Victorian

The Italian patriot’s visit to England was extraordinarily successful. But Queen Victoria deplored the scenes it provoked; and Karl Marx described them as “a miserable spectacle of imbecility”.

Architect and landscape-gardener to the sixth Duke of Devonshire, Paxton reached his highest fame in 1851 with the creation of the Crystal Palace, writes Tudor Edwards.

The unexpected fall of Gladstone's government in June 1885 was a cause of acute embarrassment to the parliamentary Opposition, whose victory caught them unprepared.

Joseph Chamberlain entered public life as a self-made man and a Republican Radical: he left it as the leader and idol of Protectionist Toryism. Such are the transformations of the English political scene, writes Robert Rhodes James.

In 1845, writes George Woodcock, a veteran of the Arctic Seas perished with his crews in the Canadian North.

The traditional version of the scramble for empire in Africa during the late nineteenth century is here challenged and critically re-appraised by Eric Stokes.

Amid the disasters of the First Afghan War, the courage and buoyancy of Lady Sale stands out — James Lunt describes her as the shining epitome of “a soldier's wife."

The concluding article in Steven Watson’s studies of Britain’s Lord Chancellors.

T.H. Corfe analyses a double assassination in Dublin that long left its scar on Anglo-Irish relations.

Stephen Usherwood describes the Oxford Movement, the revival of the Catholic faith in England, and the hostility that both aroused.