Victorian

John Butt marks the birth of the great missionary, idealist and explorer of Africa, born at Blantyre, Lanarkshire, in March 1813.

Among military adventurers who have served in India, Mildred Archer writes, none was more dashing than the half-Indian leader of the famous Irregular Cavalry Corps known as Skinner’s Horse.

Boyd Alexander profiles a man whose whole life and fortune were spent in creating and living out a youthful dream. But William Beckford was not only a romantic visionary: he was also an inspired collector and an artistic pioneer.

Established partly in response to the long-feared French invasion and partly to quell unrest at home, the yeomanry were increasingly used by the authorities to intervene on the side of employers in disputes and riots. The ensuing armed clashes present the clearest example of class warfare in early 19th-century Britain, says Nick Mansfield.  

S. Gopal describes how, in the course of eight years, Dalhousie greatly extended the territories of the East India Company. Today his memory is respected by Indians not as one of the builders of the British Empire but as one of the architects of the Indian Republic.

On May 10th, 1857, while the bells of Meerut rang for divine service, the Sepoys of the Bengal Army rose in revolt against the rule of the British East India Company. That mutiny, Jon Manchip White writes, affords brilliant glimpses of a wilful generation.

Jon Manchip White describes how a garrison of 1,050 Europeans and 712 loyal Indians held the Residency at Lucknow against an army of 30,000 Sepoys.

Some of the fiercest fighting of the Indian Mutiny took place in and around the ancient capital of the Moguls, where the last Mogul sovereign exercised a shadowy power until 1857. This is the second of three articles by Jon Manchip White on the origins and development of the nineteenth-century Indian Revolt against British Rule.

Arnold Whitridge recounts the brief but dangerous nineteenth century Anglo-American naval crisis that almost led to war.

C. Howard introduces Mary Kingsley: the devoted daughter amd energetic middle-class housekeeper who had become a distinguished explorer by the age of thirty-five. More than any other publicist of the 1890’s, she helped to make Englishmen aware of their responsibilities on the African continent.