Victorian

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.

Edna Bradlow writes that while Paul Kruger felt he had an obligation to protect his country's moral right on behalf of the Transvaal Republic, Chamberlain, speaking for his own countrymen, declared that the issue involved both “our supremacy in South Africa and our existence as a great power”.

Just over a hundred years ago, writes William Watson, an unprovoked attack on a party of inoffensive Westerners was followed by violent reprisals.

Robert E. Zegger reflects on the the philhellenic crusade to free Greece in the 1820s.

The Education Act of 1870 was a landmark in Liberal policy, writes Paul Adelman, but it failed to satisfy the Nonconformist conscience of many Liberal supporters.

Admired by Lord Melbourne; and, later, the author of two popular novels, Emily Eden was one of the liveliest of correspondents. By Prudence Hannay.