1858 in History

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary Ashton
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Medical Profession ◽  
Benjamin Disraeli ◽  
Cultural Events ◽  
Marriage And Divorce ◽  
National Importance ◽  
Summer Heat

This chapter details events that occurred in London in the in the summer of 1858. For Charles Darwin, the hot summer of 1858 was the time of crisis, as it was, for different reasons, for his close contemporaries Charles Dickens and Benjamin Disraeli. Other Victorians of lasting fame, and some whose notoriety did not outlast the stifling summer heat, found themselves intricately involved in political, social, or cultural events of national importance during the short four-month period from May to August 1858. Several far-reaching acts of parliament were debated and passed: on the governance of India, Jewish representation in parliament, the medical profession, marriage and divorce, and — most visibly and nauseatingly — the ‘Great Stink’ for which 1858 is best known.

Prologue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary Ashton
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Benjamin Disraeli ◽  
Origin Of Species ◽  
Aged Forty

This prologue describes events that occurred in the lives of Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, and Benjamin Disraeli in the summer of 1858. The publication in November 1859 of Darwin's groundbreaking Origin of Species, had its catalyst in June 1858. That was when Darwin, fearing that he might lose precedence by continuing to delay publication of his painstaking researches, was galvanised into writing up his findings quickly and having them published in one readable volume. For Dickens, the summer of 1858 was one of horror. Aged forty-six and already the famous author of several successful novels, he lost his head and publicly advertised his separation from Catherine, his wife of twenty-two years, while disclaiming rumours of a relationship with either his sister-in-law or an actress aged nineteen. He acted impulsively and brutally, losing friends, dismissing his publishers, causing anguish to his wife and children. As for Disraeli, he became chancellor of the Exchequer in Lord Derby's reforming Tory government.

One Hot Summer

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary Ashton
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Turning Points ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Benjamin Disraeli ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Thames River ◽  
Social Level

While 1858 in London may have been noteworthy for its broiling summer months and the related stench of the sewage-filled Thames River, the year is otherwise little remembered. And yet, this book reveals in this microhistory, 1858 was marked by significant, if unrecognized, turning points. For ordinary people, and also for the rich, famous, and powerful, the months from May to August turned out to be a summer of consequence. The book uncovers historically crucial moments in the lives of three protagonists — Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, and Benjamin Disraeli. It also introduces others who gained renown in the headlines of the day, among them George Eliot, Karl Marx, William Thackeray, and Edward Bulwer Lytton. The book reveals invisible threads of connection among Londoners at every social level in 1858, bringing the celebrated city and its citizens vibrantly to life.

Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century

2009 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Science And Literature ◽  
Creative Writers ◽  
Humphry Davy ◽  
The Individual ◽  
John Tyndall ◽  
Michael Faraday

‘It has been said by its opponents that science divorces itself from literature; but the statement, like so many others, arises from lack of knowledge.’ John Tyndall, 1874 Although we are used to thinking of science and the humanities as separate disciplines, in the nineteenth century that division was not recognized. As the scientist John Tyndall pointed out, not only were science and literature both striving to better 'man's estate', they shared a common language and cultural heritage. The same subjects occupied the writing of scientists and novelists: the quest for 'origins', the nature of the relation between society and the individual, and what it meant to be human. This anthology brings together a generous selection of scientific and literary material to explore the exchanges and interactions between them. Fed by a common imagination, scientists and creative writers alike used stories, imagery, style, and structure to convey their meaning, and to produce work of enduring power. The anthology includes writing by Charles Babbage, Charles Darwin, Sir Humphry Davy, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Michael Faraday, Thomas Malthus, Louis Pasteur, Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, Mark Twain and many others, and introductions and notes guide the reader through the topic's many strands. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

THE SQUAB AND THE IDLER: A COSMOPOLITAN – COLONIAL DIALOGUE IN THE CALCUTTA STAR BETWEEN WILLIAM THACKERAY AND JAMES HUME

2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 387-406
Author(s):  
Gary Simons
Keyword(s):  
Mortality Rate ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
High Mortality ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
English Language ◽  
Small Body ◽  
William Makepeace Thackeray ◽  
Benjamin Disraeli ◽  
Leigh Hunt ◽  
Henry Mayhew

The first English language newspaper in India began publication in 1780; by 1857, almost two hundred papers and periodicals had appeared – and many had quickly disappeared. An 1839 article in the Calcutta Literary Gazette partially attributed this high mortality rate to a lack of talented writers and to a desire among colonists for news from England: There is not here as there is in London, a class of professional literati, always ready to prepare a certain supply of matter. . . . [T]he London paying system has been introduced, but the writer whose contributions are worth paying for, are a very small body. . . . To all the drawbacks already mentioned we must mention another of no trifling influence; we allude to the disposition in our countrymen to look homewards for their literature. (Chanda xviii-xxi) Indeed, English newspapers of the time featured the contributions of literati such as Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, George Eliot, Leigh Hunt, Douglas Jerrold, Henry Mayhew, and William Makepeace Thackeray, but of these figures only Thackeray wrote purposely for an Indian periodical.

scholarly journals Orientalism in the Victorian Era

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valerie Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Benjamin Disraeli ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Mary Kingsley ◽  
Antoine Galland ◽  
East End

Orientalism in the Victorian era has origins in three aspects of 18th-century European and British culture: first, the fascination with The Arabian Nights (translated into French by Antoine Galland in 1704), which was one of the first works to have purveyed to Western Europe the image of the Orient as a place of wonders, wealth, mystery, intrigue, romance, and danger; second, the Romantic visions of the Orient as represented in the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, George Gordon, Lord Byron, and other Romantics as well as in Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh; and third, the domestication of opium addiction in Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater. Victorian Orientalism was all pervasive: it is prominent in fiction by William Thackeray, the Brontë sisters, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Joseph Conrad, and Rudyard Kipling, but is also to be found in works by Benjamin Disraeli, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, and Robert Louis Stevenson, among others. In poetry Edward Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat is a key text, but many works by Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning also show the influence of Orientalist tropes and ideas. In theater it is one of the constant strands of much popular drama and other forms of popular entertainment like panoramas and pageants, while travel writing from Charles Kingsley to Richard Burton, James Anthony Froude, and Mary Kingsley shows a wide variety of types of Orientalist figures and concepts, as do many works of both popular and children’s literature. Underlying and uniting all these diverse manifestations of Victorian Orientalism is the imperialist philosophy articulated by writers as different as Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx, supported by writings of anthropologists and race theorists such as James Cowles Pritchard and Robert Knox. Toward the end of the Victorian era, the image of the opium addict and the Chinese opium den in the East End of London or in the Orient itself becomes a prominent trope in fiction by Dickens, Wilde, and Kipling, and can be seen to lead to the proliferation of Oriental villains in popular fiction of the early 20th century by such writers as M. P. Shiel, Guy Boothby, and Sax Rohmer, whose Dr. Fu Manchu becomes the archetypal version of such figures.

Money, Marriage, and Madness

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim E. Nielsen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Medical Profession ◽  
Marital Violence ◽  
Professional Status ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Marriage And Divorce ◽  
Legal Context ◽  
Historical Methods ◽  
The Impact

Money, Marriage, and Madness is a story of the medical profession, a woman’s wealth and the gendered property laws in which she operated, marital violence, marriage and divorce, institutional incarceration, and an alleged bank robbery. Dr. Anna B. Miesse Ott lived in a legal context governing money, marriage, and madness that nearly all nineteenth-century women shared. She benefited from wealth, professional status as a physician, and whiteness, but they did not protect her from the vulnerabilities generated by sexism and ableism. After an 1856 marriage and divorce, Ott served for nearly twenty years as a physician in Madison, Wisconsin and garnered additional wealth. In 1873, her husband and local physicians testified to her insanity, as well as her legal incompetency, and Ott entered the gates of the Wisconsin State Hospital for the Insane where she remained until her 1893 death. Her decades of institutionalization reveal daily life in a late nineteenth-century asylum and the permeability of its walls. Tracing the stories told of her after her death enables analyses of the impact of the diagnosis of mania and institutionalization on our memory of her. In addition, this book explores historical methods, ethics, and dilemmas confronted when historical sources are limited and come not from the subject but from those with greater power.

The Diagnosis of Viral Disease by Electron Microscopy

1982 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 270-273
Author(s):  
William B. McCombs ◽  
Cameron E. McCoy
Keyword(s):  
Electron Microscopy ◽  
Hospital Stay ◽  
Viral Infections ◽  
Medical Profession ◽  
Bacterial Pathogens ◽  
Viral Disease ◽  
Viral Pathogens ◽  
Academic Interest ◽  
The Past

Recent years have brought a reversal in the attitude of the medical profession toward the diagnosis of viral infections. Identification of bacterial pathogens was formerly thought to be faster than identification of viral pathogens. Viral identification was dismissed as being of academic interest or for confirming the presence of an epidemic, because the patient would recover or die before this could be accomplished. In the past 10 years, the goal of virologists has been to present the clinician with a viral identification in a matter of hours. This fast diagnosis has the potential for shortening the patient's hospital stay and preventing the administering of toxic and/or expensive antibiotics of no benefit to the patient.

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