Victorian

For twenty-five years, King Mindon preserved a peaceful and progressive atmosphere in nineteenth-century Burma.

J.D. Scott describes how a London banker, of Danish origin, played a large part in financing the unification of Italy.

Georgina Battiscombe introduces the Dean of Windsor; the wisest of Queen Victoria’s private counsellors and a relation of the Duke of Wellington.

‘If this Empire seems an evil thing to me, it is not because I hate the British...’ B.G. Gokhale on Gandhi’s attitudes to empire upon the centenary of his birth.

Donald Read describes how, during the 1830s and 1840s an Irishman, claiming royal descent, became the hero of British working men in the Chartist campaign for universal suffrage and equal Parliamentary representation.

Raymond A. Mohl describs how the nineteenth century history of Anglo-Russian conflict in Central Asia is marked by gradual Russian advances and gradual British retreats.

From 1775 onwards, writes Mildred Archer, a succession of British officials delighted in the centre of Hindu religion and learning upon the banks of the Ganges.

In his youth hailed by Carlyle as a “new Mystic,” later acclaimed by his contemporaries as the “saint of rationalism,” John Stuart Mill was an extraordinarily versatile writer. Maurice Cranston profiles a man of very wide interests, who became the personification of Victorian liberal democracy and “the agnostic’s equivalent of a godfather” to the infant Bertrand Russell.

At the age of twenty-one, in 1826, Disraeli published his first novel, Vivian Grey. Robert Blake describes the long career that lay before him, in which romantic politics and political romances were brilliantly blended.

Asa Briggs reflects on two Victorian radicalists who employed controversial new means to secure power, drawing both fervent disciples and bitter enemies, before their eventual defeat as part of a reaction against the ideas and methods of the 1840’s.