Victorian

The Great Exhibition of 1851 was not only a celebration of Victorian Britain’s scientific and economic pre-eminence but also a hymn to the religion that underpinned it, argues Geoffrey Cantor.

During his brief life, the Polish master of the musical miniature became a living symbol of his troubled nation. Adam Zamoyski looks at the reception given to Chopin by a divided public when he visited Britain in 1848, a year of revolution through Europe.

In the second of our occasional series exploring the ways in which topical historical subjects are being tackled in a variety of media, Rohan McWilliam examines a time in Britain’s history that seems to repay frequent revisiting more than a century after it ended.

‘Garotting’, or the strangulation of a victim in the course of a robbery, haunted the British public in the 1850s. Emelyne Godfrey describes the measures taken to prevent it and the range of gruesome self-defence devices that were often of greater danger to the wearer than to the assailant.

Roland Quinault looks at how the Victorians saw the old English system of trial by jury as a defining feature of British good government and fair play and as an example to other nations. Admiration for the system at home and abroad, though, contrasted with the practical realities faced by 19th-century juries.

Richard Willis charts how order was brought to the medical profession by the foundation of the General Medical Council 150 years ago.

Criminal poisoning at once fascinated and terrified Victorian society. Here Ian Burney shows how the extraordinary case of a doctor, hanged in 1856 for allegedly poisoning an acquaintance, threw up deep-rooted anxieties about poison, detection, and professionalism in Victorian society.

Between autumn 1855 and spring 1856, the attitude of Britain’s war leaders underwent bewildering change as their determination to bring the war with Russia to a desirable conclusion was buffeted by doubts about the commitment of the French, and fears about the motives of French policy, as Brian James reveals.

Walter Harris introduces the retired soldier who brought sound recording to Britain.

Mark Juddery introduces The Story of the Kelly Gang, possibly the first-ever feature film, now largely lost, that was made a hundred years ago in Australia about the notorious outlaw with the unusual body-armour. Hugely popular when it was first released in 1906, it spawned a genre of bushranger movies and epitomized the significance of the Kelly legend in Australian cultural identity.