1895: Drama, Disaster and Disgrace in Late Victorian Britain

In Lewis Carroll’sSylvie and Bruno, Concluded(1893), the mysterious ‘Mein Herr’ tells how, in his country, maps are no longer drawn to scale: each mile on a map is a mile long. Jorge Luis Borges’s parable, ‘On Exactitude in Science’ (1960) relates a similar story, explaining how the Cartographers Guilds of an ancient civilisation surveyed their empire in such detail that the map they produced was the same size as the terrain it covered. The fate of these hapless geographers is a salutary one, and I was mindful of it throughout my work on this book. During the 1890s,...

Late 1894 was unseasonably warm, with raspberries picked in Essex the week before Christmas. The high temperatures prompted thunderstorms, with the south-west seeing its heaviest rain since 1882. On 14 November, George Gissing noted the ‘Newspapers are full of floods and wrecks’ (Gissing 1978: 353), and a deluge in the Thames Valley meant ‘Eton was flooded out, and the school had to be broken up’ (Hamilton 1986: 190). Oscar Wilde received an intimation of changes in the moral climate a few days earlier. The first night of Haddon Chambers’sJohn O’Dreams, starring Herbert Beerbohm Tree and Mrs Patrick Campbell (Beatrice...

‘Should golf be encouraged at public schools?’ Golf was perfectly acceptable in itself, saidBlackwood’s, but it should not join cricket and rugby on the educational curriculum. ‘Except in rare cases, we should instinctively condemn the boy who devoted his play-time to a more or less solitary and selfish game,’ it announced, characterising golf as a pastime in which ‘bad temper towards adversaries, and mutual recrimination between partners’ replaced the cricket eleven’sesprit de corps. Cricketers recognised and applauded their opponents’ successes, but golf had no moral compass. Indeed, its presence in schools risked swelling the numbers of ‘malingerers or...

On the day Wilde was sentenced to two years in prison, Conan Doyle wrote to his mother to tell how, on the advice of Grant Allen, he had decided to spend £3,500 on having a new house built in Hindhead, ‘the most improving part of England’ (Lellenberg 2007: 353). Had this been public knowledge, a newspaper editor may well have contrasted the two events to illustrate how Vice and dissidence had been punished, and Virtue and conformity rewarded

Justice Wills had passed sentence on a Saturday afternoon, so Wilde and Taylor were held in cells at Newgate until the morning...

Reflecting on the Conservatives’ election victory,Blackwood’sidentified Agriculture, the Poor Law, Education and Labour as urgent priorities for Salisbury’s government (8/95: 306). In August however, the Queen’s Speech was confined to foreign affairs. Balfour, the Tories’ leader in the Commons, hoped for ‘a period of calm and peace’ (P24/8/95: 91), but it was obvious to informed observers that his party would have to work hard to fulfil their electoral promises. A large majority did not guarantee a common purpose.

Outside Parliament, debate surrounding the ‘sex problem’ continued. F.A. Atkins’sThe Ideal Husbandcollected essays on the perfect partnership...