Social Victorians/Timeline/1880s
1880s Headlines
editTime Line
editJanuary: big snowstorm beginning on the 19th that brought everything to a halt.
January
editWilliam Morris spoke at Kensington Palace.
February
editThomas Carlyle died.
March
edit2 March 1881, Russian Emperor Alexander II was assassinated.
April
editBenjamin Disraeli, Lord Beaconsfield, died, funeral at Hughenden.
July
editVery hot. Dean Stanley, of Westminster Cathedral, died.
October
editAnnie Horniman met Moina Bergson at the Slade School of Art.
May
editThe Prince of Wales opened the Royal College of Music, Gladstone in attendance.
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.
Victoria's Golden Jubilee
"Bloody Sunday": protest march on Trafalgar Square. Annie Besant was there, as was George Bernard Shaw, who "skedaddled."
March
editHeavy snowstorm in London.
February
editThe Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was created.
August
editJack the Ripper's first victim was found.
October
edit31 October 1888, last day of the American Exhibition in London that featured Buffalo Bill's Wild West.
April
edit12 April 1889, Fabian Society Converzazione, attended by George Bernard Shaw, Amy Levy, and Elizabeth Pennell.
August
editLippincott 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
edit- "Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885." Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_Law_Amendment_Act_1885 (accessed August 2020).