Victorian

Alexander Burnes met his death on November 2nd, 1841, at the hands of a furious Afghan mob. James Lunt introduces one of the most adventurous travellers of his generation.

A century ago, writes Patrick Renshaw, Karl Marx and his colleagues founded in London the first International Workingmen's Association, a body from which many varieties of socialism and communism have since developed.

From 1848 until 1867, writes E.R.R. Green, the romantic nationalists of Ireland, with strong backing from the Irish-Americans, conspired in vain to make their country an “Independent Democratic Republic.”

A youth of brilliant promise, a man of commanding gifts, Gladstone's friend and lieutenant quitted the political arena before he had reached the age of fifty. None of the statesmen of his period, writes John Raymond, presents the modern biographer with a more absorbing problem.

“He resigned.” Sir Winston Churchill has written of his father, “at the wrong time, on the wrong issue, and he made no attempt to rally support.” By Robert Rhodes James.

To the victors in the Ministerial Crisis of 1886 went twenty years of power, writes Robert Rhodes James, while to the loser there only remained a poignant struggle against denigration and disease.

Engineer, journalist, inventor, Herbert Spencer became one of the most influential prophets of the Victorian Age. J.W. Burrow describes how his Synthetic Philosophy was an encyclopedic attempt to construct a system of “unified knowledge,” in which the facts of Darwinian natural science were blended with transcendental metaphysics.

Robert Rhodes James analyses the controversy over Parliamentary procedure that helped to precipitate the General Election in which Gladstone went down to defeat.

 “I am a Jingo in the best acceptation of that sobriquet... To see England great is my highest aspiration, and to lead in contributing to that greatness is my only real ambition.” By Edgar Holt. 

The Grace Darling legend as an early manifestation of the terrifying power of sustained publicity; Richard Armstrong writes that she may well have been its first victim.