97 Fun Facts About Victorian Era

In which year did Queen Victoria come to the throne?

Victoria became queen on 20 June 1837, aged 18, and reigned until her death in January 1901.

Which era came immediately before the Victorian era?

The Georgian era, named for the four King Georges, ran from 1714 until Victoria's accession; the Edwardian era followed her reign.

After Albert died, Victoria withdrew to Balmoral and which seaside house the couple had built?

Osborne House, on the Isle of Wight, was planned by Albert with the builder Thomas Cubitt; Victoria's long absences there left the public impatient with a queen it rarely saw, and she died at Osborne in 1901.

Which disease was Prince Albert diagnosed with shortly before his death in December 1861?

Typhoid fever was the diagnosis when Albert died at Windsor Castle on 14 December 1861, aged 42; Victoria wore mourning black for the remaining forty years of her life.

Which was the only war Victorian Britain fought against another European great power?

The Crimean War (1853-56) set Britain and France against Russia; reports of the army's mismanagement so angered the public that Lord Aberdeen's government fell in 1855.

The Charge of the Light Brigade took place during which 1854 battle?

Balaclava saw the Light Brigade ride at the wrong guns after a muddled order on 25 October 1854; Tennyson's poem, published six weeks later, turned the blunder into legend.

William Howard Russell, often called the first modern war correspondent, reported in the 1850s for which newspaper?

The Times printed his dispatches on soldiers dying for want of supplies and care; the outcry sent Florence Nightingale's nurses east and helped bring down the government.

The 1856 treaty that ended Britain's war with Russia was signed in which city?

Paris hosted the peace congress that produced the treaty on 30 March 1856; it closed the Black Sea to all warships, a humiliation Russia repudiated in 1870.

The military hospital where Florence Nightingale made her name stood across the Bosporus from Constantinople at which place?

Scutari's Barrack Hospital, in today's Üsküdar, Istanbul, was where Nightingale arrived in November 1854 with 38 nurses and found that disease, not battle wounds, was killing most of the soldiers.

At which London hospital did Nightingale open her nursing school in 1860?

St Thomas' Hospital housed the Nightingale Training School from 9 July 1860, paid for by more than £40,000 that a grateful public had given to the Nightingale Fund.

Florence Nightingale made which kind of statistical chart famous in her campaign for army health reform?

Her polar area diagram, often called the rose diagram, showed that disease rather than wounds killed most of the army's dead, and it helped force sanitary reform.

Where was the Great Exhibition of 1851 held?

Hyde Park kept its trees: the glass hall, soon nicknamed the Crystal Palace, was redesigned with a high arched transept so that full-grown elms could stay standing inside it.

Who designed the Crystal Palace?

Joseph Paxton, a gardener by trade, drew on the greenhouses he had built for the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth.

The Great Exhibition's profits bought land for museums in which London district?

South Kensington was Prince Albert's choice: he wanted the profits spent on museums and colleges teaching art and science, to keep British industry competitive, and the quarter was nicknamed Albertopolis.

Which famous diamond drew crowds at the Great Exhibition of 1851 but disappointed them with its dull sparkle?

The Koh-i-Noor, the 'Mountain of Light', was surrendered to Britain after the 1849 annexation of the Punjab; after its poor reception Prince Albert had it recut in 1852, and it lost more than 40 per cent of its weight.

After 1851 the Crystal Palace was rebuilt near which South London hill?

The rebuilt palace opened at Sydenham Hill in 1854 and stood until fire destroyed it on 30 November 1936; the district took the name Crystal Palace.

Which engineer's plan moved London's sewage eastwards through new intercepting sewers?

Joseph Bazalgette hid the main low-level sewer inside new riverside walls, the Victoria and Chelsea Embankments, so the same works gave London a riverside road and room for an underground line.

What was the world's first adhesive postage stamp, issued in 1840?

The Penny Black lasted barely a year: its red cancellation ink could be cleaned off and the stamp used again, so in 1841 the stamp was printed in red and the postmark in black.

Who proposed the adhesive stamp as proof of prepaid postage?

Rowland Hill argued that one low rate paid in advance by the sender, whatever the distance, would be cheaper to run than charging recipients by the mile, and would get far more people writing.

In 1843 Henry Cole commissioned the first commercial example of which Christmas tradition?

The Christmas card began as Cole's time-saver for a pile of unanswered post; John Callcott Horsley drew a family raising a toast, and copies went on sale at a shilling each.

Which company opened the world's first underground railway?

The Metropolitan Railway opened on 10 January 1863 between Paddington and Farringdon, and it ran on steam: for four decades locomotives filled the tunnels with sulphurous smoke, until electric trains took over.

Brunel's original Great Western main line, built on a seven-foot broad gauge, linked London with which city?

Bristol was reached in 1841; Brunel's broad gauge gave fast, steady running but lost the 'battle of the gauges' to the narrower standard track, and the last of it was converted in 1892.

Which bridge designed by Brunel was finished only after his death?

The Clifton Suspension Bridge stalled for decades after riots and then money troubles stopped work; fellow engineers finished it in 1864 as a memorial to Brunel, who had drawn it up in his twenties.

Which Brunel steamship laid the first lasting transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866?

SS Great Eastern lost money as a passenger liner and was sold off as a cable ship; in that second career she laid the first lasting Atlantic telegraph line in 1866, seven years after Brunel's death.

Which pair patented Britain's first electric telegraph in 1837?

Cooke and Wheatstone's needle telegraph made headlines in 1845, when a message wired ahead from Slough to Paddington led police to the murder suspect John Tawell.

Which everyday word did Cambridge scholar William Whewell coin in the 1830s, modelled on 'artist'?

Scientist was Whewell's answer after the poet Coleridge objected to researchers calling themselves 'philosophers'; the word was resisted for decades, and many went on saying 'man of science'.

In which year was Darwin's On the Origin of Species published?

On the Origin of Species appeared on 24 November 1859; Alfred Russel Wallace's 1858 essay describing the same idea had forced Darwin to rush it into print.

Where was Charles Darwin buried?

Westminster Abbey took him at the Royal Society president's request: an agnostic, Darwin was buried there on 26 April 1882 beside John Herschel and a few feet from Isaac Newton.

Dickens left school at 12 to work in what kind of factory?

A boot-blacking works, Warren's, took the 12-year-old while his father was in the Marshalsea debtors' prison; he told almost no one for years, but the misery resurfaced in David Copperfield.

Which Dickens serial of 1836 became his first publishing phenomenon?

The Pickwick Papers sold poorly until the Cockney servant Sam Weller walked in at chapter 10; his sayings turned the serial into a craze, complete with pirated copies and Weller joke books.

Dickens survived what kind of accident in 1865?

A rail crash at Staplehurst in Kent sent carriages off a bridge under repair; Dickens tended the injured with brandy and a hatful of water, then climbed back in for the manuscript of Our Mutual Friend.

Which future prime minister founded the Metropolitan Police in 1829 as Home Secretary?

Robert Peel set up the Metropolitan Police in 1829 as Home Secretary, and its officers have carried his name ever since, as 'bobbies' and 'peelers'.

The repeal of which legislation in 1846 split the Conservative Party and brought down its prime minister?

The Corn Laws, tariffs that kept grain dear, went as famine struck Ireland; the prime minister won the vote 327 to 229 only with opposition support, most of his own party voting against him, and resigned within weeks.

Roughly how many people died in Ireland's Great Famine?

About one million people died and at least a million more emigrated, so that Ireland's population fell by about a fifth in a decade.

Ireland's 1840s potato blight was caused by what kind of organism?

A water mould, Phytophthora infestans, did the damage; long classed as a fungus, it is in fact a closer relative of brown algae, and it reached Ireland from North America in 1845.

The 1834 Poor Law made which institution the main relief for the able-bodied poor?

The workhouse was made deliberately harsher than the poorest life outside, so that only the truly desperate would ask for help; Dickens attacked the system in Oliver Twist.

Which Victorian prime minister was born into a Jewish family?

Benjamin Disraeli was baptised an Anglican as a boy after his father quarrelled with their synagogue; without that he could not have sat in Parliament, which kept out practising Jews until 1858.

Which statesman served as prime minister on four separate occasions between 1868 and 1894?

William Gladstone formed four Liberal governments; admirers called him the Grand Old Man, and after General Gordon's death at Khartoum his critics flipped GOM into MOG, 'Murderer of Gordon'.

Which working-class movement of the 1830s and 1840s demanded votes for all men in three giant petitions to Parliament?

The Chartists saw Parliament throw out their petitions, one with over three million signatures, yet five of the six demands in their People's Charter, from the secret ballot to paid MPs, later became law.

Forster's Education Act of 1870 created which elected local bodies to fill the gaps left by church classrooms?

School boards were elected by local ratepayers, and unusually for the time women could stand for them: Elizabeth Garrett Anderson topped the poll for London's first board in 1870.

In which East End district did Jack the Ripper kill in 1888?

Whitechapel gave its name to eleven murders in the police file between 1888 and 1891; five are usually pinned on the Ripper, who was never identified or arrested.

The name 'Jack the Ripper' first appeared as the signature on which letter, sent to a London news agency?

The 'Dear Boss' letter reached the Central News Agency on 27 September 1888 signed 'Jack the Ripper'; police later believed a journalist had written it as a hoax, but the name stuck.

Oscar Wilde was convicted in 1895 of which offence?

Wilde was convicted of gross indecency under the 1885 Labouchere Amendment after his own libel suit against the Marquess of Queensberry collapsed and the evidence was turned against him.

Lewis Carroll was the pen name of which Oxford mathematician?

Charles Dodgson taught mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford; on a rowing trip on 4 July 1862 he made up Alice's adventures for the Dean's daughter Alice Liddell, who asked him to write them down.

Victoria's Diamond Jubilee service of 1897 was held outside which church?

St Paul's Cathedral staged the thanksgiving in the open air because the frail 78-year-old Queen could not manage its steps, so she stayed in her carriage while the clergy came out to her.

Which Victorian industrial city was nicknamed 'Cottonopolis'?

Manchester was 'Cottonopolis' as much for trading as for spinning: as its own mills declined, the cloth was made in a ring of towns such as Oldham and Bolton and sold through the city's warehouses and exchange.

Which campaigner went to South Africa in 1900 to investigate Britain's concentration camps?

Emily Hobhouse published what she saw, hunger and disease killing children by the thousand; the storm at home made the government send Millicent Fawcett's commission, and conditions in the camps improved.

Queen Victoria made which colour the fashion for bridal gowns at her 1840 marriage to Prince Albert?

White was a break with custom: royal brides before Victoria usually wore heavy brocaded gowns stitched with silver thread, and red was a popular choice elsewhere.

An 1848 engraving of the royal family at Windsor Castle made which festive decoration fashionable across Britain?

The Christmas tree was pictured with the royal family in The Illustrated London News that year, and the engraving was copied in America's Godey's Lady's Book two years later.

Which Victorian novelist, working as a Post Office surveyor, introduced the pillar box to Britain in the 1850s?

Anthony Trollope proposed roadside letter boxes for the Channel Islands, where mail boats sailed at irregular times, and the first four went up on Jersey in 1852.

Queen Victoria made which new anaesthetic respectable by using it at the birth of her son Leopold in 1853?

Chloroform so impressed the queen that she used it again for her last child, Beatrice, despite clergy who thought easing the pain of childbirth went against the Bible.

A mock obituary for English cricket gave the Ashes their name after an 1882 defeat at The Oval by which country?

Australia had just won a Test on English soil for the first time, and The Sporting Times joked that English cricket's body would be cremated and the ashes taken there.

Which Belfast vet devised the first practical pneumatic tyre in the 1880s to smooth his young son's tricycle ride?

John Dunlop made little from his idea: he sold his rights to the tyre business for a small cash sum and a small shareholding.

Queen Victoria was the first monarch to live in which London residence, moving in soon after becoming queen?

Buckingham Palace made a chilly first home: its chimneys were said to smoke so much that the fires had to be left to die down.

The first Wimbledon tennis championship in 1877 was staged by a club founded for which other lawn game?

Croquet was the club's only game when it was founded in 1868 at the height of a craze; lawn tennis arrived in 1875, when a single lawn was set aside for it.

Which travel pioneer ran his first railway excursion in 1841, taking Leicester temperance campaigners to Loughborough?

Thomas Cook had the idea while walking 15 miles to a temperance meeting, hoping that the new power of the railways could be put to work against drink.

Queen Victoria passed which inherited blood disorder to the royal houses of Spain and Russia through her daughters?

Haemophilia reached Russia through her granddaughter Alexandra, who married Tsar Nicholas II and passed the disease to their son and heir, Alexei.

Chemist William Perkin, aged 18, stumbled on which first synthetic dye colour while trying to make quinine?

Mauve made Perkin's fortune: he patented the dye while still a teenager and set up a factory to produce it from coal tar, a waste product of making gas.

Which London theatre built for Gilbert and Sullivan was the first public building lit entirely by electricity?

The Savoy opened in 1881 with about 1,200 incandescent lamps run from a generator on open land nearby, and its owner later built a luxury hotel beside it.

Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson first appeared in which 1887 novel by Arthur Conan Doyle?

A Study in Scarlet was also the first work of detective fiction to use the magnifying glass as an investigative tool.

Which Irish author of Dracula spent years as business manager of Henry Irving's Lyceum Theatre in London?

Bram Stoker won the actor's friendship with a glowing newspaper review of his Hamlet in Dublin; Irving asked him to dinner, and the job followed.

Robert Louis Stevenson drafted which 1886 story within days after its key scenes came to him in a dream?

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde began as a nightmare: his wife Fanny woke him at the first transformation scene, and he complained that she had cut short a fine bogey tale.

Which author of Middlemarch was really Mary Ann Evans, writing under a man's name?

George Eliot scandalised society in private life too, living for more than twenty years with the married critic George Henry Lewes and calling him her husband.

The Brontë sisters first published as Currer, Ellis and Acton, sharing which invented surname?

Bell may have been borrowed from a local clergyman, Arthur Bell Nicholls, and each unusual first name kept its owner's real initial.

Which former draper's apprentice wrote The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds in the 1890s?

H. G. Wells worked thirteen-hour days and slept in a dormitory at a Southsea drapery, misery he later turned into novels such as Kipps.

Which Bombay-born author of The Jungle Book became the first English-language winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature?

Rudyard Kipling won in 1907 aged just 41, younger than any literature laureate before him.

Which Charles Dickens ghost story, published in December 1843, sold out its first edition in under a week?

A Christmas Carol went on sale on 19 December and was gone by Christmas Eve; thirteen editions had been released by the end of the following year.

Thomas Hardy set Tess of the d'Urbervilles and his other major novels in which fictional English region?

Wessex took its name from the Anglo-Saxon kingdom that once covered the same corner of England, and Hardy gave many of its real towns invented names.

Which poet was Poet Laureate for most of Queen Victoria's reign, after succeeding William Wordsworth in 1850?

Alfred Tennyson was offered the post only after the elderly Samuel Rogers refused it; Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Leigh Hunt had been considered too.

Which Glasgow surgeon pioneered antiseptic surgery in 1865 by dressing a boy's broken leg with carbolic acid?

Joseph Lister first succeeded with an 11-year-old whose leg had been crushed by a cart wheel, and the mouthwash Listerine was later named in his honour.

Which physician traced a deadly 1854 cholera outbreak in Soho to a public water pump on Broad Street?

John Snow blamed tainted water at a time when most doctors blamed foul air, and persuaded the parish authorities to take the handle off the pump.

Which mathematician, the only legitimate child of Lord Byron, is often called the first computer programmer?

Ada Lovelace translated a paper on a proposed mechanical computer and added notes three times its length, including a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers.

Which naturalist's paper from the Malay Archipelago pushed Charles Darwin to publish on natural selection?

Alfred Russel Wallace had reached the same idea independently, so Darwin set aside the big species book he was drafting and quickly wrote a shorter abstract.

Which Victorian anatomist coined the word dinosaur and later drove the creation of London's Natural History Museum?

Richard Owen built the name from Greek words meaning terrible lizard, then campaigned to move the British Museum's natural history collections into a home of their own.

Which English inventor announced the calotype in 1841, a photographic process built on paper negatives?

Henry Fox Talbot went on to publish The Pencil of Nature, a book illustrated with original prints made from his own negatives.

Which English chemist demonstrated a working incandescent lamp in Newcastle in 1879 and lit his own house with them?

Joseph Swan's house in Gateshead was the world's first to have working light bulbs installed, and his British lamp company later joined Thomas Edison's as Ediswan.

An 1884 conference in Washington fixed zero degrees longitude on a line through which London district?

Greenwich was chosen by 22 to 1 with two abstentions, and the line was drawn through the centre of the transit instrument at its observatory.

Which two-wheeled horse-drawn cab, named after the architect who patented it, served as the taxi of Victorian London?

The hansom carried two passengers behind a single horse, while the driver sat on a high seat at the back and took instructions through a hatch in the roof.

Which Scottish estate did Prince Albert buy in 1852 as a private Highland retreat for Queen Victoria's family?

Balmoral as it stands is not the house they bought: the original soon proved too small, and a new castle was commissioned to designs that Albert himself amended.

Queen Victoria died in 1901 at which Isle of Wight home, designed by Prince Albert as an Italian-style palazzo?

Osborne House had a private beach below its gardens, where the queen kept an ornate bathing machine with curtains to hide her until she was in the water.

Which Thames crossing, completed in 1894, has a central pair of bascules that lift to let ships through?

Tower Bridge was agreed only after more than fifty earlier designs had failed to win support, and its lifting arms ran on hydraulic power from the start.

Which Lancashire seaside resort opened a 518-foot landmark in 1894 inspired by the Eiffel Tower?

Blackpool got its tower after a company bought an aquarium on the Central Promenade, intending to build a replica of the French landmark on the site.

Which Scottish railway crossing collapsed in a storm in December 1879 as a train passed over, killing all aboard?

The Tay Bridge had been designed with no explicit allowance for wind loading, and its engineer Thomas Bouch saw his plans for a second great crossing dropped.

Which Quaker chocolate-making family founded the model village of Bournville near Birmingham for its factory workers?

Cadbury's village forbade the sale of alcohol, and George Cadbury planned its homes at his own expense to relieve the evils of cramped living conditions.

William and Catherine Booth founded which uniformed Christian movement as an East End mission in London in 1865?

The Salvation Army took its military name and structure in 1878, when William Booth reorganised the mission and became its first general.

Which Dublin-born philanthropist opened a home for orphaned boys at Stepney Causeway in London in 1870?

Thomas Barnardo styled himself a doctor although he never finished his studies at the London Hospital, and only later secured a medical licence.

Which writer's Book of Household Management sold 60,000 copies in its first year, before her death at just 28?

Isabella Beeton was not a regular cook: she and her husband Samuel gathered the recipes from other books and from readers of his magazine.

China ceded which island to Britain as a colony in 1842 under the treaty that ended the First Opium War?

Hong Kong was written into an old draft treaty by the British envoy, who struck the letter s from the word islands and added the name after it.

At which mission station did just over 150 British and colonial troops hold off thousands of Zulu warriors in 1879?

Rorke's Drift was attacked hours after the British defeat at Isandlwana, six miles away, by warriors who had broken off from the main Zulu force.

Which Welsh-born journalist found the missing explorer David Livingstone at Ujiji, near Lake Tanganyika, in 1871?

Henry Morton Stanley was born John Rowlands and spent part of his childhood in a Welsh workhouse; he later told the story in a book called How I Found Livingstone.

William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti founded which circle of English painters in 1848?

The Pre-Raphaelites took their name from rejecting what they saw as the mechanistic approach of the artists who came after Raphael and Michelangelo.

Which British general, nicknamed Chinese for his earlier campaigns, was killed when Mahdist forces took Khartoum?

Charles Gordon had been sent to evacuate the city but stayed to defend it, and the government sent a relief force only when public pressure became irresistible.

Queen Victoria gave her Indian attendant Abdul Karim which title, a word meaning clerk or teacher?

Munshi Karim grew so close to the queen that after her death the new king sent him back to India and ordered their correspondence destroyed.

Queen Victoria was baptised with which first name, chosen to honour her godfather the Russian tsar?

Alexandrina appeared on official documents on the first day of her reign, but she had the name withdrawn and it was never used again.

Which London amateur club, made up mainly of former public schoolboys, won the first FA Cup final in 1872?

Wanderers won only one game on the way to the final, helped by opponents withdrawing and a rule that let both clubs go through after a draw.

Which architect won the 97-entry competition to rebuild the Houses of Parliament after fire destroyed the old palace?

Charles Barry had help with his winning drawings from Augustus Pugin, a young designer he had met while building a school in Birmingham.

Prince Albert brought which German dynastic name to the British royal family, used until it was dropped in 1917?

Saxe-Coburg and Gotha gave way to Windsor, a name taken from the Berkshire castle, when George V bowed to anti-German feeling during the First World War.