Haven: Yale UP, [c. 1956].

Johnson, E. D. H. The Alien Vision of Victorian Poetry. Princeon: Princeton UP, 1952.

Mill, John Stuart. "Bentham" and "Coleridge," Autobiography and Other Writings. Ed. Jack Stillinger. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969.

§Hastings and Women's Suffrage

In 1866, Hastings resident Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon had drafted and promoted a petition for votes for women, thus sowing the seeds of a nationwide movement for votes for women. Over the next forty years, suffrage groups sprung up all over the country. The first in Hastings & St Leonards was the London National Society, which was began in the 1870s-80s and later came under the umbrella of the NUWSS. There was also a Hastings Association for the Promotion of Women's Rights which, in 1876, presented MP Thomas Brassey with a suffrage petition, which he took to Parliament. In 1890 Brassey married Sybil De Vere Capell and, as Earl and Countess Brassey, they later became NUWSS activists.

The Appeal of Womanhood and The WSPU newspaper -- The Suffragette

Around 1908 a branch of the militant suffragettes, the WSPU, was established. There were also branches of the Note: Tax Resistance League, the Free Church League for Women's Suffrage (Chairman: Jane E Strickland), the Catholic Women's Suffrage League (Secretary: Miss I Willis), the Men's League for Women's Suffrage, the Women's Suffrage Propaganda League (secretary: Mrs Darent Harrison) and the Women's Freedom League.

The societies in Hastings were very active: each held weekly meetings plus ad hoc talks and lectures. Plays, films and church services were attended and sometimes interrupted.

Open air meetings were held in Wellington Square and on the beach in front of the De Luxe Cinema, Pelham Place. Public rallies with famous national speakers drew huge crowds to the Public and Metropole halls. There were poster-parades, processions, and self-denial weeks to raise funds. Women chalked the pavements to advertise forthcoming events and sold copies of The Suffragette and Votes for Women in the streets. Some very prominent local people and clergy lent their support.

In February 1918 female householders aged over 30 were granted the vote, 62 years after Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon's petition. To read Martin Pugh's account of the reasons women were enfranchised at this time click here.

Two post-suffrage items of local interest are included on this site: former suffragette Muriel Matters ran for election as Hastings' MP in 1924, and the notorious militant suffragette Mary "Slasher" Richardson retired to Hastings and died here in 1961.

Originally appeared in 1838-1840 The London and Westminster Review.

§Political & Economic History of Great Britain from the Civil War to the Twentieth Century (with an Emphasis on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries)

1642-6	The Great Civil War
1642	Charles I (Stuart; Anglican) captured. Queen Henrietta Maria and Charles, Prince of Wales, escape to France.
1649	Charles I beheaded.
1649-60	The Interregnum; the Commonwealth established.
1653	Oliver Cromwell (Puritan) becomes Lord Protector of the Commonwealth.
1658	Oliver Cromwell dies; his son Richard attempts to succeed him.
1660	The Restoration. Charles (II—Anglican) returns from France and takes the throne.
1681-5	Parliament does not meet. Court holds power.
1685	Charles dies; his brother James (II; Roman Catholic) succeeds him. Threat of "popery."
1688	James, Prince of Wales born. This means the crown will pass to him, a Roman Catholic, rather than to the King's Anglican siblings. Glorious (i.e., bloodless) Revolution. James flees to France and is deposed, because his daughter Mary and her husband William, Prince of Orange, have been invited by Parliament to share the crown. Executive ! power lodged with William. Balance of power shifts finally from Court to Parliament.
1688-1788	For 100 years, till the death of Bonnie Prince Charlie, England feels the threat of an invasion from France which would restore Stuart (Jacobite), and thus Roman Catholic, rule. In fact, Jacobite risings occur twice during this period, in 1715 and 1745.
1694	Mary dies; William (III) sole ruler.
1701	James II dies in France. Act of Settlement directs succession, should Anne die childless, to the (Protestant) House of Hanover--unless "the Old Pretender," James (son of James II) or, later, Bonnie Prince Charlie, "the Young Pretender," would ! abjure Roman Catholicism. (See the chart of kings and queens.)
1702	William dies; Anne (Mary's Anglican sister) succeeds.
1707	Act of Union between Scotland and England.
1702-13	War of the Spanish succession.
1713	Peace of Utrecht.
1714	Anne dies; Dynastic crisis; George I (of Hanover) succeeds unopposed.
1715	Jacobite rebellion.
1720	Charles Edward Stuart (a.k.a. Bonnie Prince Charlie or the Young Pretender) born in France to James (the Old Pretender). South Sea Bubble.
1721-42	Robert Walpole Prime Minister.
1727	George I dies; George II crowned.
1733	John Kay's flying shuttle.
1745	Jacobite rising in support of Bonnie Prince Charlie.
1754	Anglo-French war begins in North America.
1755	Lisbon earthquake.
1756-63	Seven Years' War.
1757	Clive captures India from the French.
1758	first threshing machine.
1759	British Museum opens.
1760	George II dies; his grandson crowned George III. French surrender Montreal to the British. Wedgwood opens pottery works.
1763	Treaty of Paris ends the Seven Years' War. France cedes Canada and the Mississippi Valley to Britain.
1764	Hargreaves invents the spinning jenny.
1766	James "the Old Pretender" dies in France.
1769	Arkwright invents a spinning machine.
1771	Arkwright's first spinning mill.
1773	Boston Tea Party.
1774	Priestly isolates oxygen. Accession of Louis XVI of France.
1775	American Revolution begins. Watt's first efficient steam engine.
1776	Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations. American colonies declare their independence.
1778	Rousseau and Voltaire die.
1779	first steam powered mills. Crompton invents spinning "mule."
1781	Cornwallis surrenders to Washington at Yorktown, Va.
1782	Lord North resigns; full Parliamentary government restored.
1783	Peace treaty signed in Paris between Great Britain and the United States.
1785	Cartwright builds power loom.
1786	Coal gas first used for lighting.
1787	Warren Hastings impeached.
1788	Bonnie Prince Charlie dies in France.
1789	Bastille falls; French Revolution begins. Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals (see utilitarianism).
1791-2	Paine, The Rights of Man.
1792	Reign of Terror in France.
1793	Louis XVI executed in France. England and France at war. Godwin, Political Justice.
1794	Execution of Robespierre ends the Reign of Terror.
1796	Invasion of England threatened.
1798	Battle of the Nile. Malthus, Essay on . . . Population.
1799	Napoleon named First Consul of France.
1801	Union of Great Britain and Ireland.
1804	Napoleon declared Emperor.
1805	Battle of Trafalgar.
1809	Napoleon captures Vienna.
1811	Prince of Wales named Regent to act for George III, now insane.
1811-12	Luddite riots in the North and the Midlands. Laborers attack factories and break up the machines which they fear will replace them.
1812	Napoleon invades Russia.
1812-14	War of 1812 between England and the United States.
1814	Treaty of Ghent ends Anglo-U.S. War. England and allies invade France. Napoleon exiled to Elba.
1815	Napoleon escapes Elba; begins the "Hundred Days." Battle of Waterloo; Napoleon exiled to St. Helena in the South Atlantic. Corn Laws passed.
1817	David Ricardo, Principles of Political Economy.
1819	Peterloo Massacre of Corn Law protestors.
1820	George III dies; succeeded by Prince Regent as George IV. Cato Street Conspiracy
1821	Napoleon dies.
1822	Classical Tripos established at Cambridge.
1823	London Mechanics Institute founded.
1827	Thomas Arnold appointed to Rugby.
1829	Catholic Emancipation Act. Peel establishes the Metropolitan Police.
1830	George IV dies; his brother William IV succeeds. Manchester - Liverpool Railway (first in England).
1832	First Reform Bill: adds £10/year householders to the voting rolls and reapportions Parliamentary representation much more fairly, doing away with most "rotten" and "pocket" boroughs. Adds 217,000 voters to an electorate of 435,000.
1833	Slavery abolished throughout the British Empire. Factory Act.
1834	New Poor Law. Houses of Parliament burn down.
Late 1830s	First of the Parliamentary "Blue Books"—facts and figures about England compiled by the Royal Commissioners.
1836-48	Chartist movement.
1837	William IV dies; succeeded by his niece, Victoria.
1838	Regular Atlantic steamship service begins.
1839	Anti-Corn-Law League founded.
1840	Queen Victoria marries her cousin Albert, who becomes Prince Consort. Penny post started. S.F.B. Morse invents the telegraph. Grammar Schools Act.
1842	Chartist Riots. Copyright Act.
1845-6	Potato Failure in Europe; starvation in Ireland. Corn Laws (which had kept up the price of grain) repealed.
1848	Revolutions in Europe. Queen's College (for women) founded in London.
1849	Gold discovered in California and Australia.
1850	Telegraph cable laid under English Channel.
1851	Great Exhibition ("Crystal Palace"). Population of United Kingdom at 21 million.
1853-6	Crimean War.
1855	Livingston discovers Victoria Falls. Civil Service Commissioners appointed.
1857-8	The Mutiny (India).
1858	First Atlantic cable laid.
1860	Garibaldi takes Naples; unification of Italy.
1861	Albert dies; Victoria retires into mourning.
1861-5	American Civil War.
1862	Bismarck becomes Prussian premier.
1864	Geneva Convention establishes Red Cross.
1866	Italy defeated by Austria. Telegraph cable laid under the Atlantic.
1867	Second Reform Bill: enfranchises many workingmen; adds 938,000 to an electorate of 1,057,000 in England and Wales. (Disraeli's legislation) South African diamond fields discovered. Fenian rising in Ireland.
1869	Suez Canal opened. Union Pacific Railway completed in U.S.
1870	Forster's Elementary Education Act establishes School Boards. Vatican Council (establishes the infallibility of the Pope).
1870-1	Franco-Prussian War.
1871	University Tests Act removes religious tests at Oxford and Cambridge. Trade unions legalized. Newcastle engineers strike for a nine-hour day. Germany unified.
1873	Population of the United Kingdom at 26 million (France 36 million).
1876	Victoria named Empress of India. Edison invents the phonograph. Compulsory school attendance in Great Britain.
1877	Transvaal annexed.
1879	Somerville and Lady Margaret Colleges (for women) founded at Oxford. Zulu war.
1880	War with Transvaal.
1881	Cambridge Tripos exams opened to women.
1882	Triple Alliance (Germany, Italy, and Austria). Married Women's Property Act enables women to buy, own, and sell property, and to keep their own earnings.
1883	"Oom Paul" Kruger named president of the South African Republic. Fabian Society founded. Mahdi Rebellion in the Sudan.
1884-5	Third Reform Act and Redistribution Act extend vote to agricultural workers; electorate tripled.
1885	Fall of Khartoum.
1886	First (Irish) Home Rule bill rejected.
1887	Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee.
1889	London dock workers and match girls strike for 6d./hour.
1890	Parnell--O'Shea divorce case ends Parnell's influence; no Home Rule for Ireland.
1894	Dreyfus trial in France.
1895	U.S. equals the U.K.'s industrial output.
1897	Victoria's Diamond Jubilee.
1898-99	Spanish-American War.
1899-1902	Boer war.
1901	Victoria dies; Edward Prince of Wales succeeds.
1903	U.S. acquires Canal Zone from Panama.
1904	Entente Cordiale (England and France).
1905	Revolution in Russia.
1914-18	The "Great War" (World War I).
1916	Easter Rising in Dublin.
1917	Russian Revolution.
1918	all men over 21 and women over thirty enfranchised.
1922	Irish Free State established. James Joyce, Ulysses; T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land.
1928	Equal Franchise Act grants right to vote to women over 21 (as well as men).
1936-8	Spanish Civil War.
1938	Chamberlain cedes Czech territory to Hitler at Munich.
1939-45	World War II.

“Political & Economic History of Great Britain from the Civil War to the Twentieth Century (with an Emphasis on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries)” Glenn Everett. October 2002 <http://www.victorianweb.org/history/historytl.html>

“Movements and Currents in Nineteenth-Century British Thought” George P. Landow. February 2002 <http://www.victorianweb.org/philosophy/thought1.html>

“Hastings and Women's Suffrage” Helena Wojtczak. 2000 < http://www.victorianweb.org/gender/wojtczak/hassuf.html>

Various texts from the Victorian Web

< http://www.victorianweb.org/index.html>

§Movements and Currents in Nineteenth-Century British Thought

Since the 1830s the Victorians and those who have followed them have identified several opposed trends, tendencies, movements, or loosely organized schools of Victorian thought. Here are some of them:

1. Progressive vs. Conservative

At the very beginning of Victoria's reign, John Stuart Mill argued that contemporary British thought divided into progressive and conservative schools derived from Jeremy Bentham and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Following Mill's lead, modern critics have identified followers of each strain or party.

Progressives, Liberals, or Rationalists: James Mill (Mill's father), Mill himself John Bright

Conservatives, Tories, or Reactionaries: Carlyle, Disraeli, Pugin, Newman, Arnold, Ruskin, Morris

2. Radical Progressive vs. Tory Radical vs. Conservative

Another take on political schools recognizes that the terms , liberal, radical, and conservative mean different things in the twentieth century than they did in the last.

Tory Radicals, Christian Socialists, Marxists: Carlyle, Arnold, Ruskin, Morris. Characteristic beliefs: need for strong central government, welfare or interventionist state; anti-aristocractic; ambivalent attitude toward middle class.

Conservatives, Tories, or Reactionaries: Carlyle, Disraeli, Pugin, Newman, Keble, Pusey, Hopkins Characteristic beliefs: pro aristocracy, medieval revival, social hierarchy, established (or official) state religion.

3. Hebrew vs. Hellene (or Moral vs. Aesthetic)

Using Matthew Arnold's opposition of an emotional, fundamentalist (or Puritanical) Evangelical Protestantism to an elite Hellenic school, a series of scholar-critics, of whom Graham Hough and David DeLaura are the most important, have proposed the following kind of opposition:

Hebrews: Ruskin, Carlyle, Dickens, Eliot, Mrs. Gaskell, the Brownings. Characteristic forms: prophetic modes, social protest, autobiographies emphasizing conversion, dense, often grotesque image and analogy, contemporary, often middle-class subjects.

Hellenes: Newman, Arnold, D. G. Rossetti, Swinburne, Pater, Wilde. Characteristic forms: would-be elitist subjects, emphasis on clarity, greater use of classical myth, secular version of Tractarian notions of reserve.

4. Believers vs. Nonbelievers

Orthodox Believers: Newman, Keble, Ruskin (early), C. Rossetti, E. B. Browning, MacDonald, Hopkins

Idiosyncratic, unorthodox believers -- usually liberal Christians: Dickens, MacDonald, Ruskin (after 1870), Tennyson, R. Browning (?)

Nonbelievers: Bentham, Mill, Carlyle, Darwin, Huxley, Clough, Arnold, Ruskin (late 1850s through 1860s), D. G. Rossetti, Morris, Swinburne, Hardy, Eliot, Thomson

Suggested Readings

Buckley, J. H. The Victorian Temper: A Study in Literary Culture. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1964.

DeLaura, David J. Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England: Newman, Arnold, and Pater. Austin: U of Texas P, 1969.

Houghton, Walter E. The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870. New Haven: Yale UP, [c. 1956].

Johnson, E. D. H. The Alien Vision of Victorian Poetry. Princeon: Princeton UP, 1952.

Mill, John Stuart. "Bentham" and "Coleridge," Autobiography and Other Writings. Ed. Jack Stillinger. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969.

§Hastings and Women's Suffrage

The Appeal of Womanhood and The WSPU newspaper -- The Suffragette

The societies in Hastings were very active: each held weekly meetings plus ad hoc talks and lectures. Plays, films and church services were attended and sometimes interrupted.

In February 1918 female householders aged over 30 were granted the vote, 62 years after Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon's petition. To read Martin Pugh's account of the reasons women were enfranchised at this time click here.

Two post-suffrage items of local interest are included on this site: former suffragette Muriel Matters ran for election as Hastings' MP in 1924, and the notorious militant suffragette Mary "Slasher" Richardson retired to Hastings and died here in 1961.

Originally appeared in 1838-1840 The London and Westminster Review.

§Political & Economic History of Great Britain from the Civil War to the Twentieth Century (with an Emphasis on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries)

“Political & Economic History of Great Britain from the Civil War to the Twentieth Century (with an Emphasis on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries)” Glenn Everett. October 2002 <http://www.victorianweb.org/history/historytl.html>

“Movements and Currents in Nineteenth-Century British Thought” George P. Landow. February 2002 <http://www.victorianweb.org/philosophy/thought1.html>

“Hastings and Women's Suffrage” Helena Wojtczak. 2000 < http://www.victorianweb.org/gender/wojtczak/hassuf.html>