Social Victorians/Timeline/1880s
1880s Headlines
[edit | edit source]Time Line
[edit | edit source]1840s 1850s 1860s 1870s | 1880s 1880 1881 1882 1883 1884 1885 1886 1887 1888 1889 | 1890s 1900s 1910s 1920s-30s
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[edit | edit source]January: big snowstorm beginning on the 19th that brought everything to a halt.
Headlines
[edit | edit source]January
[edit | edit source]William Morris spoke at Kensington Palace.
February
[edit | edit source]Thomas Carlyle died.
March
[edit | edit source]2 March 1881, Russian Emperor Alexander II was assassinated.
April
[edit | edit source]Benjamin Disraeli, Lord Beaconsfield, died, funeral at Hughenden.
July
[edit | edit source]Very hot. Dean Stanley, of Westminster Cathedral, died.
The Second Married Women's Property Act:
According to the centuries-old principle of coverture, English law saw a wife not as a separate entity but a "femme covert," who was under the "protection and influence of her husband, her baron or lord." The status of a wife, in other words, was that of a servant. The Second Married Women’s Property Act of 1882 established wives as distinct entities — "femme sole" — who could own, inherit, and rent property and represent themselves in a court of law.[1] (698 of 1203)
Headlines
[edit | edit source]2 March 1882
[edit | edit source]Another assassination attempt on Queen Victoria as she was getting off the train at Windsor: "It was the seventh attempt on her life; a train conductor stopped the man—Frederick McLean [fired at her with a gun] — and two local Eton boys attacked him with umbrellas."[1] (709 of 1203)
October
[edit | edit source]Annie Horniman met Moina Bergson at the Slade School of Art.
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[edit | edit source]May
[edit | edit source]The Prince of Wales opened the Royal College of Music, Gladstone in attendance.
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[edit | edit source]Queen Victoria conferred a peerage on Nathaniel Rothschild.
The 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act arose in the context of scandals about prostitution and the trade in pre-adolescent girls in London in the mid 1880s. William T. Stead, who had taken over the editorship of the Pall Mall Gazette when his mentor won the election to Parliament, "bought" Eliza Armstrong, who was thirteen years old, for five pounds. Eliza Armstrong's mother, possibly facing censure from the other women in her neighborhood and from her husband, reported the incident as a story to another newspaper. The scandal surrounding Stead's expose, including his own conviction, not to mention the media frenzy around Jack the Ripper, led to an attempt to reduce and regulate the population of prostitutes in Whitechapel. In a big police raid of brothels in Whitechapel, a number of members of Parliament and other officials of state were discovered with prostitutes, many of them young, both boys and girls. The Criminal Amendment Act, thus, addresses issues that Members of Parliament would have associated with prostitution: it raised the "age of consent" in girls from 13 to 16 (it had been raised to 13 from 12 in 1875). This act also introduced a number of regulations for brothels, especially their presence and management. And it made male homosexual behavior illegal, punishable by 2 years' hard labor. The Member of Parliament who introduced the bill, Henry LaBouchere, is remembered today for this last paragraph among the LGBTQ community, which calls the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act the "LaBouchere act." (On overview of this can be found in the Wikipedia article on the "Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885" ("Criminal")
As far as I can discover, there is no evidence that Victoria denied that women were capable of homosexual behavior, nor that she crossed out a rumored paragraph making women's homosexual activity illegal.
26 January 1885
[edit | edit source]General Gordon was killed by Mahdists in Khartoum after a 300-day siege and 2 days before the British relief expedition arrived. London found out 10 days later, on 5 February 1885.[1] (727 of 1203)
Parliament repealed the Contagious Diseases Acts in 1886.
In April 1886 Gladstone introduced a bill for Irish Home Rule in the House of Commons. The bill lost on 8 June 1886.[1] (744 of 1203)
On 8 June 1886 Gladstone's a bill for Irish Home Rule in the House of Commons lost, 341–311.[1] (744 of 1203)
Headlines
[edit | edit source]Victoria's Golden Jubilee
"Bloody Sunday": protest march on Trafalgar Square. Annie Besant was there, as was George Bernard Shaw, who "skedaddled."
William F. Cody's Buffalo Bill's Wild West performed at the American Exhibition.
March
[edit | edit source]Heavy snowstorm in London.
Headlines
[edit | edit source]February
[edit | edit source]The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was created.
August
[edit | edit source]Jack the Ripper's first victim was found.
October
[edit | edit source]31 October 1888, last day of the American Exhibition in London that featured Buffalo Bill's Wild West.
"Activist Emmeline Pankhurst formed the Women’s Franchise League in 1889 with her barrister husband Richard, with the aim of procuring the vote for women in local elections."[1] (699 of 1203)
Headlines
[edit | edit source]April
[edit | edit source]12 April 1889, Fabian Society Converzazione, attended by George Bernard Shaw, Amy Levy, and Elizabeth Pennell.
August
[edit | edit source]Lippincott editor took Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Irish MP Thomas Patrick Gill out to dinner, looking for something to publish. In Wilde's case, it was The Picture of Dorian Grey.
References
[edit | edit source]- "Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885." Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_Law_Amendment_Act_1885 (accessed August 2020).