Chronology

Full chronology version

1850

Levi Strauss invents blue jeans

1850

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter; William Wordsworth publishes his final version of The Prelude

1850

Elizabeth Barrett Browning publishes a further volume of Poems, including the Sonnets from the Portuguese. Robert Browning publishes Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day

1850

Wilkie Collins' first novel, Antonina; or, The Fall of Rome

1850

Charles Dickens founds his own magazine, Household Words which runs until 1859

1850

George Eliot moves to London with the intent of becoming a writer. She is assistant editor at John Chapman's Westminster Review

1850

Thomas Hardy is sent to a private school in nearby Dorchester

1850

Dante Gabriel Rossetti meets Elizabeth Siddal, a milliner's assistant, who becomes an important model for many of his artworks. The periodical The Germ (later renamed Art and Poetry), is established by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

1850

John Ruskin publishes his Collected Poems

1850

In Memoriam, Alfred Tennyson's elegy for Hallam, is published. He is appointed Poet Laureate and marries Emily Sellwood

1851

First telegraph cable laid under English Channel

The Crystal Palace from the northeast, by Dickinson Brothers - Dickinsons' comprehensive pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851

1851

The Great Exhibition, or Crystal Palace, opens in South London, celebrating the latest industrial technology and design; Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor

1851

Death of Mary Shelley; Hermann Melville, Moby Dick; Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford

1851

Matthew Arnold marries Frances Lucy Wightman, with whom he will have six children. He takes a job as an inspector of schools, a position which he will hold for thirty-five years

1851

Charlotte Brontë meets Elizabeth Gaskell, her future biographer, and Thackeray, to whom she had dedicated Jane Eyre. She rejects another marriage proposal, this time from James Taylor

1851

Elizabeth Barrett Browning publishes Casa Guidi Windows

1851

Wilkie Collins is introduced to Charles Dickens, the start of a lifelong friendship

1851

The first volume of John Ruskin's The Stones of Venice is published, containing his most famous essay 'The Nature of Gothic'. Ruskin meets with members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and champions their art, which is heavily influenced by his writings

1851

William Thackeray's relationship with Jane Brookfield ends. Gives a series of lectures on 'the English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century' (published 1853)

1852

Louis Napoleon proclaims the Second French Empire

1852

Matthew Arnold publishes his second volume of verse, Empedocles on Etna, and Other Poems

1852

Charles Dickens, Bleak House

1852

Alfred Tennyson's son Hallam is born

1852

William Thackeray begins his first lecture tour of the United States. Publishes his historical novel Henry Esmond

1853

Start of the Crimean War between Russia and Britain

1853

Giuseppe Verdi, La Traviata

1853

Elizabeth Gaskell, Ruth

1853

Matthew Arnold, Poems

1853

Charlotte Brontë's Villette

1853

Wilkie Collins tours Italy with Augustus Egg and Charles Dickens

1853

Charles Dickens tours Italy with Augustus Egg and Wilkie Collins

1853

George Eliot co-habits with the married George Henry Lewes

Title page of The Newcomes

1853

William Thackeray, The Newcomes

Florence Nightingale

1854

Florence Nightingale works in army hospitals during the Crimean War

1854

Henry David Thoreau, Walden ; birth of Oscar Wilde

1854

Charlotte Brontë marries her father's curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, at Haworth church. The couple live with Patrick Brontë at the parsonage

1854

Charles Dickens' Hard Times begins weekly serialisation in Household Words

1854

George Eliot publishes a translation of Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity, her only book to bear her real name, Marian Evans

1854

John Ruskin's marriage to Euphemia Gray is annulled on the grounds of non-consummation. Ruskin begins lecturing on art at the new Working Men's College in North London

1854

Alfred Tennyson's son Lionel is born

1855

Charge of the Light Brigade; Crimean War ends

1855

The artist Gustav Courbet leads the Realist movement in French painting

1855

Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South; Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

1855

Matthew Arnold, Poems, Second Series

1855

Charlotte Brontë dies of complications during pregnancy at the age of 38

1855

Robert Browning's Men and Women is published

1855

Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens collaborate on the melodrama The Lighthouse

1855

Charles Dickens publishes Little Dorrit and collaborates with Wilkie Collins on the melodrama The Lighthouse

1855

Dante Gabriel Rossetti joins John Ruskin at the Working Men's College

1855

John Ruskin's former wife Euphemia Gray marries John Everett Millais

1855

Alfred Tennyson publishes Maud and Other Poems which includes 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' and 'Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington'

1855

William Thackeray publishes his Christmas book The Rose and the Ring and begins his second lecture tour of the United States

1856

Sigmund Freud born; Giuseppe Verdi's, La Traviata opens in London

1856

Elizabeth Barrett Browning publishes Aurora Leigh

1856

Thomas Hardy's schooling ends at the age of 16 when he becomes apprenticed to John Hicks, a local architect

1856

Dante Gabriel Rossetti meets William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones

1857

Indian Mutiny against the British East India Company leads to the beginning of the British Raj period

1857

Baudelaire publishes his influential poetry collection Les Fleurs du Mal; Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers

1857

Charlotte Brontë's The Professor

1857

Death of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's father, who remained unreconciled to her marriage to Robert Browning

1857

Wilkie Collins, The Dead Secret . The Frozen Deep, co-written with Charles Dickens, is first performed at Tavistock House

1857

Joseph Conrad born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in Podolia in the Ukraine

1857

Charles Dickens' play The Frozen Deep, co-written with Wilkie Collins, is first performed at Tavistock House. In the spring Dickens moves to Gad's Hill in Kent

1857

George Eliot makes her fiction debut with the serialization in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine of 'The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton', 'Mr Gilfil's Love-Story' and 'Janet's Repentance'. She adopts the pseudonym George Eliot

George Gissing

1857

George Gissing is born in Wakefield, Yorkshire

1857

John Ruskin, "A Joy Forever" and its Price in the Market, or the Political Economy of Art; The Elements of Drawing and The Political Economy of Art

1857

The Virginians (1857-9), William Thackeray's sequel to Henry Esmond, is published. He stands unsuccessfully as an independent reform candidate for Parliament

1858

London's sewage system is designed by Joseph Bazalgette

1858

Covent Garden Opera House opens

1858

R. M. Ballantyne The Coral Island

1858

Matthew Arnold, Merope, a Tragedy. Arnold becomes professor of poetry at Oxford

1858

Wilkie Collins begins living with the widowed Mrs Caroline Graves

1858

Charles Dickens begins his first series of paid public readings from his own works. He separates from his wife Catherine, with considerable publicity

1858

George Eliot, Scenes from Clerical Life

1858

John Ruskin meets and falls in love with the ten year old Rose La Touche. He publishes The True and the Beautiful in Nature, Art, Morals and Religion

1859

Charles Darwin publishes the Origin of Species; The English Philosopher John Mill publishes the radical work On Liberty; Samuel Smiles publishes Self-Help which influences the New Thought Movement

1859

Birth of Havelock Ellis, AE Housman, Jerome K Jerome and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

1859

Charles Dickens' periodical Household Words closes. Dickens founds his magazine All The Year Round and publishes A Tale of Two Cities

1859

George Eliot, Adam Bede and The Lifted Veil

[Idylls of the King: The coming of Arthur]. Holograph draft of 25 lines near the end of the poem

1859

Alfred Tennyson, The Idylls of the King

1860

Abraham Lincoln elected President of the US; Kingdom of Italy founded; Second Opium Wars begin

1860

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's volume of political poetry, Poems before Congress is badly received

1860

Wilkie Collins' first sensation novel The Woman in White is published in book form, following its great success in serialisation

1860

Great Expectations

1860

The Mill on the Floss

1860

Henry James starts to devote himself to writing and to translation of French authors

1860

Dante Gabriel Rossetti marries Lizzie Siddal

1860

John Ruskin criticises capitalism in his economic work Unto This Last

1860

William Thackeray is a founding editor of the phenomenally successful literary journal The Cornhill Magazine

1861

Death of Prince Albert; the American Civil War begins

1861

The first known permanent colour photograph is taken by James Clerk Maxwell

1861

Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley's Secret ; death of Arthur Hugh Clough

1861

Matthew Arnold publishes his essay 'On Translating Homer'. His childhood friend and poet Arthur Hugh Clough dies. Arnold writes 'Thyrsis' as an elegy

Robert Browning, Paris, October 1862

1861

Elizabeth Barrett Browning dies at Casa Guidi. Robert Browning prepares her Last Poems for publication. Browning and son Pen move to London

1861

George Eliot, Silas Marner

1861

Dante Gabriel Rossetti publishes The Early Italian poets, a set of poetry translations

1862

Emancipation Proclamation issued by Lincoln

Sarah Bernhardt, c.1870, by Charles Roscoe Savage

1862

Sarah Bernhardt's illustrious stage career begins

1862

Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market and Other Poems

1862

Wilkie Collins, No Name

1862

George Eliot, Romola

1862

Thomas Hardy moves to London, enrolling as a student at King's College and joining the architectural offices of the celebrated Arthur Blomfield

1862

Henry James enters Harvard Law School but withdraws after a year

1862

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's wife Lizzie Siddal dies from an overdose of laudanum

1862

Alfred Tennyson has first audience with Queen Victoria

1862

William Thackeray resigns as editor of The Cornhill Magazine due to ill health

1863

Maxwell extends the theory of electromagnetism; First underground steam railway in London opens; Battle of Gettysburg

1863

Napoleon III institutes the Salon des Refusés, containing all the works that the Paris Salon had rejected that year

1863

Elizabeth Gaskell, Sylvia's Lovers ; Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Aurora Floyd; Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies

1863

William Thackeray suffers a stroke and dies, leaving Denis Duval unfinished. He is buried on 29 December at Kensal Green Cemetery in London

1864

Pasteurization invented

Portrait of Elizabeth Gaskell by George Richmond, 1851

1864

Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters

1864

Robert Browning, Dramatis Personae

1864

Joseph Conrad's father Apollo Korzeniowski is exiled to Vologda, Russia, for his involvement in the January Uprising of 1863-64. His wife, Ewelina Korzeniowska and four-year-old son follow him into exile

1864

Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

1864

Henry James moves to Boston and publishes 'A Tragedy of Error” in the Continental Monthly, works on other stories, and is employed by the North American Review

1864

John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies. Ruskin's father dies, leaving him considerable wealth

1864

Alfred Tennyson, Enoch Arden

1865

End of US Civil War; President Lincoln assassinated by John Wilkes Booth; 13th Amendment to US constitution abolishes slavery

1865

Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

1865

Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism

1865

Joseph Conrad's mother dies of tuberculosis

1865

Charles Dickens is involved in the Staplehurst rail crash

1865

Thomas Hardy's first published work appears in print with the short story 'How I Built Myself a House'

1865

John Ruskin proposes to Rose La Touche, now seventeen, but her parents refuse the marriage due to concerns about his atheism

1865

Alfred Tennyson refuses a baronetcy

Alfred Nobel, by Gösta Florman (1831-1900)

1866

Alfred Nobel invents dynamite

1866

Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset

1866

Wilkie Collins, Armadale

1866

George Eliot, Felix Holt, the Radical

1866

John Ruskin, The Ethics of the Dust; The Crown of Wild Olive: Three Lectures on Work, Traffic and War

1867

Canada becomes a Dominion of the British Empire; the second Reform Act increases the number of people allowed to vote in Britain; Trans-Atlantic telegraph cable laid

1867

The modern typewriter is invented; Japanese art is exhibited for the first time in Paris; Das Kapital by Karl Marx is published

1867

Anthony Trollope, Phineas Finn, the Irish Member

1867

Matthew Arnold, 'The Study of Celtic Literature'. Arnolds resigns chair at Oxford

1867

Thomas Hardy returns to Dorset and assists architect John Hicks with church restorations. He begins his first and never published novel The Poor Man and the Lady

1867

John Ruskin, Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne: Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work

1868

Disraeli becomes Prime Minister for the first time in February but resigns by December; First Trade Union Congress in Britain; The last public execution is carried out in England

1868

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women; Anthony Trollope, He Knew He Was Right; Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

1868

Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book is a popular success

1868

Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone, often described as the first detective novel. Mrs Graves leaves Collins to marry Joseph Clow

1868

George Eliot, The Spanish Gipsy, a dramatic poem

1868

Thomas Hardy finishes The Poor Man and the Lady in January, but it is rejected by publishers Chapman and Hall

1869

First American transcontinental railroad is completed; Suez Canal opened

1869

Siegfried Wagner and Henri Matisse born

1869

Matthew Arnold writes his great prose work Culture and Anarchy

1869

Wilkie Collins fathers the first of three children with Martha Rudd

1869

Joseph Conrad's father dies in Kraków, leaving Conrad orphaned at the age of eleven

1869

Henry James sails to Liverpool, England where he stays in London, then Malvern and Oxford, then travels the Continent

1869

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's dead wife Lizzie Siddal is exhumed, and the manuscript poems placed in her coffin by Rossetti at her funeral are retrieved

Pencil sketch by John Ruskin

1869

John Ruskin is appointed the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University. The Queen of the Air: Being a Study of the Greek Myths of Cloud and Storm

1869

Alfred Tennyson The Holy Grail and Other Poems which includes 'The Coming of Arthur', 'The Holy Grail' and 'Pelleas and Ettarre'.

1870

Franco-Prussian war; Periodic table is developed; Education Act in Britain provides state education for all; Siege of Paris begins; Battle of Sedan; Unification of Italy is completed

1870

Edward Lear, Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets

1870

Matthew Arnold Saint Paul and Protestantism

Man and wife. Act I[and II]. Holograph draft.

1870

Wilkie Collins, Man and Wife. Mrs Graves returns to Collins, who thereafter maintains two households

1870

Charles Dickens suffers a stroke at Gads Hill. He dies on 9 June and is buried at Westminster Abbey. His unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood is serialised, despite only six of twelve planned numbers being completed

1870

George Gissing's father dies in December, leaving behind a young wife, three sons, and two daughters

1870

Henry James returns to Cambridge, Massachusetts after receiving a letter from his mother on March 26 informing him that his cousin Minnie has died

1870

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Poems

1871

First women's college founded at Cambridge University

1871

Charles Darwin Descent of Man; dry plates are invented, revolutionizing photography

1871

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There

1871

Matthew Arnold, Friendship's Garland

1871

Robert Browning, Balaustion's Adventure; Prince Hohnstiel-Schwangau

1871

George Eliot, Middlemarch

1871

George Gissing, along with his brothers, William and Algernon, is educated at the Quaker boarding school Lindow Grove, at Alderley Edge, Cheshire

1871

Thomas Hardy publishes his sensation novel Desperate Remedies

1871

Henry James publishes his novella A Passionate Pilgrim in The Atlantic Monthly

1871

Dante Gabriel Rossetti leases Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire with William Morris and his wife, Jane Burden, with whom Rossetti has a lasting affair

1871

John Ruskin purchases Brantwood near Coniston in the Lake District, England. He becomes mentally and physically ill. Death of his mother

1872

The secret ballot is introduced in Britain and the third public Health Act is passed; Brooklyn suspension bridge opens

1872

Claude Monet's painting 'Impression, Sunrise' lends its name to the emerging Impressionist movement

1872

Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds

1872

Robert Browning, Fifine at the Fair

1872

Wilkie Collins, Poor Miss Finch: A Novel

1872

George Gissing wins a scholarship for three years to Owens College, Manchester

1872

Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree

1872

Henry James travels in Europe with his sister Alice and Aunt Kate, and writes travel sketches for The Nation

1872

Dante Gabriel Rossetti overdoses on laudanum

1872

Alfred Tennyson, Gareth and Lynette

1873

Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance

1873

Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma

1873

Robert Browning, Red Cotton Night-Cap Country

1873

Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes

1873

Barbed wire is invented

1874

Disraeli becomes Prime Minister for the second time after the resignation of Gladstone

1874

Verdi's Requiem premieres in Milan; first Impressionist art exhibition is held

1874

Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now

1874

Joseph Conrad goes to Marseilles and is employed by the shipping firm Delestang

1874

Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd. Hardy marries Emma Lavinia Gifford

1874

Henry James publishes his novella Madame de Mauves

1875

The premiere of Bizet's opera Carmen in Paris

1875

Anthony Trollope The Prime Minister; Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer

1875

Matthew Arnold, God and the Bible

1875

Robert Browning, Aristophanes' Apology; The Inn Album

1875

Wilkie Collins, The Law and the Lady

1875

George Gissing moves into private lodgings in Manchester and wins honours in English and Latin

1875

Henry James publishes his novel Roderick Hudson

1875

The love of John Ruskin's life, Rose La Touche dies in a Dublin nursing home

1875

Alfred Tennyson produces his first play, Queen Mary

1876

Telephone invented by Alexander Graham Bell; Queen Victoria becomes Empress of India

1876

Tchaikovsky completes Swan Lake; First symphony by Brahms

1876

George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

1876

George Gissing falls in love with prostitute Marianne Helen (Nell) Harrison. He is caught stealing, convicted of theft, and expelled from university. He serves one month in prison before sailing to the United States

1876

Thomas Hardy and his wife move to Yeovil. The Hand of Ethelberta

1876

Henry James moves to London, which will be his base for the next twenty years

1877

Russo-Turkish war begins

1877

Eadweard Muybridge invents the first moving pictures

1877

Harriet Martineau, Harriet Martineau's Autobiography ; Anna Sewell, Black Beauty

1877

Matthew Arnold, Last Essays on Church and Religion

1877

Robert Browning publishes his translation of Aeschylus' Agamemnon

1877

George Gissing teaches briefly in a public school at Waltham, Massachusetts before going to Chicago where his first published fiction, "The Sins of the Fathers," appears in The Chicago Tribune. In September Gissing sails from Boston and settles in London

1877

Henry James, The American

1878

Russo-Turkish war ends with an Ottoman surrender to the Russians

An artist's impression of the 1878 production of H.M.S. Pinafore, Act II, by D. H. Friston

1878

Gilbert and Sullivan open the comic opera HMS Pinafore in London

1878

Wilkie Collins, My Lady's Money: An Episode in the Life of a Young Girl

1878

Joseph Conrad attempts suicide in Marseille. His career as a sailor begins with the British merchant navy, on a variety of English ships. His first ship is bound for Constantinople, before its return to Lowestoft, his first landing in Britain

1878

George Eliot's common law partner, George Henry Lewes, dies. Eliot spends the next two years editing his final work Life and Mind for publication.

1878

George Gissing receives his share of a trust fund (about £500) left by his father

1878

Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native. Hardy and his wife move to Upper Tooting, in South London

1878

Henry James, The Europeans

1878

Ruskin founds the utopian charitable trust The Guild of St. George. The artist JM Whistler successfully sues Ruskin after a scathing review of the painting Nocturne in Black and Gold. Ruskin is unable to testify due to increasing mental instability

1879

Thomas Edison invents the light bulb

1879

Wilkie Collins, The Fallen Leaves

1879

George Eliot's last work, Impressions of Theophrastus Such

1879

George Gissing seeks out and then marries Nell Harrison. He begins work on his first novel while earning a living as a tutor

1879

Henry James, Daisy Miller

1879

Dante Gabriel Rossetti is increasingly ill due to chloral addiction

1879

John Ruskin resigns the Slade Professorship at Oxford

1880

In this period the music hall became widely popular

1880

Eliot marries John Walter Cross in May, but dies in December aged 61

1880

Gissing's brother William dies from tuberculosis. His first novel, Workers in the Dawn is published

1880

The Trumpet-Major

1880

Henry James, Washington Square. James meets American novelist Constance Fennimore Woolson, who becomes a close friend

1880

Alfred Tennyson, Ballads and Other Poems which includes 'The Battle of Brunanburh', 'The Voyage of Maeldune', 'Rizpah', 'The Revenge' and 'The Defence of Lucknow'

1881

The Browning Society is formed for the study and appreciation of Robert Browning's works

The Black Robe by Wilkie Collins

1881

Wilkie Collins, The Black Robe

1881

Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

John Keats Sixty Years Dead, holograph poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

1881

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ballads and Sonnets

1882

British troops occupy the Suez Canal; incandescent electric lights are introduced in London

1882

Death of Anthony Trollope

1882

George Gissing finishes his second novel Mrs. Grundy's Enemies in September. It is accepted for publication but is never published

1882

Dante Gabriel Rossetti dies shortly before his fifty-fourth birthday and is buried at Birchington-on-Sea, Kent

1883

The Metropolitan Opera House opens in New York; "Buffalo Bill" Cody opens his "Wild West" entertainment show in Nebraska USA; death of Karl Marx

1883

Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island; birth of Franz Kafka

1883

Matthew Arnold goes on first lecture tour of America

1883

George Gissing and his wife Nell separate and she returns to prostitution. Gissing does not see her alive again

1883

John Ruskin resumes his Professorship at Oxford

1883

Alfred Tennyson eventually accepts baronetcy and takes his seat in the House of Lords

1884

Sino-French war; The third Reform Act gives more men the vote in Britain

1884

J.K Huysmans decadent novel A Rebours creates a sensation; Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

1884

Wilkie Collins, I Say No

1884

George Gissing, The Unclassed

1884

John Ruskin, The Art of England; The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century

1885

Karl Benz invents the first practical automobile powered by an internal combustion engine

1885

Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean

1885

Thomas Hardy moves into Max Gate, which Hardy himself designed and built on the outskirts of Dorchester

1885

Alfred Tennyson, Tiresias, and Other Poems which includes 'Balin and Balan'

1886

Johannesburg is founded in South Africa

1886

Impressionism has its final show in Paris; Rodin finishes his sculpture "The Kiss"; The first Coca-Cola drink is sold in Atlanta USA

1886

Matthew Arnold retires from school inspection and makes his second trip to America

1886

Wilkie Collins, The Evil Genius: A Domestic Story

1886

Joseph Conrad becomes a naturalized British subject and officially changes his name to Joseph Conrad

Demos by George Gissing

1886

George Gissing, Demos: A story of English Socialism; Isabel Clarendon

Title page of The Mayor of Casterbridge

1886

Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge

1886

Henry James, The Bostonians

1886

John Ruskin publishes his autobiography Praeterita

1886

Alfred Tennyson, Locksley Hall, sixty years after. Tennyson's son Lionel dies

1887

Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee

1887

H. Rider Haggard - She; Walter Pater, Imaginary Portraits

1887

George Gissing, Thyrza

1887

Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders

1888

Jack the Ripper murders at least five women in Whitechapel, East London

1888

George Eastman's "Kodak" camera goes on the market; Strauss writes Don Juan

1888

Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward

1888

Matthew Arnold dies suddenly of heart failure. His second series of Essays in Criticism are published posthumously

1888

Wilkie Collins, The Legacy of Cain

1888

George Gissing, A Life's Morning. Gissing's wife Nell dies

1888

Thomas Hardy, The Withered Arm; Wessex Tales

1888

Henry James, The Aspern Papers

1888

John Ruskin, who had been deteriorating steadily, collapses during a Continental trip and is taken home to Brantwood in the Lake District

1889

The London Dock Strike illustrates the power of the labour movement

1889

Robert Browning publishes his last work, Asolando, and dies in Venice

1889

Wilkie Collins dies and is buried in Kensal Green Cemetery, West London

1889

Joseph Conrad visits central Africa and reaches the Congo Free State as captain of a steamboat

1889

George Gissing, The Nether World

1890

The first electric underground trains run in London

1890

Art Nouveau emerges, led by artists like Gustav Klimt; Death of Van Gogh

1890

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

1890

Blind Love is completed by Walter Besant after Collins's death

1890

George Gissing, The Emancipated. Gissing meets Edith Underwood

1890

Anna, Lady Baxby' (1890)

1891

Free elementary education is introduced in the UK

1891

Gauguin travels to Tahiti and leads the Post-Impressionist art movement

1891

William Morris, News from Nowhere; Oscar Wilde, Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, and Other Stories and The Picture of Dorian Gray

1891

Joseph Conrad starts writing his first novel Almayer's Folly

1891

George Gissing, New Grub Street. Gissing marries Edith Underwood and they move from London to Exeter, Devon. Their first son, Walter Leonard, is born

1891

Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles is widely criticised for its depiction of a 'fallen woman'

1892

Denzil Quarrier; Born In Exile

1892

Death of Alfred Tennyson

1893

New Zealand grants female suffrage

1893

Edvard Munch's 'The Scream' inspires the Expressionist art movement

1893

George Gissing, The Odd Women

1894

Sino-Japanese war; Gladstone resigns and Lord Rosebery becomes Prime Minister

1894

The influential Aesthetic journal The Yellow Book is first published, featuring illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley

1894

George Bernard Shaw, Arms and the Man; Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book; Oscar Wilde, Salomé; death of Christina Rossetti and Robert Louis Stevenson

1894

George Gissing, In the Year of Jubilee

1894

Henry James' close friend Constance Woolson commits suicide in Venice

An early X-ray picture (radiograph) taken at a public lecture by Wilhelm Roentgen of Albert von Kölliker's left hand

1895

Roentgen discovers X-rays

1895

H. G. Wells, The Time Machine

1895

Joseph Conrad's first novel, Almayer's Folly, is published

1895

George Gissing, Eve's Ransom

1895

Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure is published to a hostile reception. The outcry causes Hardy to give up writing novels

1895

Henry James's play Guy Domville receives boos and catcalls when he is called on stage. He returns to writing fiction

1896

Olympic games start; The first Nobel peace prizes are awarded

1896

H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau

1896

Joseph Conrad marries Jessie George with whom he has two sons, John and Borys

1896

George Gissing's second son, Alfred Charles, is born

1897

Diesel engines invented; electrons are discovered and named

Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee Service, 22 June 1897, by Andrew Carrick Gow

1897

Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee

1897

Bram Stoker, Dracula

1897

Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'

Holograph quotation from The Whirlpool by George Gissing

1897

George Gissing, The Whirlpool. Gissing separates from his wife, Edith, who is mentally unstable

1897

Thomas Hardy, The Well-Beloved (first published as a serial from 1892)

1897

Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton; What Maisie Knew. James leases Lamb House in Rye, East Sussex

1898

Spanish-American War

1898

George Gissing, The Town Traveller; Charles Dickens: A Critical Study. Gissing meets Gabrielle Fleury in the home of H. G. Wells, and they move to France

1898

Thomas Hardy publishes his first verse edition, Wessex Poems and Other Verses

1898

Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

1899

The start of the Boer War; Zeppelin invents the airship

1899

Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband,; HG Wells, When the Sleeper Wakes

1899

Joseph Conrad writes Heart of Darkness

1899

George Gissing, The Crown of Life

1899

Henry James, The Awkward Age

1900

Labour Party founded; Russia annexes Manchuria

1900

Sigmund Freud publishes the Interpretation of Dreams, inaugurating his theory of dream analysis; Pablo Picasso begins his career; the Paris Metro opens, with art nouveau entrances designed by Hector Guimard

1900

Death of Oscar Wilde

1900

Lord Jim

1900

John Ruskin dies from influenza