Social Victorians/Timeline/1880s

Time Line

1850s 1860s 1870s 1880s 1890s 1900s 1910s 1920s-30s

1880

January: big snowstorm beginning on the 19th that brought everything to a halt.

1881

January

William Morris spoke at Kensington Palace.

February

Thomas Carlyle died.

March

2 March 1881, Russian Emperor Alexander II was assassinated.

April

Benjamin Disraeli, Lord Beaconsfield, died, funeral at Hughenden.

July

Very hot. Dean Stanley, of Westminster Cathedral, died.

1882

October

Annie Horniman met Moina Bergson at the Slade School of Art.

1883

May

The Prince of Wales opened the Royal College of Music, Gladstone in attendance.

1885

Queen Victoria conferred a peerage on Nathaniel Rothschild.

The 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act arose in the context of scandals about prostitution and the trade in pre-adolescent girls in London in the mid 1880s. William T. Stead, who had taken over the editorship of the Pall Mall Gazette when his mentor won the election to Parliament, "bought" Eliza Armstrong, who was thirteen years old, for five pounds. Eliza Armstrong's mother, possibly facing censure from the other women in her neighborhood and from her husband, reported the incident as a story to another newspaper. The scandal surrounding Stead's expose, including his own conviction, not to mention the media frenzy around Jack the Ripper, led to an attempt to reduce and regulate the population of prostitutes in Whitechapel. In a big police raid of brothels in Whitechapel, a number of members of Parliament and other officials of state were discovered with prostitutes, many of them young, both boys and girls. The Criminal Amendment Act, thus, addresses issues that Members of Parliament would have associated with prostitution: it raised the "age of consent" in girls from 13 to 16 (it had been raised to 13 from 12 in 1875). This act also introduced a number of regulations for brothels, especially their presence and management. And it made male homosexual behavior illegal, punishable by 2 years' hard labor. The Member of Parliament who introduced the bill, Henry LaBouchere, is remembered today for this last paragraph among the LGBTQ community, which calls the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act the "LaBouchere act." (On overview of this can be found in the Wikipedia article on the "Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885" ("Criminal")

As far as I can discover, there is no evidence that Victoria denied that women were capable of homosexual behavior, nor that she crossed out a rumored paragraph making women's homosexual activity illegal.

1887

Victoria's Golden Jubilee

"Bloody Sunday": protest march on Trafalgar Square. Annie Besant was there, as was George Bernard Shaw, who "skedaddled."

March

Heavy snowstorm in London.

1888

February

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was created.

August

Jack the Ripper's first victim was found.

October

31 October 1888, last day of the American Exhibition in London that featured Buffalo Bill's Wild West.

1889

April

12 April 1889, Fabian Society Converzazione, attended by George Bernard Shaw, Amy Levy, and Elizabeth Pennell.

August

Lippincott editor took Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Irish MP Thomas Patrick Gill out to dinner, looking for something to publish. In Wilde's case, it was The Picture of Dorian Grey.

Bibliography

• "Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885." Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_Law_Amendment_Act_1885 (accessed August 2020).