Victorian Era

In encouraging women into music, Alice Mary Smith thought promises of ‘greatness’ counterproductive.

‘Why are there no great female composers?’ asked the Victorians. But Alice Meadows White, née Smith (1839-1884), never afraid to voice a challenging opinion, believed that the excited demand for a ‘great’ female composer was actually discouraging a potential host of good ones.

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The Scottish missionary and medic believed that slavery could better be eradicated by trade than by force.

By the 1840s Britain had so repented of her involvement in slavery that she was the leading force in worldwide abolition. One of the most beloved anti-slavery campaigners was Scottish missionary, Dr David Livingstone.

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How the cricketing rivalry between England and Australia got its name.

The Ashes is the name given to any Test Match series between the cricket teams of England and Australia, in a tradition which began as newspaper joke.

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Despite setback after setback, Stanford was determined to hear his music played in public.

Sir Charles Villiers Stanford had to wait five resolute years to hear his Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor played in public, a disappointment bound up with the tragedy of the ‘Lusitania’.

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Mild-mannered Grace Darling persuaded her father to let her help him rescue the survivors of a shipwreck.

Grace Darling was just 22 when she helped her father rescue the survivors of a shipwreck on the Farne Islands off the Northumberland coast. It was a moment of instinctive heroism that would change her life forever.

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Lord Armstrong’s home was an Aladdin’s cave of Victorian technology.

Modern ‘green’ policies cost money and jobs, and blight the environment. Victorian industrialist Lord Armstrong managed to conserve the environment and yet also trial a range of emerging technologies that now bring comfort and prosperity to hundreds of millions of people.

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