Victorian Era
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Victorian Era’
Ethel Smyth puts on a show for a self-declared music enthusiast.
Ethel Smyth (to rhyme with ‘blithe’) came home to England in 1880 after winning many friends among the musical celebrities of Leipzig, and found that she had become something of a celebrity herself. It took a visit from a neighbour to remind her that whether you are a Smyth or a Schubert, ‘celebrity’ is a relative term.
George Stephenson was only too pleased to save the Government from its scientific advisers.
When a line from London to Newcastle was first planned in the 1840s, Brunel recommended an atmospheric railway, which pulls carriages along with vacuum tubes laid between the rails instead of locomotives. The decision lay with the Government’s chief engineer, Robert Stephenson, but his father George made sure the idea got no further than Robert’s outer office.
Henry Mayhew, co-founder of ‘Punch’, tells two anecdotes about the Victorian cabbie.
‘London Characters’ was a tissue of light-hearted observations on everyday life in the capital written by Henry Mayhew, co-founder of the satirical magazine ‘Punch’. Mayhew made a career out of satisfying the middle classes’ curiosity about the working man, something the working man did not always appreciate.
A fierce Victorian rivalry sprang up between two football teams from the industrial heartlands of the North East.
Sunderland AFC is a team in the English Football League with a proud history, six times champions of the top flight and twice winners of the FA Cup. Their first trophy, Football League Champions, came in 1892, but in those days they were not the only league side from the busy industrial town on the Wear.
Sir John Seeley urged us to cherish our close ties to India and other nations beyond Europe.
Victorian essayist and historian Sir John Seeley urged his readers to think more about our ties of language, blood, culture and history with the countries of our loose and far-flung Empire, and less about ‘little England’ and her mere geographical proximity to Continental Europe.
JB Cramer was one of the finest pianists of his day, though his reverence for Mozart made his own music more popular in the drawing room than the concert hall.
In 1772, Wilhelm Cramer, a virtuoso violinist from Stuttgart in the Duchy of Württemberg, settled in London, becoming a leading figure in concert halls and in the Court of King George III. Soon afterwards, his infant son Johann Baptist Cramer (1771-1858) joined him in England.