Sir Alexander Malet and Prince Otto von Bismarck: an Almost Forgotten Anglo‐German Friendship

This article concentrates on Prince von Bismarck's relationship with England, with particular reference to his friendship with the British diplomat Sir Alexander Malet in the eighteen‐fifties, when Bismarck was Prussian representative to the German confederation at Frankfurt. Bismarck's love–hate relationship with England has been frequently described. He complained repeatedly about British Liberalism, the Reform Bill of 1832 and the parliamentary system. Thus, it is rather surprising that one of his closest and most intimate friends in this decade was Malet, a fact which is overlooked by most of Bismarck's biographers.

Ireland and the First International

Ireland in the eighteen-fifties was quiescent through exhaustion. The great famine of the eighteen-forties had resulted in heavy population losses through death and emigration and demoralized tenant farmers had offered but a feeble resistance to wholesale evictions. The failure of the Irish Confederate risings of 1848-49, the collapse of tenant-right agitation and the disintegration of the Independent Irish Party at Westminster, had left the country sunk in political apathy. The trade union movement did not escape the general paralysis and the Regular Trades Association, a central organization that had developed in Dublin during the eighteen-forties, disappeared. Not until 1859 was there renewed trade union activity in the form of a campaign to abolish night-baking; though it had only limited success, it helped to bring about the appearance in 1863 of a new grouping of Dublin trade unions, the United Trades Association. It was, however, not a trade union organization but the Irish Republican Brotherhood that aroused the country from political torpor.The I.R.B., known in North America as the Fenian Brotherhood, was a secret oath-bound society pledged to establish an independent Irish republic. Its first leader was James Stephens, who had founded it in 1858 after his return from an exile following the 1848 rising. Its membership was drawn from the rural and urban working class – the sons of small farmers, mechanics, artisans, laborers and petty shopkeepers. In 1861 Stephens skillfully stage-managed the funeral of Terence Bellew McManus, a Confederate exile whose body was brought back for burial in Ireland, and thus aroused an unprecedented interest in “The Organization,” as its members called it.

Ruskin's Reputation in the Eighteen-Fifties : The Evidence of the Three Principal Weeklies

Mr. R. H. Wilenski protests against the common belief that Ruskin was a kind of Art-Dictator of England in the eighteen-fifties. Ruskin, he says, was not a best-selling author during that decade; nor, on the other hand, was he respected by established artists and architects. So slight was his repute, indeed, that his letters to the Times in May 1851 can have done little to influence either the general or the specialist public in favor of pre-Raphaelitism. This drastic revision of accepted notions has had surprisingly little effect. In Mr. Paul Bloomfield's William Morris, Ruskin appears once more as the critic who gave “status” to the Pre-Raphaelites; and Mr. William Gaunt declares that on May 13, 1851, “an eagle scream was heard, a mighty talon hovered over the correspondence columns of The Times. It was Ruskin to the rescue. The Pre-Raphaelites had found a champion.” Neither of these writers mentions Wilenski's dissent.