The Age of Romanticism Texts and Contexts: A Chronological Chart

The Age of Romanticism 

Texts and Contexts: A Chronological 

Chart 

In the chart below, dates generally refer to the year when a work was first made public, whether 

published in print or, in the case of dramatic works, made public through the first performance of a 

play. Where that date is known to differ substantially from the date of composition, the difference 

is generally noted. With medieval works, where there is no equivalent to the “publication” of later 

eras, where texts often vary greatly from one manuscript copy to another, and where knowledge of 

date of original composition is usually imprecise, the date that appears is an estimate of the date of 

the work’s origin in the written form included or referenced in the Broadview Anthology. Earlier oral 

or written versions are of course in some cases real possibilities. 

Divisions in these chronological charts follow the divisions into six parts of the Broadview 

Anthology. For the convenience of those who may be focusing on only one period, but who may wish 

to look slightly beyond its boundaries as they are generally defined, there is in some cases an overlap 

between periods in these chronologies. The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century chart, for 

example, carries through to the end of the eighteenth century (thereby overlapping with the chart for 

The Age of Romanticism), and the chart for The Victorian Era begins several years before Victoria 

came to the throne. 

Texts 

1789 Jeremy Bentham, Principles of Morals and 

Legislation 

William Blake, Songs of Innocence 

Gilbert White, The Natural History and 

Antiquities of Selborne 

1790 Joanna Baillie, Poems 

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 

William Bligh, A Narrative of the Mutiny on 

Board His Britannic Majesty’s Ship Bounty 

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in 

France 

Charlotte Lennox, Euphemia 

Amelia Opie, The Dangers of Coquetry 

Helen Maria Williams, Letters Written in France 

(first of eight volumes published in 1790-96) 

 

Contexts 

1789 Storming of the Bastille (a prison in Paris in 

which political prisoners were held) marks the 

beginning of the French Revolution 

1790 J.M.W. Turner exhibits his work at the Royal 

Academy for the first time

2 The Age of Romanticism 

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights 

of Men 

1791 Jeremy Bentham, Panopticon; or, The Inspection- 

House 

Elizabeth Inchbald, A Simple Story 

Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, Part 1 (Part 2 

published in 1792) 

Charlotte Smith, Celestina 

1792 Charlotte Smith, Desmond 

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights 

of Woman 

1793 William Blake, America: A Prophecy 

Robert Burns, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish 

Dialect (enlarged edition; earlier editions 

published in 1786, 1787) 

William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning 

Political Justice 

Charlotte Smith, The Old Manor House 

1794 William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of 

Experience 

William Godwin, Caleb Williams 

Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho 

1795 Eliza Fenwick, Secresy 

Robert Southey, Poems 

1796 Robert Bage, Hermsprong 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poems (second edition 


Elizabeth Inchbald, Nature and Art 

Elizabeth Hamilton, Translations of the Letters of 

a Hindoo Rajah 

1791 First Haitian Revolution; slaves overthrow 

French colonial rule in Saint-Domingue 

(modern day Haiti). A complex series of 

struggles against French and British forces and 

among factions within Haiti itself ends in 1804 

with the establishment of Haiti as a free 

republic––the second independent nation in the 

Western hemisphere 

The Canada Act divides the former jurisdiction 

of the province of Quebec into Upper Canada 

(now southern Ontario), a province that would 

follow English legal and institutional practices, 

and Lower Canada (now southern Quebec), a 

province that would be governed by the 

principles of French civil law and in which the 

Roman Catholic Church would hold a 

privileged position 

1793 Reign of Terror––an eleven-month period of 

brutal repression during the French 

Revolution––begins in Paris 

British colony of Upper Canada bans slavery 

1795 France becomes the world’s first jurisdiction to 

adopt a secret ballot for elections 

1796 Napoleon invades Italy and defeats Austria at 

the Battle of Lodi

Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney 

Matthew Lewis, The Monk 

Ann Radcliffe, The Italian 

William Taylor, Ellenore 

1797 Mary Robinson, Walsingham 

Charlotte Smith, Elegiac Sonnets 

1798 Joanna Baillie, Plays on the Passions (volume 1) 

Jeremy Bentham, Political Economy 

Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of 

Population 

Charlotte Smith, The Young Philosopher 

George Vancouver, A Voyage of Discovery to 

the North Pacific Ocean, and Around the 

World 

Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria, or The Wrongs of 

Woman (unfinished; published as part of the 

Posthumous Works of the Author of A 

Vindication of the Rights of Woman, edited 

by William Godwin) 

William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor 

Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other 

Poems (revised and enlarged editions 

published in 1801, 1802, 1805, 1815) 

1799 William Godwin, St. Leon 

Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System 

of Female Education 

Mary Robinson, Letter to the Women of England 

Mary Robinson, The Natural Daughter 

Robert Southey, Poems 

George Walker, The Vagabond 

1800 William Earle, Jr., Obi 

Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent 

Mary Hays, The Victim of Prejudice 

Mary Robinson, Lyrical Tales 

1801 Maria Edgeworth, Moral Tales for Young People 

Charles Lucas, The Infernal Quixote 

Amelia Opie, The Father and Daughter 

Anne Plumptre, Something New 

1802 Edinburgh Review founded 

William Paley, Natural Theology 

1797 Edmund Burke dies 

Texts and Contexts 3 

1798 Irish Rebellion of 1798, a non-sectarian uprising 

(under the leadership of Theobald Wolfe Tone) 

against British control of Ireland 

British Navy under Horatio Nelson defeats the 

French fleet at the Battle of the Nile 

Income tax introduced in Britain 

1799 Napoleon seizes control of the French 

government 

1800 English and Irish parliaments pass the Act of 

Union; the United Kingdom of Great Britain and 

Ireland created on 1 January 1801 

1802 Health and Morals of Apprentices Act (also 

known as the Factory Act of 1802) limits 

employment of children in cotton and woolen


Ann Taylor and Jane Taylor, Original Poems for 

Infant Minds 

1805 Amelia Opie, Adeline Mowbray 

William Godwin, Fleetwood, or The New Man of 

Feeling 

1806 Charlotte Dacre, Zofloya, or The Moor 

Sydney Owenson (later Lady Morgan), The 

Wild Irish Girl 

Sir Walter Scott, Ballads and Lyrical Pieces 

Ann Taylor and Jane Taylor, Rhymes for the 

Nursery 

1807 Joanna Baillie, De Montfort: A Tragedy 

Henrietta Bowdler, The Family Shakespeare 

(later editions edited by her brother Thomas 

Bowdler) 

George Gordon, Lord Byron, Poems Printed on 

Various Occasions 

Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb, Tales from 

Shakespeare 

Charlotte Smith, Beachy Head, with Other 

Poems 

William Wordsworth, Poems, in Two Volumes 

mills to no more than 12 hours per day and sets 

out various other regulations (e.g., requiring that 

children living under the supervision of the 

employer not sleep more than two to a bed, and 

that on Sunday they be given a least one hour’s 

instruction in the Christian religion) 

1803 Louisiana Purchase: the United States acquires 

from France approximately 828,000 square 

miles (2,100,000 square kilometers) of land, 

extending from what are now the states of 

Arkansas and Missouri north and west to what 

are now portions of southern Alberta and 

Saskatchewan 

Fighting between Britain and France resumes in 

the Napoleonic wars 

1804 Napoleon crowns himself Emperor 

1805 Battle of Trafalgar establishes British sea 

supremacy 

Battle of Austerlitz establishes the supremacy of 

Napoleon’s land forces on the European 

continent 

1807 Abolition of the Slave Trade Act ends the slave 

trade in all British possessions (slavery itself in 

British possessions would not be abolished until 

1833) 

First public street lighting, Pall Mall, London. 

(Five years later Parliament granted a charter to 

the London and Westminster Gas Light and 

Coke Company, which became the world’s first 

gas company. By the 1820s, many of Britain’s 

larger cities and towns had public street lighting 

by gas)

1808 William Blake, Milton 

Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, 

Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition 

of the African Slave-Trade 

Charles Robert Maturin, The Wild Irish Boy 

1809 Hannah More, Coelebs in Search of a Wife 

1810 George Crabbe, The Borough 

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Zastrozzi 

1811 Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility 

Sydney Owenson (later Lady Morgan), The 

Missionary: An Indian Tale 

Jonathan Scott, The Arabian Nights 

Entertainments (the first English translation) 

Percy Bysshe Shelley and Thomas Hogg, The 

Necessity of Atheism 

Percy Bysshe Shelley, St. Irvyne 

Mary Tighe, Psyche, with Other Poems 

1812 Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Eighteen Hundred and 

Eleven 

George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s 

Pilgrimage, cantos 1 and 2 (fourth 

and final canto published in 1818) 

1813 John Aubrey, Lives of Eminent Men (later known 

as Aubrey’s Brief Lives) 

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice 

1814 Jane Austen, Mansfield Park 

Frances Burney, The Wanderer; or, Female 

Difficulties 

George Gordon, Lord Byron, Ode to Napoleon 

Buonaparte (published anonymously) 

Sir Walter Scott, Waverley 

William Wordsworth, The Excursion 


1808 Johann Wolfgang von Goëthe, Faust 

1810 Napoleon annexes the Netherlands to France 

1811 Luddite anti-factory riots and other workingclass 

protests against loss of employment and 

economic hardship due to industrialization 

1812 United States declares war on Britain 

Napoleon invades Russia and attacks the 

Russian army at the Battle of Borodino, the 

largest and most destructive battle of the 

Napoleonic Wars, with over 250,000 soldiers 

involved, and between 65,000 and 120,000 dead 

and wounded. The battle does not produce a 

clear victory; Napoleon enters Moscow a week 

later, but begins to retreat from Russia the 

following month 

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm publish Kinder-und- 

Hausmarchen (Children’s and Household Tales, 

commonly referred to as Grimm’s Fairy Tales) 

1814 Napoleon forced to abdicate as Allies enter 

Paris; he is exiled to Elba 

War between the United States and Britain ends 

with the Treaty of Ghent


1814-17 William Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt, Round Table 

essays published in The Examiner (issued in 

book form in 1817) 

1815 Jane Austen, Emma 

Robert Owen, Observations on the Effect of the 

Manufacturing System 

Sir Walter Scott, The Field of Waterloo 

Sir Walter Scott, Guy Mannering 

1816 Leigh Hunt, The Story of Rimini 

Sir Walter Scott, The Antiquary 

1817 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey; and Persuasion 

First appearance of the radical journals Black 

Dwarf and Sherwin’s Political Register (later 

The Republican) 

Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine first published 

George Gordon, Lord Byron, Manfred 

Maria Edgeworth, Harrington 

David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political 

Economy and Taxation 

Major developments in steam technology as 

George Watson develops a steam locomotive 

and the British navy introduces a steam-driven 

warship 

1815 Napoleon returns from Elba and briefly resumes 

his rule over France; he is finally defeated by the 

Duke of Wellington and Gebhard von Blücher 

at the Battle of Waterloo, and exiled to St. 

Helena 

Construction begins on the Brighton Pavilion, 

designed by John Nash (completed in 1823) 

Parliament passes the Importation Act (legislation 

subsequently referred to as the Corn Laws), 

protecting grain producers against imports (and 

thereby maintaining higher prices for 

consumers) 

1816 Elgin Marbles exhibited at the British Museum 

1816-17 Economic depression and political upheaval in 

Britain; riots at the opening of Parliament, 

insurrection in Derbyshire, and protests in 

Manchester. The government suspends the right 

of habeas corpus (thereby allowing authorities to 

imprison dissenters without bringing them to 

trial or laying formal charges), and various 

political societies are suppressed 

1817-23 Simon Bolivar leads the struggle against colonial 

rule in several South American Wars of 

Independence

1818 Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey 

John Keats, Endymion 

Sir Walter Scott, Rob Roy 

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein 

1819 George Gordon, Lord Byron, Don Juan, cantos 

1 and 2 (final cantos published in 1824) 

John William Polidori, The Vampyre 

Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe 

Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Cenci 

William Wordsworth, Peter Bell 

1820 John Clare, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and 

Scenery 

John Keats, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, 

and Other Poems 

Sir Walter Scottt, Kenilworth 

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound 

1821 John Clare, The Village Minstrel, and Other 

Poems 

William Cobbett, Cottage Economy 

William Hazlitt, Table-Talk 

Letitia Elizabeth Landon, The Fate of Adelaide, 


Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer 

Mary Shelley, Mathilda completed (not 

published until 1959) 

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais: An Elegy on the 

Death of John Keats 

First publication of the Manchester Guardian 

1822 Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English 

Opium Eater 

Amelia Opie, Madeline 


1818 Publisher Richard Carlile tried and imprisoned 

as part of the government’s effort to suppress 

political dissent 

1819 “Peterloo Massacre”: militia attacks 

approximately 50,000 people attending a 

peaceful political demonstration in Manchester, 

killing 11 and injuring over 400; the 

government passes several acts designed to 

suppress dissent 

Venezuela, Columbia, and Ecuador declare 

independence from Spain 

1820 Development of quinine (the first effective antimalarial 

drug) 

1820-23 Political unrest in continental Europe, especially 

in Spain, France, and Portugal 

1821 John Keats dies 

1821-32 Greek War of Independence, in which the 

Greeks fought for and eventually won 

independence from the Ottoman Empire 

1822 Brazil achieves independence from Portugal 

Liberia is established by the American 

Colonization Society as a place to which freed 

African-American slaves could “return” 

Percy Bysshe Shelley dies


1823 Felicia Hemans, The Siege of Valencia 

Charles Lamb, Elia, first series (second series 


Mary Shelley, Valperga 

Edgar Taylor, trans., German Popular Stories, 

volume 1 (first English translations of the 

Grimm’s fairy tales); volume 2 published in 

1826 

William Wilberforce, An Appeal to the Religion, 

Justice, and Humanity of the British Empire, 

in Behalf of the Negro Slaves in the West 

Indies 

1824 James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and 

Confessions of a Justified Sinner 

Letitia Elizabeth Landon, The Improvisatrice, 


Westminster Review founded by Jeremy Bentham 

(later editors included John Stuart Mill and 

George Eliot) 

1825 William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age 

Felicia Hemans, The Forest Sanctuary, and Other 

Poems 

1823 The United States declares itself a world power 

through the Monroe Doctrine; President James 

Monroe gives notice that the United States 

would view any attempt by an European power 

to control the destiny of any part of the 

Americas that was not already under its control 

as “the manifestation of an unfriendly 

disposition toward the United States” 

Mexico, Guatemala, and Costa Rica declare 

independence from Spain 

George Birkbeck founds the London Mechanics 

Institute (later Birkbeck College, a part of the 

University of London) to provide adult 

education. Beginning in 1830, women as well as 

men are admitted; in 1866, the institute was 

renamed the Birkbeck Literary and Scientific 

Institution 

1824 National Gallery opens in London 

Ludwig von Beethoven, Ninth Symphony 

Lord Byron dies 

1825 Opening of the Stockton and Darlington 

Railway (the first passenger railway in Britain) 

Stock market crash and banking crisis: the Bank 

of England had greatly expanded the money 

supply in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, and 

the stock market had experienced a boom, with 

new demands for capital investment in factories, 

canals, gas lighting, etc., and new markets for 

exports, particularly in the now-independent 

states of Latin America. By 1825, much of the 

boom was based on ill-advised speculation and 

in some cases outright fraud (bonds were issued 

to finance Poyais, an imaginary South 

American republic). The collapse of the bubble 

began in April, with a stock market crash; by the 

end of the year, several major banks had failed, a 

financial panic had set in, and the Bank of 

England itself had barely avoided failure. A 

sharp recession followed in 1826

1826 Elizabeth Barrett (later Elizabeth Barrett 

Browning), An Essay on Mind and Other 

Poems 

Richard Carlile, The Philosophy of the Sexes; or, 

Every Woman’s Book 

William Hazlitt, The Plain Speaker 

Thomas Love Peacock, The Four Ages of Poetry 

Mary Shelley, The Last Man 

1827 John Clare, The Shepherd’s Calendar 

1828 The Athaneum first published (weekly 

publication continued until 1921) 

John Brown, A Memoir of Robert Blincoe (first 

published as a series of five articles in 

Richard Carlile’s newspaper The Lion; later 

reprinted in The Poor Man’s Advocate ; 

published in pamphlet form in 1832) 

Edward Lytton Bulwer (later Edward Bulwer- 

Lytton), Pelham; or, The Adventures of a 

Gentleman 

Felicia Hemans, Records of Woman 

The Keepsake first published (annual publication 

continued until 1857) 

1829 Caroline Norton, The Undying One 

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Timbuctoo 

1830 Ebenezer Elliot, Corn Law Rhymes 

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical 

1831 Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince 

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, third edition 

(substantially revised from the first edition 

of 1818) 

1832 Anna Jameson, Characteristics of Women 

Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology 

Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Mask of Anarchy 

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Poems 


1826 Founding of University College, London, as a 

secular alternative to the universities of Oxford 

and Cambridge (both of which were tied to the 

established Church of England) 

Georg Simon Ohm defines the relationship 

between electrical voltage, current, and 

resistance 

1828 Repeal of the Test Act, which had required that 

all holders of office swear allegiance to the 

monarch as head of the Church of England and 

receive the sacrament of communion through 

the established Church (thereby excluding from 

office all who were not members of the Church 

of England). A broader Catholic Emancipation 

followed in 1829, though some discriminatory 

measures remained in the case of Catholics; the 

many restrictions existing for Jews were 

unaffected by the 1828 and 1829 measures 

1829 Metropolitan Police Act sets up an organized 

police force in London—often called the first 

police force in the modern sense of the term. 

(Previously law enforcement had been provided 

through a combination of individual local 

constables, informal local militias, and, in the 

case of larger disturbances, army troops.) The 

early police officers were called “Peelers,” after 

Sir Robert Peel, the Home secretary (later Prime 

Minister) responsible for the force’s creation 

1831 Defeat of First and Second Reform Bills; a 

Third Reform Bill is introduced 

1832 Representation of the People Act (commonly 

referred to as the Reform Act) passed by both 

houses of Parliament. The act introduced a 

number of changes to the electoral system and


Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the 

Americans 

1833 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (published 

serially in 1833-34; first published in book 

form in 1836 [United States] and 1838 

[England]) 

1834 Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Last Days of 

Pompeii 

Sara Coleridge, Pretty Lessons in Verse for Good 

Children 

1835 Mary Shelley, Lodore 

1836 Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz 

Caroline Norton, A Voice from the Factories 

1837 Bentley’s Miscellany first published 

Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution 

Charles Dickens, The Posthumous Papers of the 

Pickwick Club (later generally referred to as 

The Pickwick Papers) 

Harriet Martineau, Society in America 

Mary Shelley, Falkner 

substantially expanded the categories of people 

eligible to vote 

1833 Report on the Employment of Children in Factories 

Factory Act restricts working hours to no more 

than 9 hours per day for children aged 9-13 and 

no more than 10 hours per day for those aged 

13-18 

British Emancipation Act (also known as the 

Slavery Abolition Act): the Act, which was passed 

by Parliament and signed into law in 1833 but 

which took effect on 1 August 1834, ended 

slavery in all British possessions. (Britain’s 

involvement in the slave trade had ended in 1807, 

but slavery itself within British territories had not) 

John Keble’s attack on a proposal to reduce the 

number of bishoprics helps spark the formation 

of the “Oxford Movement,” a group that sought 

to promote within the Church of England the 

bonds between the traditions of that church and 

those of the Catholic Church of Rome 

1834 Poor Law Amendment Act sets out workhouse 

procedures 

Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge dies 

1835 First colonial settlement at Melbourne, Australia 

1836 Beginning of the Chartist Movement; the 

People’s Charter calls for universal suffrage and 

a variety of other reforms 

Boer settlers in South Africa begin a “Great 

Trek” away from British-controlled territory 

1837 Samuel Morse demonstrates his electric 

telegraph in New York 

Death of George IV; 18-year-old Princess 

Victoria assumes the throne

The Victorian Era 



















1830 Ebenezer Elliot, Corn Law Rhymes 

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical 

1831 Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince 

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, third edition 

(substantially revised from the first edition 

of 1818) 

1832 Anna Jameson, Characteristics of Women 

Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology 

Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Mask of Anarchy 


Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the 

Americans 


1831 Defeat of First and Second Reform Bills; a third 

reform Bill is introduced 

1832 Representation of the People Act (commonly 

referred to as the Reform Act) passed by both 

houses of Parliament. The act introduced a 

number of changes to the electoral system and 

substantially expanded the franchise

12 The Victorian Era 

1833 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (published 

serially in 1833-34; first published in book 

form in 1836 [United States] and 1838 

[England]) 

1834 Edward Lytton Bulwer (later Edward Bulwer- 

Lytton), The Last Days of Pompeii 

Sara Coleridge, Pretty Lessons in Verse for Good 

Children 

1835 Mary Shelley, Lodore 

1836 Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz 

Caroline Norton, A Voice from the Factories 

1837 Bentley’s Miscellany first published 

Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution 

Charles Dickens, The Posthumous Papers of the 

Pickwick Club (later generally referred to as 

The Pickwick Papers) 

Harriet Martineau, Society in America 

Mary Shelley, Falkner 

1833 Report on the Employment of Children in 

Factories 

Factory Act restricts working hours in the textile 

industry to no more than 9 hours per day for 

children aged 9-13 and no more than 10 hours 

per day for those aged 13-18 

British Emancipation Act (also known as the 

Slavery Abolition Act): the Act, which was 

passed by Parliament and signed into law in 

1833 but which took effect August 1, 1834, 

ended slavery in all British possessions. (Britain’s 

involvement in the slave trade had ended in 

1807, but slavery itself within British territories 

had not) 

John Keble’s attack on a proposal to reduce the 

number of bishoprics helps to spark the formation 

of the “Oxford Movement,” a group that 

sought to promote within the Church of England 

the bonds between the traditions of that church 

and those of the Catholic Church of Rome 

1834 Poor Law Amendment Act sets out workhouse 

procedures 

Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge dies 

1835 First colonial settlement at Melbourne, Australia 

1836 Beginning of the Chartist Movement; the 

People’s Charter calls for universal suffrage and 

a variety of other reforms 

Boer settlers in South Africa begin a “Great 

Trek” away from British-controlled territory 

1837 Samuel Morse demonstrates his electric 

telegraph in New York 

Death of William IV; 18-year-old Princess 

Victoria assumes the throne

1838 Charles Darwin, The Zoology of the Voyage of 

HMS Beagle 

Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist; or The Parish 

Boy’s Progress 

Lady Charlotte Guest, The Mabinogion (first 

translation into English) 

Sir Charles Lyell, Elements of Geology 

1839 William H. Ainsworth, Jack Sheppard 

Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby 


1838 First regular London-New York steamship 

service begins 

Richard Cobden and John Bright establish the 

Anti-Corn Law League. (Parliament had passed 

the Importation Act in 1815—legislation 

subsequently referred to as the Corn Laws— 

protecting grain producers against imports, and 

thereby maintaining higher prices for 

consumers) 

1838-39 Louis Daguerre in France and Henry Fox 

Talbot in England introduce rival methods of 

photography 

1838-80 The Anglo-Afghan Wars: this series of conflicts 

had its roots in what came to be referred to as 

“The Great Game” of great power politics— 

specifically, in Britain’s desire to increase its 

sphere of influence while at the same time 

putting a check on Russia’s expansionist 

tendencies in Central Asia. Persia (which had 

formerly controlled Afghanistan) also retained 

territorial ambitions and, in the First Afghan 

War (1838-40), attempted to re-establish its 

control. But Afghan resistance to foreign rule 

was extremely fierce, and the British suffered 

substantial losses, even in battles in which they 

were judged to have been victorious. In 1880, 

they pulled out their forces and handed the 

throne to Abdul Rahman Khan—a strong leader 

who was nevertheless prepared to accept a large 

measure of British control of Afghan foreign 

policy 

1839 Chartists present to Parliament a petition calling 

for reforms; when Parliament votes not to hear 

the petitioners, widespread protests erupt, with 

rioting in many towns and calls for a general 

strike 

Infant Custody Bill (pressed for by Caroline 

Norton) ends the absolute control of husbands 

over their children’s custody, allowing mothers 

in the event of divorce or separation to apply for 

custody of children under the age of seven, and 

for access to children under the age of sixteen


1840 Frances Trollope, The Life and Adventures of 

Michael Armstrong: The Factory Boy 

1841 Dion Boucicault, London Assurance: A Comedy 

Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and 

the Heroic in History 

Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop 

A.W.N. Pugin, The True Principles of Pointed or 

Christian Architecture 

1842 Robert Browing, Dramatic Lyrics (number 3 in 

the Bells and Pomegranates series, 1841-46) 


1843 Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present 

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol 

Thomas Hood, The Song of the Shirt 

John Ruskin, Modern Painters 

1839-60 Anglo-Chinese Opium Wars: the British, keen 

to increase trade penetration into China, had 

encouraged the growth of trade in opium, which 

was popular among the Chinese but had been 

made illegal by a Chinese government alarmed 

at its effect on the populace. The British 

continued to subsidize and protect the 

production of opium in their Indian colonies 

and to support its importation into China, and 

the issue eventually sparked two wars (1839-42 

and 1856-69). In 1860, the Chinese finally 

succumbed to a joint Anglo-French force that 

captured Beijing and looted the treasure-filled 

Summer Palace before destroying it. The 

Chinese were forced to legalize the opium trade 

again, but the atmosphere of mistrust between 

China and the European powers that the 

conflicts had engendered lasted well into the 

twentieth century. 

1840 Queen Victoria marries Prince Albert 

1842 China forced to cede Hong Kong to Britain 

through the provisions of the Treaty of Nanking 

Copyright Act increases the period of protection 

for intellectual property rights to 42 years after 

publication, and to seven years after an author’s 

death 

Charles Edward Mudie begins to lend books for 

a fee from his bookselling and stationery shop; 

by the early 1850s, Mudie’s Select Library had 

proved a substantial success 

1843 The Economist Weekly Commercial Times 

newspaper first published, with the aim of 

publishing articles in which “free-trade 

principles will be most rigidly applied to all the 

most important questions of the day”

1844 Elizabeth Barrett (later Elizabeth Barrett 

Browning), Poems 

Benjamin Disraeli, Coningsby; or, The New 

Generation 

Harriet Martineau, Life in the Sick Room; or, 

Essays by an Invalid 

William Makepeace Thackeray, The Luck of 

Barry Lyndon 

1845 Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil; or, The Two Nations 

Harriet Martineau, Letters on Mesmerism 

1846 “Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell” (Charlotte 

Brontë, Emily Brontë and Anne Brontë), Poems 

by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell 

1847 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre 

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights 

Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey 

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Princess 


Maori revolt against British colonial rule in New 

Zealand 

1844 Public bath houses open in Britain for the first 

time 

Invention of wood-pulp paper 

Founding of the Young Men’s Christian 

Association (YMCA) 

Factory Act restricts working hours in the textile 

industry to no more than 6 ½ hours per day for 

children aged 9-13; maximum working hours 

for women are set at 12 hours per day, 9 hours 

on Sunday. The Act also included a variety of 

provisions regarding workplace safety 

1845 John Franklin sets sail to try to find the 

Northwest Passage 

1845-49 Anglo-Sikh Wars: the two wars (1845-46 and 

1848-49) were fought on the British side under 

the auspices of the British East India Company; 

at war’s end, the British had brought the Sikh 

Kingdom under control and annexed the Punjab 

1845-50 Famine in Ireland as fungus destroys much of 

the potato crop. By 1850, it is believed that 

between 750,000 and 1,000,000 people had 

died and approximately 2,000,000 had 

emigrated; the population of Ireland (over 6 

million in the early 1840s) had in 2006 still not 

recovered to its pre-famine level 

1846 Corn Laws repealed in the face of intense public 

pressure. The move was intended in part to 

ameliorate the effects of famine in Ireland, but 

the change was phased in over three years and 

came too late to provide much help to the Irish 

1847 Foundation of the Communist League, the first 

international organization devoted to 

communist doctrines; Karl Marx and Friedrich 

Engels are asked to write a manifesto setting out 

the organization’s principles


1848 Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall 

Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son 

Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton 

William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair 

1849 Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of 

England from the Accession of James II 

William Makepeace Thackeray, The History of 

Pendennis 

1850 Charles Dickens begins to publish Household 

Words 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Poems 

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield 

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memorium A. H. H. 

Factory Act restricts the working week for 

women and children under 18 employed in 

factories to 58 hours 

1848 Revolt and revolution across Europe, including 

upheavals in Austria, Rome, Venice, Milan, and 

Berlin. In France, Louis Phillipe is forced to 

relinquish the monarchy; a republic is declared 

and the right to vote is granted to all males; 

Louis Napoleon, a descendant of Napoleon 

Bonaparte who had been living in exile, returns 

and is elected as president of the republic 

Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Dante 

Gabriel Rossetti form the Pre-Raphaelite 

Brotherhood. The group, founded in reaction to 

what the three saw as an overly classical and 

academic approach by many artists of their day, 

put forward four goals: “to have genuine ideas to 

express; to study Nature attentively, so as to 

know how to express them; to sympathize with 

what is direct and serious and heartfelt in 

previous art, to the exclusion of what is 

conventional and self-parading and learned by 

rote; and, most indispensable of all, to produce 

thoroughly good pictures and statues” 

1849 Bedford College founded in London (the first 

institution in Britain to offer higher education 

for women) 

1850 Public Libraries Act: although this act did not 

directly fund the creation of “libraries freely 

open to the public,” as Edward Edwards and 

others pressing for a new bill had wanted, it did 

allow local authorities to levy taxes in a very 

limited way in order to pay for the creation of 

such libraries. Even after an amendment 

increasing the amount that municipalities could 

levy, it was impossible for local authorities to do 

so without also enlisting the help of wealthy 

benefactors. Manchester and some other towns 

acted quickly to set up libraries, but it was only 

in the twentieth century—particularly after the 

1919 abolition of the rate limits—that publicly 

funded lending libraries spread throughout 

Britain

1851 J.S. Le Fanu, Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery 

Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London 

Poor 

John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice: Volume the 

First 

1852 Susanna Moodie, Roughing It in the Bush 

William Makepeace Thackeray, The History of 

Henry Esmond, Esq. 

1853 Matthew Arnold, Poems: A New Edition 

Charlotte Brontë, Villette 

Charles Dickens, Bleak House 

Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford 

Charlotte M. Yonge, The Heir of Redclyffe 


Alfred, Lord Tennyson appointed Poet Laureate, 

succeeding William Wordsworth 

1851 Great Exhibition of Science and Industry in the 

Crystal Palace, London 

Coup d’état in France in December: Louis 

Napoleon suspends the constitution of the 

republic and declares himself Emperor. (Those 

moves, together with the seizure of property 

from some French citizens, leads some in Britain 

to see Louis Napoleon as dangerously 

unpredictable—and to fear he might 

contemplate an invasion of Britain) 

1851-53 Cape Colony-Xhosa War: this conflict was the 

bloodiest of the Cape Frontier wars (also known 

as the Kaffir Wars) that were fought intermittently 

from 1779 to 1879 as the Cape Colony 

expanded and took over territory previously 

occupied by the Xhosa peoples of the Eastern 

Cape. In the case of the 1851-53 war, conflict 

broke out after the Cape colonists objected to a 

previous treaty settlement reserving a territory 

known as Sandile for occupation by native 

Africans. Britain was reluctantly drawn into the 

conflict in support of the colonists; the Cape 

Colony and British forces suffered substantial 

losses, but eventually their superior numbers and 

firepower overwhelmed the Xhosa, and in 1853 

the disputed territory was annexed to the Cape 

Colony 

1852 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin 

1853-56 Crimean War: Britain and France went to war 

in support of the crumbling Turkish Ottoman 

Empire in order to try to preserve the European 

balance of power against Russia. France and 

Russia had come into conflict in the matter of 

who would exert religious authority over 

Christian worship in the Ottoman empire. In 

the ensuing struggle, it was feared that Russia 

might seize control not only of the strategic 

Black Sea port of Sebastopol, but perhaps also of 

Constantinople, the center of the Ottoman


1854 Charles Dickens, Hard Times 

“Arthur Pendennis” (William Makepeace 

Thackeray), The Newcomes 

1855 Robert Browning, Men and Women 

Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South 

Charles Kingsley, Westward Ho! 

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Maud, and Other 

Poems (revised version published 1856) 

Anthony Trollope, The Warden 

Charlotte M. Yonge, The Railroad Children 

Daily Telegraph begins publishing 

1856 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh 

Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English 

Opium Eater (enlarged edition; first edition 


Charlotte M. Yonge, The Daisy Chain; or, 

Aspirations 

1857 Charlotte Brontë, The Professor 

Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit 

Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë 

Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays 

Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers 

empire. The war, which ended with an 

agreement by all sides to respect the territorial 

integrity of the Ottoman empire, was notable 

for the introduction of railway and telegraph 

technology to warfare, for various 

demonstrations of military futility (most 

famously, the Charge of the Light Brigade at the 

Battle of Balaclava), and for its appalling 

casualty rates—the worst of any war for which 

records exist. Casualties from disease far 

outnumbered those from battle, and Florence 

Nightingale became famous for leading a force 

of volunteer nurses to care for the sick, and for 

campaigning for improved conditions for troops 

1856 The Australian colonies of Tasmania, Victoria, 

and South Australia become the first Britishcontrolled 

jurisdictions to enact voting by secret 

ballot. (Britain did not adopt the secret ballot 

until the Ballot Act of 1872; Canada made the 

change in 1874, and the “Australian ballot” was 

not adopted in the United States until the 

1880s) 

County and Borough Police Act makes the 

formation of a county constabulary compulsory 

in every county. Following the introduction of a 

police force to London in 1829, a number of 

jurisdictions had followed suit in setting up their 

own constabularies; the 1856 Act regularized 

this practice throughout England. A similar act 

was passed regarding Scotland in 1857 

1857 Matrimonial Causes Act makes it possible to 

obtain a divorce through the law courts rather 

than through a Private Act of Parliament. Under 

the provisions of the Act, adultery by the wife 

was sufficient cause for a husband to sue for 

divorce, but adultery by the husband was not 

considered cause without its being accompanied 

by grounds such as cruelty or desertion 

Matthew Arnold appointed Professor of Poetry 

at Oxford University 

Indian Rebellion: this war had its roots in 

economic and religious grievances among the 

native Hindu and Muslim population against

1858 “George Eliot” (Mary Anne Evans), Scenes of 

Clerical Life 

George MacDonald, Phantastes: A Faerie 

Romance for Men and Women 

1859 Dion Boucicault, The Octoroon 

Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by 

Natural Selection 

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities 

George Eliot, Adam Bede 

Edward Fitzgerald (trans.), The Rubáiyát of 

Omar Khayyám 


control by the British East India Company, 

which had attempted to outlaw various religious 

customs deemed uncivilized and to convert 

many Indians to Christianity. The rebellion was 

eventually suppressed by the British, but it 

brought about the end of the British East India 

Company’s rule in India; in 1858, the 

company’s powers were transferred to the 

British Crown, and for the following 90 years, 

Britain ruled India directly through their 

viceroy. The war, sometimes referred to as the 

Indian Mutiny or the Sepoy Rebellion, is also 

referred to as the First War of Indian 

Independence 

Members of the Philological Society form an 

“Unregistered Words Committee” to identify 

words not included in extant dictionaries. The 

following year, the Society decided in principle 

to undertake preparation of A New English 

Dictionary on Historical Principles. The project 

proceeded fitfully until 1879, when it was taken 

over by Oxford University Press and James 

Murray was appointed general editor. The first 

edition of the full Oxford English Dictionary was 

finally published in 1928 

Charles Baudelaire, Les fleurs du mal (The 

Flowers of Evil) 

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary. The novel 

had been issued in serial form in 1856; Flaubert 

was tried on charges of obscenity in January/ 

February of 1857 and acquitted, and the novel 

became a bestseller in book form later that year


George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel 

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty 

Samuel Smiles, Self-Help 

Alfred, Alfred Tennyson, Idylls of the King 

1860 Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White 

George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss 

1861 Charles Dickens, Great Expectations 

Charles Reade, The Cloister and the Hearth 

Ellen Wood (Mrs. Henry Wood), East Lynne 

1862 Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret 

Arthur Hugh Clough, Poems 

George Meredith, Modern Love 

Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market, and Other 

Poems 

1863 Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Aurora Floyd 

George Eliot, Romola 

Elizabeth Gaskell, Sylvia’s Lover 

Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies 

John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism 

Charles Reade, Hard Cash: A Matter-of-Fact 

Romance 

1864 J.S. Le Fanu, Uncle Silas 

John Henry Newman (later Cardinal), Apologia 

Pro Vita Sua 

1860 Emancipation of the serfs in Russia 

1861 Giuseppe Garibaldi completes the unification of 

Italy with his conquest of Naples; Victor 

Emmanuel is crowned as king of the new nation 

Prince Albert dies 

1861-64 American Civil War: though the people of the 

adjacent British colonies in Canada were almost 

universally opposed to slavery, opinion in 

Britain itself was mixed—particularly after the 

“Trent Affair” in 1861, in which a US warship 

intercepted a British ship (the R.M.S. Trent) on 

its way to London and forcibly removed two 

Confederate diplomats who had hoped to plead 

their case to the British. The French declared 

their willingness to fight alongside the British if 

Britain went to war against the Union 

government, but the crisis was defused early in 

1862, and neither Britain nor any other 

European powers intervened in the American 

conflict 

1862 Emancipation Proclamation in America 

Otto von Bismarck becomes Prime Minister of 

Prussia. Bismarck largely created the modern 

German state over the following decade 

1864-69 Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866, and 

1869 (all repealed in 1886 after a long campaign 

of public opposition): these acts attempted to

1865 Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism 

“Lewis Carroll” (C.L. Dodgson), Alice’s 

Adventures in Wonderland 

Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend 

J.S. Le Fanu, Guy Deverell 

David Livingstone, Narrative of an Expedition to 

the Zambesi and its Tributaries 

Charlotte M. Yonge, The Clever Woman of the 

Family 

1866 Margaret Oliphant, Miss Marjoribanks 

Algernon Charles Swinburne, Poems and Ballads 

1867 Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution 

Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset 

Augusta Webster, A Woman Sold, and Other 

Poems 


control venereal disease in specified cities and 

towns by mandating the physical examination of 

women suspected of being prostitutes, and 

interning those suspected of infection for up to 

three months, without legal recourse. No 

provisions were included for the examination or 

detention of the prostitutes’ clientele 

1865 Morant Bay Insurrection (also known as the 

Jamaica Rebellion) and subsequent Eyre 

controversy: this episode had its roots in the 

deplorable conditions to which Jamaica’s black 

population remained subject. Officially, they 

had been free since the 1834 emancipation of all 

slaves in British possessions, but in practice 

there were severe limits on this freedom. 

Economically, most remained under the 

effective control of plantation owners, and 

exorbitant voting fees in effect reserved the right 

to vote to wealthy white males. The spark for 

insurrection in 1865 was the imprisonment of a 

black man for trespassing on a long-abandoned 

piece of property. When the militia fired into a 

gathering of protesters, killing at least seven, the 

crowd attacked in turn and killed at least 18 

members of the militia and others. The 

insurrection was quickly put down by troops, 

but, after calm had been restored, the Governor- 

General, Edward John Eyre, ordered brutal 

reprisals; almost 800 black Jamaicans were killed 

either directly by troops or by execution without 

proper trial and at least 600 were flogged. The 

episode excited considerable controversy in 

Britain, and Governor Eyre was suspended from 

his duties and recalled, but never formally 

accused or tried for his actions 

1865-69 Leo Tolstoy, Voyna I mir (War and Peace) is 

published in serial form 

1867 Reform Act (often referred to as the Second 

Reform Bill) extends the franchise to all male 

householders satisfying a residential 

requirement, greatly increasing the size of the 

electorate. Member of Parliament John Stuart


1868 Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book (vols. 

1 and 2) 

Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone: A Romance 

1869 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy 

R.D. Blackmore, Lorna Doone 

John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women 

1870 Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood 

Edward Lear, Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany and 

Alphabet 

Charles Reade, Put Yourself in his Place 

Augusta Webster, Portraits 

Mill proposes an amendment to the Act that 

would substitute “person” for “man”—thereby 

enfranchising women for the first time—but the 

amendment is defeated 196 to 73 

Bicycles first manufactured in France 

British North America Act unites Ontario, 

Quebec, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick to 

form the Dominion of Canada—a confederation 

largely independent of British control. 

(Britain retained limited control over Canadian 

foreign policy until the Statute of Westminster 

in 1931) 

Factory Extension Act extended the provisions 

of earlier Factory Acts (many of which had 

applied only to the textile industry) to all firms 

employing more than 50 workers 

Émile Zola, Thérèse Raquin 

1868 Public executions abolished 

1869 Joseph Lister invents antiseptics 

The Suez canal opened 

1870 Elementary Education Act mandates that 

elementary education be made available to all 

children through local school boards. Under the 

provisions of the act, the boards were allowed 

(but not required) to make attendance 

compulsory within their jurisdictions. An 1872 

act mandated compulsory elementary education 

in Scotland. In 1880, attendance was made 

compulsory throughout England (though fees 

could still be levied); in 1891, elementary 

education was made universally free as well as 

compulsory 

Married Women’s Property Act of 1870 grants 

women control over funds earned by or given to 

them in certain financial categories (such as 

wages earned after marriage, certain investments, 

and legacies under £200)

1871 Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Coming Race 

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, and 

What Alice Found There 

George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin 

Samuel Smiles, Character 

1872 Samuel Butler, Erewhon; or, Over the Range 

Frances Power Cobbe, Darwinism in Morals and 

Other Essays 

George Eliot, Middlemarch 

Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree 

Christina Rossetti, Sing-Song 

Henry Morton Stanley, How I Found 

Livingstone 

1873 Robert Bridges, Poems by Robert Bridges 

John Henry Newman (later Cardinal), The Idea 

of a University 

1874 Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd 


1870-71 Franco-Prussian War: the immediate cause of 

France declaring war on Prussia was a dispute 

over the succession to the Spanish throne, but 

its underlying cause was French concern that 

Prussia’s new position of prominence (among 

the loose federation of quasi-independent states 

that together comprised Germany) would upset 

the European balance of power. As it turned 

out, France’s anxiety was well founded: 

Germany’s ability to mobilize rapidly (using 

railways to best advantage) and their superior 

artillery helped them to decisively defeat the 

French. Before the war’s end, the French 

Emperor had been overthrown and the Germans 

had formally united in a single nation state 

under the Prussian monarch. The French were 

forced to cede territory in the provinces of 

Alsace and Lorraine to Germany 

End of religion requirement for admission to the 

universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and 

Durham; it had previously been required that 

one be a communicant in the established 

Church of England 

1871 Paris Commune: disenchantment among French 

workers both at their country’s humiliating 

defeat and at poor economic conditions had led 

to an upsurge of socialism, and in the spring of 

1871 the “Conseille de la Commune” assumed 

power in Paris. The commune was soon 

overthrown, but it came to be seen by many as a 

model for revolutionary government 

1872 Formation of the National Society for Women’s 

Suffrage, forerunner of the influential National 

Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies 

1873 Arthur Rimbaud, Un saison en enfer (A Season in 

Hell) 

1874 Factory Act legislates a 56 hour work week


1876 George Eliot, Daniel Deronda 

Margaret Oliphant, Phoebe Junior 

1878 W. S. Gilbert, HMS Pinafore; or The Lass that 

Loved a Sailor 

Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native 

Algernon Charles Swinburne, Poems and 

Ballads; Second Series 

1879 The Boy’s Own Paper begins publishing 

1880 James Thomson, The City of Dreadful Night, 


The Girl’s Own Paper begins publishing 

First exhibition of Impressionist paintings in 

Paris 

1876 Trial of Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh for 

publishing a pamphlet on birth control 

Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone 

Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle of operas 

performed at the new Bayreuth Theater 

Stéphane Mallarmé, L’après-midi d’un faun (The 

Afternoon of a Faun) 

1877 Queen Victoria named Empress of India 

All England Lawn Tennis Championship first 

held at Wimbledon 

Thomas Edison invents the phonograph 

1878 Factory Act applies the Factory Code to all 

trades, eliminates the employment of children 

under the age of 10, limits the employment of 

workers aged 10-14 to half days, and limits the 

employment of women to 56 hours per week 

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Swan Lake 

1878-79 Joseph Swann in Britain and Thomas Edison in 

the United States develop practical and longlasting 

forms of electric lighting 

1879 Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House 

Anglo-Zulu War: Henry Bartle Frere, charged 

with the task of bringing about a consolidation 

of British colonies in southern Africa, provoked 

a quarrel with the independent Zulu nation, 

which ended with the British invading 

Zululand; fierce fighting ensued, with the Zulu 

inflicting a humiliating defeat on British forces 

at Isandldwana on 22 January, but by the end of 

July the British had established control over 

Zulu territory, and the war ended

1881 T.H. Huxley, Science and Culture, and Other 

Essays 

Amy Levy, Xantippe, and Other Verse 

Christina Rossetti, A Pageant, and Other Poems 

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ballads and Sonnets 

Oscar Wilde, Poems 

1883 Eliza Lynn Linton, The Girl from the Period, and 

Other Social Essays 

Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island 

1884 Amy Levy, A Minor Poet, and Other Verses 


1881 Formation of the Rational Dress Society, 

founded in order to campaign against “any 

fashion or dress that either deforms the figure 

[or] impedes the movement of the body,” and to 

promote clothing for women that was 

appropriate to “active purposes” 

1882 Married Women’s Property Act legislates the 

right of women to retain property they have 

obtained before or after marriage; earnings or 

property acquired by women while married 

remain legally the property of their husbands 

1884 Amendment to the Married Women’s Property 

Act conveys the status of an independent person 

on a married woman (who had previously been 

considered part of the “chattel” of her husband) 

Reform Act extends the vote to all male 

householders 

Berlin Conference: acting on a suggestion from 

Portugal, German Chancellor Otto von 

Bismarck called a conference of European 

powers, plus the United States, to clarify the 

extent of their respective “spheres of influence” 

(the first time this term is recorded as having 

been used) in Africa and to resolve any issues 

over disputed territories. The Conference agreed 

on boundaries dividing up almost the whole of 

Africa among the colonial powers and 

confirmed the Free State of the Congo as 

belonging to Leopold II of Belgium 

Founding of the Fabian Society, with the aim of 

advancing the socialist cause by gradualist 

means, rather than revolution 

1884-85 Siege of Khartoum: in December 1883, the 

British government had ordered the evacuation 

of British and Egyptian nationals from the 

Sudan in the face of a fierce rebellion against 

Anglo-Egyptian control of the territory. General 

Charles George Gordon, sent by the British to 

support the garrison and help coordinate their


1885 W.S. Gilbert, The Mikado 

H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines 

George Meredith, Diana of the Crossways 

Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean 

Robert Louis Stevenson, A Child’s Garden of 

Verses 

1886 Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge 

Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. 

Jekyll 

and Mr. Hyde 

Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped 

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Locksley Hall Sixty 

Years After 

1887 H. Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure 

1888 Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet 

Thomas Hardy, Wessex Tales 

Amy Levy, The Romance of a Shop 

withdrawal, ordered the evacuation of women 

and children but remained in Khartoum with a 

small British force, unwilling to concede defeat 

in the territory; from 18 March onwards, 

Khartoum was under siege. Public opinion 

swung behind Gordon in his defiance of orders, 

and the government was eventually forced to 

authorize the sending of reinforcements to 

provide relief to Gordon. The forces of Mahdi 

Mohammed Ahmed finally overwhelmed the 

city and killed Gordon on 18 January 1885; two 

days later, the relief force arrived and 

reestablished British control over Khartoum 

1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act raises the age of 

consent for girls to 16 from 13; the Labouchière 

Amendment to the act criminalizes all sexual 

acts between men (consensual or not) 

1886 Guardianship of Infants Act makes it possible 

for a woman to be declared the sole guardian of 

her children if her husband dies 

Prime Minister William Gladstone’s effort to 

allow Ireland its own legislature and a limited 

degree of independence from British control 

fails as the Irish Government Bill (also known as 

the First Home Rule Bill) is defeated 341 to 311 

in the House of Commons, with 93 from 

Gladstone’s own Liberal Party voting against the 

measure. The “Unionist” Liberal dissidents 

allied themselves with Lord Salisbury’s 

Conservative Party in the ensuing general 

election, and Gladstone was thrown from office. 

Subsequent attempts in 1893 and 1914 to enact 

some form of Irish Home Rule also failed; not 

until the Government of Ireland Act of 1920 

was “Home Rule” finally both passed and 

implemented 

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil 

1887 Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee 

1888 Annie Besant leads the Match Girls strike at the 

Bryant and May factory in London

Mary Ward (Mrs. Humphrey Ward), Robert 

Elsmere 

1889 Henry James, A London Life 

Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat (To Say 

Nothing of the Dog) 

Andrew Lang, The Blue Fairy Book 

Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwinism 

William Butler Yeats, The Wanderings of Oisin, 


1890 Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four 

J.G. Frazer, The Golden Bough 

“Vernon Lee” (Violet Paget), Hauntings 

Sidney Webb, Socialism in England 

1891 Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure 

Woman Faithfully Presented 

William Morris, News from Nowhere 

Arthur Wing Pinero, The Times: A Comedy 

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray 

1892 Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock 

Holmes 

G.A. Henty, The Dash for Khartoum 

1893 Annie Besant, An Autobiography 

“George Egerton” (Mary Chavelita Dunne), 

Keynotes 

George Gissing, The Odd Women 

“Sarah Grand” (Frances Elizabeth McFall), The 

Heavenly Twins 

Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan 

Israel Zangwill, Ghetto Tragedies 

1894 Ella Hepworth Dixon, The Story of a Modern 

Woman 

George du Maurier, Trilby 

“Anthony Hope” (Anthony Hope Hawkins), 

The Prisoner of Zenda 

Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book 

Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance 


“Jack the Ripper” murders in the East End of 

London 

Completion of the Forth Railway Bridge in 

Scotland 

1890 City and South London Railway (now 

incorporated into the Northern Line) opens as 

the first electrically-operated “deep line” in the 

London Underground. (Previous lines, 

beginning in 1863 with the Metropolitan 

Railway, had been covered railways rather than 

underground subways in the modern sense) 

1892 Alfred, Lord Tennyson dies 

1893 Independent Labour Party formed; Labour soon 

became a serious competitor to the Liberal and 

Conservative parties, and by the 1930s it had 

supplanted the Liberals as the main alternative 

to the Conservatives 

New Zealand grants women the right to vote 

1894-95 Japan defeats China in the Sino-Japanese war


1895 Grant Allen, The Woman Who Did 

Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure 

Arthur Wing Pinero, The Second Mrs. 

Tanqueray 

H.G. Wells, The Time Machine 

1896 A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad 

H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau 

1897 Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the “Narcissus” 

Havelock Ellis, Sexual Inversion 

Sarah Grand, The Beth Book 

Mary Kingsley, Travels in West Africa 

Henry Newbolt, Admirals All, and Other Verses 

Bram Stoker, Dracula 

H.G. Wells, The Invisible Man: A Grotesque 

Romance 

1898 Thomas Hardy, Wessex Poems, and Other Verses 

Bernard Shaw, Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant 

H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds 

1899 Helen Bannerman, The Story of Little Black 

Sambo 

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness 

Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in 

Literature 

Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest: A 

Trivial Comedy for Serious People 

Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband 

William Butler Yeats, The Wind Among the 

Reeds 

1895 Oscar Wilde arrested and tried for homosexual 

acts 

1896-97 Revolt of the Ndebele and Shona peoples 

against colonial rule by the British South Africa 

Company in Matabeleland (now part of 

Zimbabwe). The British sent troops to suppress 

the uprising, which is now known variously as 

the Matabeleland Rebellion, the First 

Chimurenga, and the First War of Zimbabwean 

Independence 

1897 Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee 

1898 The Fashoda incident: France attempts to claim 

the area surrounding Fashoda in Southern 

Sudan as a French protectorate, but eventually 

backs down; the issue is resolved without 

fighting, and the area remains under British 

control 

1899 Irish Literary Theatre founded 

Sigmund Freud publishes Die Traumdeutung 

(The Interpretation of Dreams) 

1899-1902 South African War (also known as the Anglo- 

Boer War): an influx of British settlers to the 

Transvaal following the discovery of gold in 

1885 had put pressure on relations between 

Britain and the independent republics of the 

Orange Free State and the Transvaal (South 

African Republic), both controlled by Dutchdescended 

Afrikaaners. Tensions were exacerbated 

by the abortive 1896 Jameson raid (led by 

Starr Jameson of the Rhodesian police force), 

which was an attempt by the British to incite 

expatriate British workers in the Transvaal to 

rebel against the local government. In the war

1900 Winston Churchill, London to Ladysmith via 

Pretoria 

Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim 

H.G. Wells, Love and Mr. Lewisham 

1901 Miles Franklin, My Brilliant Career 

Rudyard Kipling, Kim 

H.G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon 

1902 Joseph Conrad, Youth 

Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the 

Baskervilles 

Rudyard Kipling, Just So Stories for Little 

Children 

Alice Meynell, Later Poems 

E(dith) Nesbit, Five Children and It 

Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Peter Rabbit 

Bernard Shaw, Mrs. Warren’s Profession (first 

private performance, Stage Society. Shaw 

completed the original version of the play in 

1892; it was first published [in Plays Pleasant 

and Unpleasant] in 1898, and first 

performed publicly [and subsequently 

banned] in New York, 1905. The Lord 

Chamberlain’s ban on its public 

performance in Britain was removed in 

1924) 


itself, the British suffered several embarrassing 

defeats (leading many in Britain to question the 

government’s colonial strategy) before finally 

overcoming the Afrikaaner forces. The two 

republics were incorporated into the British 

Empire at war’s end, but in 1912 South Africa 

was granted largely autonomous status as a 

dominion 

1900 Boxer Rebellion: this uprising in northern China 

was led by the Righteous Harmony Society 

(nicknamed the Boxers by Westerners), who 

were protesting the degree to which citizens and 

companies from Britain and other Western 

countries were given favorable treatment by the 

Qing dynasty. For some months, the foreign 

compound in Beijing was under siege, but by 

year’s end the rebellion had been suppressed 

(and numerous reprisals carried out) 

1901 Queen Victoria dies; Edward VII succeeds to 

the throne 

First wireless communication across the Atlantic 

Factory Act forbids the employment in factories 

or workshops of children under the age of 12 

Commonwealth of Australia formed

The Twentieth Century and Beyond 



















1899 Helen Bannerman, The Story of Little Black Sambo 

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness 

Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in 

Literature 

Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest: A 

Trivial Comedy for Serious People 

Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband 

William Butler Yeats, The Wind Among the Reeds 

 


1899 Irish Literary Theatre founded 

Sigmund Freud publishes Die Traumdeutung 

(The Interpretation of Dreams) 

1899-1902 South African War (also known as the Anglo- 

Boer War): an influx of British settlers to the 

Transvaal following the discovery of gold in 

1885 had put pressure on relations between 

Britain and the independent republics of the 

Orange Free State and the Transvaal (South 

African Republic), both controlled by Dutchdescended 

Afrikaners. Tensions were 

exacerbated by the abortive 1896 Jameson raid 

(led by Starr Jameson of the Rhodesian police 

force), which was an attempt by the British to 

incite expatriate British workers in the Transvaal

1900 Winston Churchill, London to Ladysmith via 

Pretoria 

Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim 

H.G. Wells, Love and Mr. Lewisham 

1901 Miles Franklin, My Brilliant Career 

Rudyard Kipling, Kim 

H.G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon 

1902 Joseph Conrad, Youth 

Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles 

Rudyard Kipling, Just So Stories for Little Children 

Alice Meynell, Later Poems 

E(dith) Nesbit, Five Children and It 

Beatrix Potter, The Tales of Peter Rabbit 

Bernard Shaw, Mrs. Warren’s Profession (first 

private performance, Stage Society. Shaw 

completed the original version of the play in 

1892; it was first published [in Plays Pleasant 

and Unpleasant] in 1898, and first 

performed publicly [and subsequently 

banned] in New York, 1905. The Lord 

Chamberlain’s ban on its public performance 

in Britain was removed in 1924) 

1903 Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh 

Joseph Conrad, Typhoon and Other Stories 


to rebel against the local government. In the war 

itself, the British suffered several embarrassing 

defeats (leading many in Britain to question the 

government’s colonial strategy) before finally 

overcoming the Afrikaner forces. The two 

republics were incorporated into the British 

Empire at war’s end, but in 1912 South Africa 

was granted largely autonomous status as a 

dominion 

1900 Boxer Rebellion: this uprising in northern China 

was led by the Righteous Harmony Society 

(nicknamed the Boxers by Westerners), who 

were protesting the degree to which citizens and 

companies from Britain and other Western 

countries were given favorable treatment by the 

Qing dynasty. For some months the foreign 

compound in Beijing was under siege, but by 

year’s end the rebellion had been suppressed 

(and numerous reprisals carried out) 

1901 Queen Victoria dies; Edward VII succeeds to 

the throne 

First wireless communication across the Atlantic 

Factory Act forbids the employment in factories 

or workshops of children under the age of 12 

Commonwealth of Australia formed 

1903 Women’s Social and Political Union (known as 

the “suffragettes”) formed as a more militant

32 The Twentieth Century and Beyond 

1904 J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan: The Boy Who Would Not 

Grow Up 

Aubrey Beardsley, Under the Hill (unexpurgated 

version published as The Story of Venus and 

Tannhauser in 1907) 

A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy 

G.K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill 

Joseph Conrad, Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard 

Sara Jeannette Duncan, The Imperialist 

Thomas Hardy, The Dynasts: A Drama of the 

Napoleonic Wars (first part; third and final 

part published in 1908) 

W.H. Hudson, Green Mansions 

“Saki” (Hector Hugh Munro), Reginald 

1905 Ernest Dowson, The Poems of Ernest Dowson 

Arthur Conan Doyle, The Return of Sherlock 

Holmes 

Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara 

H.G. Wells, Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul 

1906 H.W. Fowler and F.G. Fowler, The King’s 

English 

John Galsworthy, The Man of Property 

E(dith) Nesbit, The Railway Children 

1907 Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent 

J.M. Synge, The Aran Islands 

J.M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World 

1908 Arnold Bennett, The Old Wives’ Tale 

E.M. Forster, A Room with a View 

Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows 

Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables 

breakaway group from the National Union of 

Women’s Suffrage Societies 

Orville and Wilbur Wright achieve a sustained 

flight in a power-driven airplane 

1905 The Imperial Guard of Russia attacks a peaceful 

crowd of strikers and other demonstrators on 

“Bloody Sunday,” killing approximately 1,000, 

injuring thousands more, and sparking an 

attempted revolution throughout the Russian 

Empire against the rule of Czar Nicholas II 

Aliens Act of 1905 implements measures 

designed to deter Jewish immigration 

Albert Einstein formulates his Theory of Special 

Relativity 

1907 Rudyard Kipling becomes the first British 

winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 

Robert Baden-Powell founds the Boy Scouts; 

the Girl Guides are founded two years later 

1908 Olympic Games in London

1910 E.M. Forster, Howards End 

Bertrand Russell and A.N. Whitehead, Principia 

Mathematica 

H.G. Wells, The History of Mr. Polly 

1911 G.K. Chesterton, The Innocence of Father Brown 

Katherine Mansfield, In a German Pension 

Mary Ward, The Case of Richard Meynell 

1912 William Archer, Play-Making 

Stephen Leacock, Sunshine Sketches of a Little 

Town 

Isaac Rosenberg, Night and Day 

Saki, The Unbearable Bassington 

May Sinclair, Feminism 

1913 J.M. Barrie, Quality Street 

D.H. Lawrence, Love Poems and Others 

D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers 

Leonard Woolf, The Village in the Jungle 


1909 People’s budget introduced by the Liberal 

government of Prime Minister Herbert Asquith 

and Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd 

George. This budget was revolutionary in its 

measures to redistribute wealth more equitably 

in British society; its provisions included a 

graduated income tax—a measure that was 

rejected by the House of Lords 

Hunger strike by imprisoned suffrage activists 

Ford Motor Company begins production of the 

Model T 

1910 Landmark exhibition of post-impressionist art in 

London, organized by Roger Fry 

Union of South Africa granted dominion status 

Edward VII dies; George V comes to the throne 

1911 Health and unemployment insurance 

introduced through the National Insurance Act 

Constitutional crisis over the power of the 

House of Lords results in the Parliament Act, 

restricting the Lords’ power to veto House of 

Commons legislation 

Q’ing dynasty (the last monarchy in China) 

overthrown in a revolution led by Sun Yat-sen; a 

new republic is established 

1912 Major suffragette demonstrations in London 

Extension of copyright restrictions in Britain to 

fifty years after the death of the author 

Norwegian expedition led by Roald Amundsen 

reaches the South Pole and returns safely; rival 

expedition led by Robert Scott of Britain reaches 

the Pole a month later, and all members of the 

expedition succumb to sickness and starvation as 

they attempt to return 

1913 Bill providing for Irish Home Rule is passed 

twice by the House of Commons and both 

times defeated in the House of Lords


1914 J.M. Barrie, The Admirable Crichton 

Joseph Conrad, Chance 

James Joyce, Dubliners 

first issue of Blast: Review of the Great English 

Vortex (edited by Wyndham Lewis) 

Bernard Shaw, Common Sense About the War 

Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion (first performed in 

English; performed in German in Vienna 

the previous year) 

H.G. Wells, The War That Will End War 

1915 John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps 

Joseph Conrad, Victory 

Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier 

D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow 

Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage 

Alice Meynell, Poems on the War 

Dorothy Richardson, Pointed Roofs (first 

volume of the Pilgrimage series) 

Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out 

1916 John Buchan, Greenmantle 

Thomas Hardy, Selected Poems 

James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young 

Man 

Ada Leverson, Love at Second Sight 

H.G. Wells, Mr. Britling Sees It Through 

H.G. Wells, Easter 

1917 Rupert Brooke, Selected Poems 

T.S. Eliot, Prufrock and Other Observations 

William Butler Yeats, The Wild Swans at Coole, 

Other Verses, and a Play in Verse (revised 

edition, containing additional poems— 

notably “An Irish Airman Foresees His 

Death”—published 1919) 

First performance of Igor Stravinsky’s 

revolutionary ballet, The Rite of Spring 

Suffragette Emily Davidson throws herself in 

front of a horse ridden by King George V during 

the Epsom Derby and is killed 

1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand assassinated, 

sparking the outbreak of World War I 

First battle of Ypres 

1915 Coalition government formed in Britain 

Second battle of Ypres 

1916 Easter rising in Dublin 

Battles of Verduyn and the Somme 

Evacuation of Australian and British forces from 

Gallipoli in Turkey after a disastrous expedition 

First use of tanks in warfare 

Establishment in India of Home Rule Leagues, 

pressing for independence from British Colonial 

Rule 

Carl Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious 

1917 February revolution overthrows Czar Nicholas 

II in Russia; October revolution brings the 

Bolsheviks to power 

United States enters World War I

1918 Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems of Gerard 

Manley Hopkins 

Marie Stopes, Married Love 

Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians 

1919 Joseph Conrad, The Arrow of Gold 

T.S. Eliot, Poems 

John Maynard Keynes, The Economic 

Consequences of the Peace 

Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence 

Siegfried Sassoon, The War Poems of Siegfried 

Sassoon 

H.G. Wells, The Outline of History 

P.G. Wodehouse, My Man Jeeves 

Virginia Woolf, Night and Day 

1920 Hugh Lofting, The Story of Dr. Dolittle 

Katherine Mansfield, Bliss, and Other Stories 

1921 Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles 

John Galsworthy, To Let 

Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow 

D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love 

Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche: A Romance of the 

French Revolution 

Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah 

Lytton Strachey, Queen Victoria 

1922 Jane Austen, Love & Freindship (sic) and Other 

Early Works 

G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics, and Other Evils 

G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Knew Too 

Much, and Other Stories 

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land 

John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga 

Frank Harris, My Life and Loves 


1918 Representation of the People Act extends the 

vote to all men over 21, to women 

householders, and to wives of householders who 

are over the age of 30. In 1928, the franchise is 

extended to all women above the age of 21 

German spring offensive is stopped at the 

Marne, turning the tide in the War 

11 November Armistice brings an end to World 

War I 

1919 Conflict in Ireland and the proclamation of an 

Irish Free State 

Treaty of Versailles imposes reparations on 

Germany 

Sex Disqualification Removal Act removes a 

variety of legal barriers; the first woman 

Member of Parliament is admitted to the House 

of Commons 

1920 Formation of the League of Nations (without 

American participation, after the US Senate 

refuses to ratify the Treaty of Versailles) 

Public radio broadcasting stations set up in both 

the United States and Britain


James Joyce, Ulysses (first edition, published in 

Paris) 

Katherine Mansfield, The Garden-Party, and 

Other Stories 

1923 Arnold Bennett, Riceyman Steps 

Elizabeth Bowen, Encounters 

Joseph Conrad, The Rover 

1924 E.M. Forster, A Passage to India 

D.H. Lawrence, England, My England 

A.A. Milne, When We Were Very Young 

I.A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism 

Bernard Shaw, Saint Joan 

1925 Jane Austen, Sanditon 

Noel Coward, Hay Fever: A Comedy 

Howard Laski, A Grammar of Politics 

Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil 

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway 

William Butler Yeats, A Vision (revised edition 


1926 Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd 

T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom 

A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh 

Sean O’Casey, The Plough and the Stars 

1927 “Jean Rhys” (Ella Gwendolen Rhys Williams), 

The Left Bank and Other Stories 

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse 

1928 “Radclyffe Hall” (Marguerite Antonia 

Radclyffe-Hall), The Well of Loneliness 

D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (printed 

privately in Italy; first printed in the United 

Kingdom in 1960) 

A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner 

J.B. Priestley, Apes and Angels 

Laura Riding, Love as Love, Death as Death 

Bernard Shaw, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to 

Socialism and Capitalism 

Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography 

William Butler Yeats, The Tower 

1924 First Labour Party government in Britain (led by 

Ramsay MacDonald) 

André Breton, Manifeste du Surréalisme 

(Surrealist Manifesto) 

1926 General strike to protest the working conditions 

of coal miners lasts 9 days, but is broken up by 

troops; the coal miners are forced to settle 

1927 Economic collapse in Germany, fueled by 

hyper-inflation 

First nonstop flight between New York and 

Paris completed by Charles Lindbergh 

1928 Right to vote granted to all women over 21 

Publishers of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of 

Loneliness charged under the Obscene 

Publications Act 

Thomas Hardy dies.

1929 Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That 

Graham Greene, The Man Within 

Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica 

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own 

1930 W.S. Auden, Poems 

Samuel Beckett, Whoroscope 

Noel Coward, Private Lives: An Intimate 

Comedy 

J.B. Priestley, Angel Pavement 

1931 Virginia Woolf, The Waves 

1932 Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm 

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World 

1933 Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth 

Ivy Compton-Burnett, More Women Than Men 

Walter Greenwood, Love on the Dole 

James Hilton, Lost Horizon 

“George Orwell” (Eric Arthur Blair), Down and 

Out in Paris and London 

Anthony Powell, From a View to a Death 

Stephen Spender, Poems 

William Butler Yeats, The Winding Stair, and 

Other Poems 

1934 Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express 

Robert Graves, I, Claudius 


1929 Stock market crash in the United States and 

Britain triggers onset of the Great Depression 

First presentation of the Academy Awards 

Erich Remarque, Im Westen Nichts Neues (All 

Quiet on the Western Front) 

1930 Campaign of civil disobedience begins in India, 

under the leadership of Mohandas Gandhi 

First British Empire Games (later the 

Commonwealth Games) held in Canada 

1931 Spanish King Alfonso XIII abdicates and Spain 

becomes a republic 

Britain abandons the practice of linking the 

value of its currency to a fixed amount of gold 

(the gold standard) in the face of economic 

depression, financial indebtedness, and the 

relative economic strength of the world’s new 

economic power, the United States 

Statute of Westminster effectively grants full 

autonomy to Canada and other Dominions 

1932 The Nazis become the largest party in the 

German Parliament 

Oswald Mosley founds a new British political 

party, the British Union of Fascists 

Team led by Ernest Rutherford succeeds in 

artificially splitting atomic nuclei 

1933 Adolph Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany; 

using the Reichstag fire as a pretext, he suspends 

civil liberties 

Nazi government begins setting up 

concentration camps 

1934 Widespread “purges” of those suspected of antigovernment 

sympathies begin in the Soviet


James Hilton, Good-bye Mr. Chips 

Bernard Shaw, Prefaces 

Dylan Thomas, 18 Poems 

P.I. Travers, Mary Poppins 

1935 “C.S. Forester” (Cecil Louis Troughton Smith), 

The African Queen 

Graham Greene, The Basement Room, and Other 

Stories 

George Orwell, Burmese Days 

1936 Stevie Smith, Novel on Yellow Paper 

1937 W.H. Auden, Spain 

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier 

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit; or, There and Back 

Again 

1938 Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart 

Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca 

Graham Greene, Brighton Rock 

George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia 

Dorothy Richardson, Pilgrimage (first 

publication as a complete work) 

Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas 

1939 Joyce Cary, Mister Johnson 

Agatha Christie, Ten Little Niggers (serialized in 

the US in 1939 as And Then There Were 

None and issued in book form under that 

title in 1940; re-issued in Britain in 1965 

under the title Ten Little Indians; American 

title And Then There Were None 

subsequently adopted in Britain and 

Commonwealth countries as well) 

Monica Dickens, One Pair of Hands 

T.S. Eliot, The Family Reunion 

Union; by the end of the decade, Josef Stalin’s 

government kills between ten and twenty 

million Soviet citizens 

1936 Popular front elected in Spain; Fascist forces led 

by Francisco Franco take up arms against the 

new government, and the Spanish Civil War 

begins 

Olympic Games held in Berlin; African- 

American Jesse Owens wins four gold medals 

Edward VIII abdicates in order to marry the 

divorced Wallis Simpson; George VI comes to 

the throne 

1937 Japanese-Chinese War begins as Japan invades 

Northern China 

Spanish town of Guernica destroyed by German 

bombers (Guernica by Pablo Picasso famously 

depicts the horror of the attack) 

1938 Munich Agreement allows Germany to annex 

the Sudenland from Czechoslovakia; British 

Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain proclaims 

that Hitler’s ambitions have now been satisfied 

and “Peace in our time” has been achieved 

1939 Franco defeats the Republican Loyalists, and the 

Spanish Civil War ends 

Germany occupies the rest of Czechoslovakia, 

and then occupies Poland; war is declared on 3 

September as Britain, France, and other allies 

resolve to stop German expansionism

Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin 

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake 

1940 Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory 

Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon 

C.P. Snow, Strangers and Brothers 

Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children 


1940 Winston Churchill succeeds Neville 

Chamberlain as Prime Minister; a coalition 

government is formed 

Germany occupies Norway, Denmark, the 

Netherlands, and France; Britain evacuates its 

forces from France at Dunkirk 

Battle of Britain, and the Blitz of London 

Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca, starring Laurence 

Olivier and Joan Fontaine, wins the Academy 

Award for Best Picture; Charlie Chaplin stars in 

The Great Dictator 

1941 Germany invades the Soviet Union 

Virginia Woolf commits suicide 

Japan attacks Pearl Harbor and the United 

States enters the war against Japan and Germany 

Nazi government in Germany undertakes the 

systematic extermination of all Jewish people in 

German-controlled territory; by 1945, 

approximately six million have been murdered 

in the gas chambers of Nazi death camps 

1942 Anglo-American offensive against German 

armies in North Africa 

Beveridge Report recommends implementing a 

comprehensive system of government support 

(later nicknamed “the welfare state”) 

Mission to India by Sir Stanford Cripps meets 

with widespread resistance from the “Quit 

India” movement 

1943 German armies defeated in North Africa and at 

Stalingrad in Russia 

Allied armies invade Italy and defeat Hitler’s 

ally, fascist dictator Benito Mussolini


1944 Joyce Cary, The Horse’s Mouth 

T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets 

Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge 

1945 “Henry Green” (Henry Vincent Yorke), Loving 

George Orwell, Animal Farm 

Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited 

1946 Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan 

Terence Rattigan, The Winslow Boy 

Dylan Thomas, Deaths and Entrances 

1947 Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano 

J.B. Priestley, An Inspector Calls 

1948 Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical 

Grammar of Poetic Myth 

Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter 

F.R. Leavis, The Great Tradition 

Alan Paton, Cry the Beloved Country 

Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One 

1944 Allied invasion of German-controlled France 

begins in Normandy on 4 June; Paris liberated 

25 August 

V-Bombs dropped on London 

Jewish uprising against Nazi oppression in 

Warsaw, Poland 

Education Act makes secondary education 

mandatory 

1945 Allied fire-bombing of Dresden and other 

German cities kills tens of thousands 

Russian armies enter Berlin 20 April; Allied 

victory in Europe declared 8 May 

Labour Party under Clement Attlee defeats 

Winston Churchill and the Conservatives 

American President Harry Truman orders 

atomic bombs to be dropped on Hiroshima and 

(a few days later) Nagasaki; Japan surrenders 14 

August 

United Nations Charter is ratified 

1947 Partition of India into two independent states: 

Muslim-dominated Pakistan and Hindudominated 

India; confusion and widespread 

conflict follows, leaving approximately one million 

dead and forcing millions more to relocate 

1948 United States approves plan drawn up by 

General George C. Marshall (the “Marshall 

Plan”) to aid in the rebuilding of Europe 

State of Israel created in the former Palestine 

Status of Berlin—jointly controlled by the 

Soviet Union and the Western Allies (the 

United States, the United Kingdom, and 

France) after the end of World War II— 

becomes a major issue between the powers;

1949 Christopher Fry, The Lady’s Not for Burning: A 

Comedy 

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four 

Judith Wright, Woman to Man 

1950 T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party: A Comedy 

Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing 

C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the 

Wardrobe (first volume in the Chronicles of 

Narnia series, completed in 1956) 

“Nevil Shute” (Nevil Shute Norway), A Town 

Like Alice 

1951 Anthony Powell, A Question of Upbringing (first 

volume of the Dance to the Music of Time 

sequence of 12 novels, completed in 1975) 

C.P. Snow, The Masters 

“Josephine Tey” (Elizabeth Mackintosh), The 

Daughter of Time 


Soviet armies blockade the city and the Western 

powers respond with a large-scale effort to 

supply West Berlin by air (the “Berlin Airlift”) 

Afrikaner Nationalist Party assumes power in 

South Africa, with a platform of apartheid—the 

separation of whites from non-whites on terms 

that discriminate against blacks in particular 

British Citizenship Act allows unrestricted 

immigration to Britain for citizens of 

Commonwealth nations 

1949 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 

formed 

Newly formed republic of Ireland leaves the 

British Commonwealth 

Communist governments assume power in 

Hungary, East Germany, and China 

Simone de Beauvoir, Le deuxième sex (The 

Second Sex) published in France 

Devaluation of the British Pound from U.S. 

$4.03 to U.S. $2.80 

Soviet Union explodes an atomic bomb for the 

first time 

1950-1953 War between Communist and Non-communist 

forces (backed respectively by the Soviet Union 

and the United States) in Korea


1952 Samuel Beckett, En attendant Godot (first 

publication; first published in English, as 

Waiting for Godot, in the USA in 1955, and 

in Britain in 1956) 

1953 Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim 

Ian Fleming, Casino Royale 

L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between 

1954 William Golding, Lord of the Flies 

Thom Gunn, Fighting Terms 

P.K. Page, The Metal and the Flower 

Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood 

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (first 

part of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, 

completed in 1955) 

1955 Graham Greene, The Quiet American 

Philip Larkin, The Less Deceived 

Brian Moore, Judith Hearne 

“John Wyndham” (J. B. Harris), The Chrysalids 

1956 Agatha Christie, The Mousetrap 

1957 Samuel Beckett, Fin de partie (first performed in 

French in London in 1957; published in 

English as Endgame in 1958) 

John Braine, Room at the Top 

Lawrence Durrell, Justine (first volume of The 

Alexandria Quartet, completed in 1962) 

Ted Hughes, The Hawk in the Rain 

John Osborne, Look Back in Anger 

Nevil Shute, On the Beach 

Stevie Smith, Not Waving but Drowning 

1952 Britain explodes an atomic bomb 

Death of George V; Elizabeth II assumes the 

throne 

1954 Defeat of French forces in Vietnam at Dien 

Bien Phu; Communist forces occupy Hanoi 

End of post-war rationing in Britain 

1956 Suez Crisis: Britain and France invade Egypt in 

response to Egyptian President Gamal Abdul 

Nasser’s nationalizing of the Suez Canal; by the 

end of the year Britain and France had been 

forced to back down 

Revolution in Hungary against Communist 

Rule is suppressed by the Soviet Union 

European Economic Community (or “Common 

Market”) formed in Europe 

Ghana becomes the first of many former British 

colonies in Africa to be granted full 

independence (and membership in the British 

Commonwealth)

1958 Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart 

1959 Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape 

Ian Fleming, Goldfinger 

Alan Sillitoe, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance 

Runner 

1960 Stan Barstow, A Kind of Loving (first volume of 

the Vic Brown trilogy, completed in 1976) 

D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (first 

publication in Britain of the unexpurgated 

edition) 

Brian Moore, The Luck of Ginger Coffey 

Edna O’Brien, The Country Girls (first volume 

of The Country Girls trilogy, completed in 

1964) 

Harold Pinter, The Birthday Party 

Harold Pinter, The Caretaker 

1961 Leonard Cohen, The Spice Box of Earth 

V.S. Naipaul, A House For Mr. Biswas 

Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie 

1962 Alan Bennett, Beyond the Fringe 

“Anthony Burgess” (John Anthony Burgess 

Wilson), A Clockwork Orange 

Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook 

Derek Walcott, In a Green Night 

1963 “John le Carré” (David John Moore Cornwell), 

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold 

P.G. Wodehouse, Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves (last in 

the series of Jeeves novels) 


1959 Rebel forces led by Fidel Castro overthrow 

Batista’s dictatorship in Cuba 

1961 Yuri Gagarin of the Soviet Union becomes the 

first human in space 

Berlin Wall constructed 

American invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs 

fails to overthrow Castro’s government 

1962 Cuban Missile Crisis: in the wake of the Bay of 

Pigs invasion of its ally, the Soviet Union began 

secretly to build missile launching sites in Cuba. 

When American reconnaissance flights detected 

this activity, American President John F. 

Kennedy demanded that the Soviets withdraw 

the missiles and put into effect a naval blockade 

of Cuba. Six days later, Soviet leader Nikita 

Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles, 

provided that the United States also remove the 

missiles it had deployed in Turkey, near the 

Soviet border 

1963 American President John F. Kennedy 

assassinated 

United States becomes involved militarily in the 

fight against Communist forces Vietnam


1964 Philip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings 

Margaret Laurence, The Stone Angel 

1965 Samuel Beckett, Imagination Dead Imagine 

Margaret Drabble, The Millstone 

T.S. Eliot, To Criticize the Critic, and Other 

Writings 

James Ngugi (later Ngg wa Thiong’o), The 

River Between 

Harold Pinter, The Homecoming 

Sylvia Plath, Ariel 

1966 John Fowles, The Magus 

Seamus Heaney, Death of a Naturalist 

Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea 

1967 Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory 

P.D. James, Unnatural Causes 

Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are 

Dead 

1964 China explodes an atomic bomb 

1965 Ian Smith, Prime Minister of the former British 

colony of Rhodesia, unilaterally declares 

independence from Britain in response to 

British attempts to persuade his government to 

end systemic racial discrimination against the 

black majority 

Widespread civil rights marches in United 

States; passage of the Civil Rights Act 

American military involvement in Vietnam 

begins to escalate 

1967 The “Six Day War”: in response to Egyptian 

threats Israel attacks Egypt and inflicts a massive 

defeat 

The Beatles, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club 

Band 

Sexual Offences Act makes male homosexual 

acts legal in Britain 

1968 Assassinations in the United States of 

Democratic politician Robert F. Kennedy and of 

civil rights leader Martin Luther King 

“Prague Spring” of new freedoms in 

Czechoslovakia under Alexander Dubek 

crushed by Soviet invasion 

Tet offensive by North Vietnam exposes the 

vulnerability of South Vietnamese and American 

forces 

Student and labor unrest in support of left-wing 

causes in Europe, notably in France 

Student protests and a growing movement in 

opposition to the Vietnam War in the United 

States

1969 John Cleese and Graham Chapman, Monty 

Python’s Flying Circus (television program 

aired 1969-74) 

John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman 

1971 Margaret Atwood, Power Politics 

E.M. Forster, Maurice (written 1913-14 but 

only published posthumously) 

Geoffrey Hill, Mercian Hymns 

1972 P.D. James, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman 

1974 Philip Larkin, High Windows 


Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1968 

denies Kenyan Asians holding British passports 

the right to immigrate to Britain 

1969 American Neil Armstrong becomes the first 

human on the moon 

Britain sends troops to quell unrest in Northern 

Ireland 

Britain liberalizes divorce laws, introducing “nofault” 

divorce 

1972 “Bloody Sunday” in Derry, Northern Ireland: 

British soldiers kill thirteen civilians 

participating in a banned but peaceful civil 

rights march 

American President Richard Nixon visits China, 

thus easing tensions between Communist China 

and Western powers 

Richard Nixon is re-elected President of the 

United States, but it is discovered that his 

campaign has used a variety of “dirty tricks” 

against the rival Democratic Party. The ensuing 

outrage over the “dirty tricks” and over efforts to 

cover them up became known as the Watergate 

Scandal (after the hotel where Republican Party 

operatives were caught breaking into the 

headquarters of the Democratic Party), and it 

prompted Nixon’s resignation in 1974 

1973 Britain, Ireland, and Denmark join the 

European Economic Community 

Yom Kippur War in the Middle East sparks a 

worldwide oil crisis


1975 Alan Ayckbourn, The Norman Conquests 

John Cleese and Connie Booth, Fawlty Towers 

(first series; second series aired in 1979) 

David Lodge, Changing Places 

Ian McEwan, First Love, Last Rites 

J.H. Prynne, High Pink on Chrome 

Tom Stoppard, Professional Foul (first televised 

September 1977; published in book form 

1978) 

“William Trevor” (William Trevor Cox), Angels 

at the Ritz, and Other Stories 

1978 Penelope Fitzgerald, The Bookshop 

Graham Greene, The Human Factor 

David Hare, Plenty 

Ian McEwan, The Cement Garden 

Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea 

1979 Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber, and Other 

Stories 

Seamus Heaney, Field Work 

V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River 

Craig Raine, A Martian Sends a Postcard Home 

1980 Peter Shaffer, Amadeus 

1975 Margaret Thatcher becomes leader of the 

Conservative Party 

Last American personnel leave Saigon as 

Communist forces take over all of the former 

South Vietnam 

1979 “Winter of Discontent” in Britain as unions take 

industrial action in disputes concerning pay and 

other issues; Thatcher elected Prime Minister 

following the Conservative’s “Labour isn’t 

working” advertising campaign 

Revolution in Iran: the Shah is deposed and 

Ayatollah Khomeini comes to power at the head 

of an Islamic fundamentalist regime 

Soviet Union invades Afghanistan 

Sandinista forces in Nicaragua overthrow 

dictator Anastasio Somoza. The Nicaraguan 

Revolution was a key moment in a struggle 

during the 1970s and 1980s throughout much 

of Central America between business-friendly 

dictatorships (generally supported by the United 

States) and left-of-centre populist movements 

that the United States government generally 

sought to undermine 

1980 End of Zimbabwe’s War of Independence; 

Robert Mugabe becomes Prime Minister 

Iraq invades Iran, beginning an eight-year war 

Solidarity Movement in Poland, led by Lech 

Walesa, begins to undermine Communist Rule

1981 Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children 

1982 Eavan Boland, Night Feed 

Caryl Churchill, Top Girls 

Michael Frayn, Noises Off 

Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient 

1983 J.M. Coetzee, The Life and Times of Michael K. 

Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory 

Les Murray, The People’s Otherworld 

Graham Swift, Waterland 

1984 Martin Amis, Money 

Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot 

Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac 

Liz Lochhead, Dreaming Frankenstein and 

Collected Poems 

1985 Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale 

Tony Harrison, V 

Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only 

Fruit 

1986 Hanif Kureishi, My Beautiful Laundrette 

Ngg wa Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind 

1987 Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines 

Roddy Doyle, The Commitments (first volume 


1982 Falklands War between Britain and Argentina 

Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi wins the 

Academy Award for Best Picture over Steven 

Spielberg’s E.T. 

1984 Miners strike in Britain. Even though the strike 

lasted a year—from March 1984 to March 

1985—the miners were eventually forced to 

back down on most of their demands in the face 

of intransigence on the part of Thatcher’s 

Conservative government. The strike had a 

considerable ripple effect on union-government 

and union-business relations in general 

Bombing of the Grand Hotel in Britain by the 

Irish Republican Army in an attempt to 

assassinate British Prime Minister Thatcher 

Indian troops storm the Golden Temple; Prime 

Minister Indira Gandhi is assassinated as a 

reprisal by Islamic militants 

1985 New Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev launches 

glasnost and perestroika initiatives, bringing 

limited freedom of speech and limited economic 

freedom to the Soviet Union 

Massive famine in Ethiopia 

Plaza Accord: the American dollar and other 

currencies are devalued in relation to the 

currencies of Germany and Japan, in recognition 

of the great increase in strength of the 

economies of those two countries 

1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the Soviet Union


of The Barrydown Trilogy, completed in 

1991 with the publication of The Van) 

Carol Ann Duffy, Selling Manhattan 

Jeanette Winterson, The Passion 

1988 David Lodge, Nice Work 

Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses 

1989 Martin Amis, London Fields 

Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10½ 

Chapters 

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day 

Grace Nichols, Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Woman, 


1990 A.S. Byatt, Possession 

1991 Pat Barker, Regeneration (first of trilogy of First 

World War novels, completed in 1995 with 

the publication of The Ghost Road) 

Alan Bennett, The Madness of George III 

Linton Kwesi Johnson, Tings an’ Times 

Jackie Kay, The Adoption Papers 

Medbh McGuckian, Marconi’s Cottage 

Ben Okri, The Famished Road 

Tim Winton, Cloudstreet 

1993 Roddy Doyle, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha 

Carol Ann Duffy, Mean Time 

Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy 

Tom Stoppard, Arcadia 

Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting 

1988 Soviet army withdraws from Afghanistan 

1989 Iran’s leader Ayatollah Khomeini issues a fatwa 

against Salman Rushdie after the publication of 

The Satanic Verses 

Freedom of Speech Movement in China is 

brutally suppressed in Beijing’s Tiananmen 

Square as troops attack demonstrators, with 

estimates of the number killed ranging from 500 

to more than 5,000 

Communist governments overthrown in Poland, 

Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, 

Bulgaria, and Romania as the former “East 

Bloc” of Communist regimes crumbles with 

astonishing speed 

1991 Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia declare independence, 

and are soon followed by other republics. 

By the end of the year, Russia has declared the 

Soviet Union to be no longer in existence, and 

the Communist Party in Russia is disbanded 

Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait triggers the “Gulf 

War,” in which American and allied forces 

defeat Saddam Hussein’s army but do not 

attempt to remove him from power or to take 

over the entire country 

Repeal of the apartheid laws in South Africa 

1993 Czechoslovakia peacefully separates into the 

Czech Republic and Slovakia 

Arab-Islamist terrorists explode a car bomb in 

the parking garage of the World Trade Center 

in New York, killing six people

1995 Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance 

1996 Roddy Doyle, The Woman Who Walked into 

Doors 

Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones’ Diary 

Graham Swift, Last Orders 

1997 Bernardine Evaristo, Lara 

Ian McEwan, Enduring Love 

Conor McPherson, The Weir 

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s 

Stone 

Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things 

Will Self, Great Apes 


Number of deaths from AIDS in the developed 

world peaks, with over 40,000 dying in the US 

alone; among the victims are tennis great Arthur 

Ashe and ballet legend Rudolf Nureyev 

1994 Nelson Mandela becomes President of South 

Africa following the country’s first fully free 

elections 

Small United Nations peacekeeping force in 

Rwanda is unable to prevent genocide; 

approximately 800,000 die in a governmentsanctioned 

killing spree by members of the 

majority Hutu group, attempting to exterminate 

members of the minority Tutsi group 

Channel tunnel (“Chunnel”) opens, connecting 

Britain and France 

Fighting intensifies in the Balkans, especially in 

Bosnia, where Serbian forces engage in “ethnic 

cleansing” of the Muslim population 

1995 American anti-government terrorist Timothy 

McVeigh bombs the Federal Building in 

Oklahoma City, killing 168 and injuring over 

800 

1997 Tony Blair leads “New Labour” to victory and 

becomes Prime Minister 

Princess Diana dies in a car crash in Paris 

Britain cedes Hong Kong to China 

Scotland Act creates a new Scottish Parliament 

(a parallel Welsh Assembly is created the 

following year) 

Kyoto Protocol on climate change opened for 

signature


1998 John Bayley, Iris 

Michael Frayn, Copenhagen 

Seamus Heaney, Beowulf 

Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters 

2000 Zadie Smith, White Teeth 

2001 Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang 

Ian McEwan, Atonement 

1998 Good Friday Agreement is approved through 

referendums both in Northern Ireland and in 

the Republic of Ireland, bringing an end to the 

long-standing conflict 

1999 Land seizures and other repressive measures by 

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe set off a 

wave of protest, both within the country and 

worldwide 

Maastricht Treaty creates a European Monetary 

Union 

World population surpasses six billion 

2000 Worldwide Millennium celebrations: Britain 

marks the Millennium with the openings of the 

Millennium Dome, the Tate Modern Gallery, 

and the Millennium Bridge in London 

Vladimir Putin elected President of Russia 

Weeks of delay follow the United States’s 

presidential election as votes are recounted and 

arguments made in court before the Supreme 

Court finally declares George W. Bush the 

winner over Al Gore 

2001 Terrorist group Al Qaeda launches attacks in 

New York and Washington on 11 September, 

killing over 2,000 and sparking a wave of antiterrorist 

activity worldwide 

United States, Britain, and allied countries 

overthrow the Taliban government in 

Afghanistan, in retaliation for their harboring Al 

Qaeda terrorists 

Netherlands becomes the world’s first country 

to recognize same-sex marriage; by the end of 

2005, Belgium, Canada, South Africa, and 

Spain pass similar legislation 

Race-based conflict in Bradford 

2002 Terrorist attacks in Bali, Indonesia, kill 202 

people (including 88 Australians) and injure 

hundreds more

2004 Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty 

Colm Tóibín, The Master 

2005 Tim Crouch, An Oak Tree 

Carol Ann Duffy, Rapture 

Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go 

Ian McEwan, Saturday 

Alice Oswald, Woods etc. 

2006 John Banville, The Sea 

Alice Munro, The View from Castle Rock 

Colm Tóibín, Mothers and Sons 

2007 Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach 


2003 United States and Britain launch war against 

Iraq, allegedly over the issue of Iraq having 

concealed “weapons of mass destruction.” 

Initially, the allied forces were able to take 

control of the full country quickly. An extended 

search revealed no evidence of “weapons of mass 

destruction,” however, and a growing 

insurgency against the occupying forces made a 

mockery of American President Bush’s early 

“mission accomplished” boast 

2003 Terrorist attacks in Madrid kill 191 and injure 

over 2,000 

2004 Tsunami in the Indian Ocean kills 

approximately 250,000 

2005 Terrorist attacks in London kill 52 and injure 

over 700 

China ends its practice of pegging the yuan to 

the value of the US dollar, in recognition of the 

great increase in the strength of its economy 

Annual number of AIDS-related deaths in 

Africa exceeds 2,000,000 for the first time; HIV 

infection rates in several African countries 

exceed 30% of the adult population 

2006 Number killed in the government-sponsored 

violence in Darfur, Sudan, exceeds 400,000; 

world-wide efforts to end the genocide continue 

to be frustrated 

Alarm grows over global warming as 2005 is 

declared to have tied 2002 as the secondwarmest 

year ever. (The warmest years in order 

since reliable records began to be kept in the 

mid-nineteenth century are, in order, 1998, 

2002/2005, 2003, 2004, 2006.) Studies report 

that the world’s polar ice caps may be melting at 

three times the rate previously thought 

2007 British Prime Minister Tony Blair announces a 

phased withdrawal of British troops from the 

conflict in Iraq

The Age of Romanticism Texts and Contexts: A Chronological Chart

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