Victorian Era
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Victorian Era’
Emmeline Pankhurst recalls how she brought some much-needed reason into the operations at Chorlton workhouse.
Emmeline Pankhurst’s campaign for women’s suffrage was not just about the right to vote: it was about the country’s desperate need for talented women actually in government. Her experiences as the only woman on the Board of the Chorlton-on-Medlock Workhouse in the 1890s rather proved her case.
Lord Salisbury seeks to calm the Viceroy of India’s nerves in the face of anti-Russian hysteria.
In 1877, military advisers urged Britain to ready themselves for war against the Russian Empire, citing St Petersburg’s diplomatic ties with Afghanistan, and warning that the Russians ‘could’ invade Turkey or even India. Lord Salisbury, Secretary of State for India, wrote to the Viceroy, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, urging calm.
American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson praises the English public for still loving freedom, despite their politicians.
American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) saw the English as a people much less biased and belligerent than their political masters. Liberty was safe, Emerson believed, while Englishmen still craved not influence abroad, but independence at home.
Lord Salisbury tells his fellow statesmen that no country should have its laws dictated from abroad.
In 1863, Copenhagen announced the first joint Constitution for Denmark and the Danish King’s duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. Amid rising German nationalism, Prussia demanded the two duchies for the German Confederation, and invaded in February 1864. London hosted a meaningless Conference, and that August the Danes gave in.
That infernal nonsense ‘Pinafore’ took America by storm.
Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘HMS Pinafore’ (1878) was surprisingly slow to get going in England, picking up speed only after Hamilton Clarke arranged some numbers for orchestra and military band at the Proms in Covent Garden. In America, however, it was a smash hit right from the start, though some people tired of it sooner than others.