It is estimated that about a million people died during the four-year famine, and that between and another million emigrated, most to Britain and North America.
Sir Robert Peel's famous reforming Conservative government came to an end shortly after legislation to repeal the Corn Laws was passed. This measure removed protective duties which had helped to keep the price of bread high. He championed it despite opposition from most of his own party, and the motion was carried by Whig votes. Peel never took office again and was remembered as the prime minister who gave the working classes cheaper bread.
Birkenhead, on the opposite bank of the Mersey Estuary from Liverpool, was the venue for the world's first man-made park, complete with lakes, hillocks and meadows. Many such parks followed as Victorians sought to provide open spaces in or near the centre of urban areas. John Mitchel came to prominence during the Irish potato famine. In March he founded a journal, 'United Irishman', which called for Irish independence and gave practical tips on how to attack British troops.
Charged under the Treason Felony Act, he was sentenced to 14 years transportation. This episode helped set Irish resistance to British occupation on a more violent path. Following pressure from the administrator Edwin Chadwick and the findings of the Health of Towns Commission, parliament passed legislation to improve urban conditions and reduce death rates.
Local boards of health were established in places where the population's death rate exceeded 23 per 1, The act was seen as an unwelcome intrusion by central government and proved very unpopular. The central Board of Health was wound up in The Pre-Raphaelites were a group of English artists who rejected what they considered as the effete symbolism and lack of reality of paintings dating from the 16th-century European Renaissance.
They aimed to revert to what they saw as the directness and sincerity of medieval painting. They were championed by the art critic and writer John Ruskin. The Tubular Bridge provided a rail link from the mainland of north Wales, near Bangor, across to Anglesey and on to Holyhead for ferries to Ireland.
Its designer, Robert Stephenson, constructed two main spans with rectangular iron tubes feet long. The bridge itself was 1, feet overall and novel in construction, since the box sections were constructed on shore and then floated into the straits to be lifted into place.
In addition to the population census of England and Wales, a census was taken of places of worship. Awareness of this numerical superiority greatly encouraged the demand for the disestablishment of the Church of England in Wales. Partly due to the opposition of the Conservative party and the House of Lords, this did not take place until This event was the brainchild of Victoria's husband, Prince Albert, and was designed to provide a showcase for the world's most advanced inventions, manufactures and works of art.
It was housed in the massive acre Crystal Palace, designed by Joseph Paxton. The event attracted almost six million visitors during the five summer months it was open. Many ordinary people travelled to London for the first time on cheap-rate excursion trains. Notable battles included those at Sebastopol, Balaclava which saw the infamous Charge of the Light Brigade and Inkerman.
Russia was forced to sue for peace, and the war was ended by the Treaty of Paris in March British troops casualties were as much from poor equipment and medical care as from fighting the Russians. Following a series of insensitive British demands, members of the Bengal army mutinied in Meerut and marched towards Delhi, which they took two days later.
It was re-taken in September. Lucknow was twice besieged before being finally relieved in November. British authority was not fully restored until July and the events of the mutiny were characterised by great brutality on both sides.
The mutiny led to the end of East India Company rule in India and its replacement by direct British rule. Based in Manchester, the orchestra gave its first concert in the city's Free Trade Hall. This development indicated the growing importance attached to providing elevating cultural activities for the citizens of Britain's towns and cities.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Saltash railway bridge across the River Tamar was a suspension bridge comprising two huge wrought iron trusses in the form of a parabola.
This bridge afforded much speedier transport to England's most remote western county. An unbroken line from London to Penzance was completed in Opened only four months before Brunel's death, the Saltash became the only suspension bridge to carry main-line trains. Charles Darwin's masterwork, which argued that all species evolved on the basis of natural selection, resulted from more than 20 years' research following a five-year journey around Cape Horn in HMS 'Beagle'. The book created an immediate stir, since Darwin's theory appeared to contradict the bible's creation story and call into question ideas of divine providence.
Despite the influence of Darwin's work, very few Victorian scientists took up an atheistic position as a result of reading it. In the debate that led to the introduction of the Post Office Savings Bank, the chancellor of the exchequer, William Gladstone, stated that the Post Office, which contained almost 3, money-order offices, would offer a convenient way of encouraging small sums to accumulate in secure accounts.
This initiative accorded with the Liberals' policy of encouraging habits of thrift and industry among what Gladstone called 'the humbler classes throughout the country'. Albert's premature death from typhoid plunged Victoria into a long period of mourning and withdrawal from public life, during which a republican movement gained popularity. Albert had been both a restraining and a guiding force on his headstrong wife and, although never popular with the British public partly on account of his German origins, he was an able and energetic man who played an important part in the scientific and intellectual life of his adopted country.
Since , the state had funded education for the poor in schools run by churches. Expenditure increased rapidly, especially after the first education inspectors were appointed in and a pupil-teacher scheme of training was implemented from By the early s, an economy-minded Liberal government wanted the state to get value for money.
Grant payments were linked to pupils' success in basic tests in reading, writing and arithmetic. The system was dubbed 'payment by results'. Joseph Lister, while Regius Professor of Clinical Surgery at Glasgow University, began experiments designed to reduce high hospital mortality rates from septic inflammation.
Despite initial scepticism, Lister's methods were refined and then widely adopted. He is regarded as the founder of modern surgical practice. Its orchestrator was Benjamin Disraeli, who permitted larger extensions to the franchise than the Liberals would have countenanced.
It virtually doubled the electorate, enabling one-third of adult males in Britain and one-sixth in Ireland to vote in parliamentary elections. In a few urban constituencies, working men were an electoral majority. A separate act for Scotland was passed in William Gladstone headed a Liberal government after defeating Benjamin Disraeli's Conservative government in a general election.
Gladstone's ministry survived until and is credited with passing many reforms, especially relating to administration, the army and public health.
Gladstone was to form three further administrations, resigning as prime minister for the last time in March William Gladstone's legislation put church property into the hands of commissioners, who could use it for 'social schemes', including poverty relief and the expansion of higher education.
Irish bishops no longer sat in the House of Lords. The act was designed to reduce tensions and increasing lawlessness in Ireland. The canal then became of vital strategic interest, particularly as a route to India and the Far East, and was protected by British troops from This bill, introduced by the Liberal member of parliament WE Forster, was to extend opportunities for education available to the children of the poor.
The act permitted new school boards to be set up where existing education provision in 'voluntary schools', controlled by the churches, was inadequate. A substantial growth in school building resulted, particularly in urban areas. The act did not make schooling compulsory. Ireland's Landlord and Tenant Act, passed by William Gladstone's government, attempted to address a key grievance.
The act provided for compensation to tenants evicted by landlords and it gave legal protection to customary tenant right. Tenants were also allowed to purchase their holdings if they could afford the cost.
This act changed the previous legal situation, in which all property automatically transferred to the control of a husband on marriage.
Similar changes did not take effect in Scotland until William Gladstone's Liberal government introduced voting by secret ballot five years after the Second Reform Act had substantially increased the size of the electorate. This realised one of the key points of the reforming 'Chartist' petition of Voting in secret was not uncontroversial. The proposal was fiercely contested by the House of Lords, which considered it 'cowardly' and 'unmanly'. It was first employed at a by-election in Pontefract in August of the same year.
India came under direct British government control in , when the remaining authority of the East India Company was dissolved.
The Conservative prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, suggested to the queen that she should be proclaimed empress.
His motive seems mainly to have been flattery. Despite objections from the Liberal opposition, who were not consulted, the title was endorsed and Victoria used it officially from Britain, represented by Conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and Robert Cecil, Marquis of Salisbury, signed a European treaty which attempted to settle problems between states in the Balkans and, in particular, to reduce perceived threats to European stability from Russian expansion.
Cyprus was leased to Britain from Turkey, strengthening its position in the Mediterranean. Disraeli declared that he had brought back 'peace with honour'. During a Force 11 gale on the River Tay, the two-year-old, two-mile railway bridge collapsed and 75 train passengers plunged to their deaths.
It was the biggest structural engineering disaster in Britain. The subsequent enquiry apportioned most of the blame to the bridge's builder, Sir Thomas Bouch, for failing to take sufficient account of the effects of wind force. The bridge was rebuilt and opened to rail traffic in July Although WE Forster's act of had greatly expanded education opportunities, and an act passed in Benjamin Disraeli's government of had set up school attendance committees, significant gaps remained.
AJ Mundella introduced a bill on behalf of William Gladstone's Liberal government which made school attendance compulsory from ages five to The eisteddfod, as a competition of Welsh bards and minstrels, had a long history dating back to at least the 10th century. In modern times, it developed as a celebration of Welsh culture and identity from the 18th century. After the formation of the National Eisteddfod Association, a national gathering was held annually, alternating between the north and the south of Wales.
The mansion created at Cragside in Rothbury Northumberland by the Scottish architect Richard Norman Shaw was designed to incorporate every modern convenience.
Built for the engineering magnate Sir William Armstrong, it was called 'the palace of a modern magician'.
Swan's new electric lamps were powered by water from a local stream through a dynamo-electric generator. One estimate suggests that a sixth of all people born in England around lived some part of their lives in London. It was only by maintaining this constant influx that the capital could possibly maintain its population and grow. The combination of low overall fertility rates with high levels of migration substantially skewed the age structure of London.
Low fertility rates, for instance, generally result in a low overall dependency ratio the number of old and young people supported by the working population. For England as whole this ratio reached its lowest point in the s. Because a high number of London's inhabitants were relatively young recent migrants over the age of 14, the effect would be even more powerfully felt in the capital.
In other words, London in the late seventeenth century was not a city of children or the elderly. Instead, it was dominated by young men and women in their teens and twenties. During the seventeenth century migration tended to be long distance and international.
As a result, besides its youth, London's population in this period was also characterised by its diversity. All the regions and countries that made up the British Isles were well represented by self-conscious communities of migrants. Specific neighbourhoods were associated with Yorkshire, Scotland and Ireland. At the same time the Huguenot refugees from France successfully carved out a distinct district for themselves in Spitalfields; while Sephardic Jews and Ashkenazim from Poland and Germany settled around Whitechapel and Petticoat Lane.
By the population of London had reached around ,; rising to approximately , by Population growth in this period was not, however, evenly spread. Steady growth up to around was followed by a period of relative stagnation to mid-century, followed in turn by stronger growth during the s.
Poor hygiene, living conditions and the "gin craze" are frequently cited as explanations for the high mortality rate, and demographers have in particular pointed to the extremely high rate among infants Changing attitudes towards child mortality in this period are reflected in both the establishment of institutions such as the Foundling Hospital in ; and in the Proceedings themselves, by the decline in prosecutions for infanticide noticeable from the s onwards, as efforts shifted towards supporting single mothers rather than shaming them.
The stagnation or very slow growth of the population of London in this period was also reflected by a marked depression in the building industries. From approximately three-quarters of a million people in , London continued a strong pattern of growth through the last four decades of the eighteenth century.
In , when the first reliable modern census was taken, greater London recorded 1,, souls; rising to a little over 1. No single decade in this period witnessed less than robust population growth. In part this urban bloat resulted from a marked decline in infant mortality brought about by better hygiene and childrearing practices, and a changing disease pattern. By the s children born in the capital were three times less likely to die in childhood than those born in the s.
But much more important than mortality was increased migration and rising fertility. Long distance migration within the Britain Isles declined with the exception of migration from Ireland , and was replaced by a higher level of regional migration, with London attracting large numbers from the home counties and from communities with strong links to London through coastal shipping.
As a result, many more Londoners came to have family and friends back home within a few days walk than they would have done in the seventeenth century. This also ensured that the social identity of communities defined by a region of origin within the British Isles became relatively less important. At the same time, international, and indeed global, migration both economic and forced became more significant.
Following the end of hostilities at the conclusions of the Seven Years War in and the American War in , a large number of black men and women from Africa, the Caribbean and North America settled in London. By the last quarter of the eighteenth century the black population of London is estimated to have been between 5, and 10, The outcome of the American War in particular also resulted in the establishment of a large American loyalist community, both white and black. Marriage patterns evolved rapidly.
From having a demographic regime at the turn of the seventeenth century in which people married in their late 20s and had relatively few children, in or out of wedlock, a new pattern took over in London from as early as the s and was well established by the s.
This new regime was characterised by high levels of illegitimacy, an average marriage age of below 25, and high overall levels of fertility both within and outside marriage. This reflected a profound change in the behaviour of the still typically young and migrant inhabitants of London.
Throughout this period women continued to dominate the population as a whole. This both reflected the importance of domestic service in drawing young people to London and exacerbated the impact of changing patterns of courtship and fertility.
In London was already the largest city in the world, but by it had grown three-fold to reach 3,, souls. And many of the souls it contained were from elsewhere. In , over 38 per cent of Londoners were born somewhere else. The Irish made up perhaps the single largest immigrant group.
This rose to , in in the wake of the Great Famine A further 13, Londoners were from elsewhere in Europe and the rest of the world rising to 26, in French, Italian, German and Spanish refugees both economic and political all formed substantial communities in London during these decades — many forced to flee following the political and economic disorder associated with the revolutions of and Added to these were smaller communities of Chinese , Indian and African sailors, living and working along the riverside.
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