Victorian Era
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Victorian Era’
As Viceroy of India, Lord Ripon was rather more popular with the people of India than he was with some of his own civil servants.
When Lord Ripon took over as Viceroy of India in 1880, he at once set about including more Indians in Government, and allowing the local press to hold lawmakers to account. Many opposed him and it took a long time for his policy to bear fruit, but Ram Chandra Palit believed that it was Ripon, and not his critics, who was truly British.
Meriel Talbot’s distinguished career in government came as no surprise to those who had seen her at the wicket.
As a young woman, composer Ethel Smyth played cricket for a ladies’ team in Kent, the White Heather Club. The club’s leading light was the future Dame Meriel Talbot, who would soon play a key government role in the Commonwealth and the Great War. Though still in her early twenties, Meriel’s demeanour on and off the pitch showed she was destined for greatness.
Composer Ethel Smyth starts telling the Archbishop of Canterbury a joke, and then wishes she hadn’t...
In the late 1880s, rising composer Ethel Smyth became friendly with Nelly Benson, daughter of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and often shared in the family’s meals. Archbishop Benson’s massive dignity never failed to disconcert Ethel, and on one occasion she started nervously babbling an anecdote about a misprint in a newspaper.
Major-General Charles Napier, given the task of policing a Chartist rally in Manchester, was alarmed to hear the protestors had brought the big guns - literally.
In 1838, the ‘Chartists’ demanded Parliamentary reforms which gained wide sympathy, especially in the industrial North West. But by the following summer violent radicals who were no friends of liberal democracy were hijacking the movement, as Major-General Charles Napier discovered for himself when keeping the peace at a rally in Manchester in May, 1839.
David Livingstone relives the historic moment when he became the first European to see the Victoria Falls.
In 1852-56, David Livingstone mapped the course of the Zambesi, hoping that agricultural trade along the river would crush the horrible trade in slaves (recently outlawed in the British Empire). On November 16, 1855, he was transported by canoe to a magnificent cataract named Mosi-oa-Tunya, ‘the smoke that thunders’, so becoming the first European to see the Victoria Falls.
Four years before the bloody American civil war, Dr David Livingstone proposed a peaceful way to rid the world of slavery.
In 1861-65, America went to bloody civil war over (among other things) the issue of slavery in the South’s cotton and sugar plantations, and upwards of a million people died. A few years earlier, Scotsman David Livingstone proposed a far less destructive answer: establish cotton and sugar farms in Africa, employ local labourers on good wages, and strangle slavery by the cords of the free market.