Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano

1789 saw the publication of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African. Exact month of publication unknown; if you have information about the correct date, please email felluga@purdue.edu with this information. The book describes Equiano's time as a slave and his life after achieving his freedom. Image: Engraving for Equiano's Interesting Narrative. This image is in the public domain in the United States as its copyright has expired.

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"Vindication of the Rights of Woman" is Published

Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is considered a “trailblazing” work for feminism (Britannica). In the piece, Wollstonecraft addresses womanhood of the middle class and criticizes what was considered a female education at the time. While men receive an education of the mind and body, women are taught to act weak, to dedicate their time to finery and fashion. Neglecting to teach women anything other than how to be attractive on the “marriage market”, will only leave them without profession, without money, and without honor or promise of redemption if they are left or divorced by their husbands. Wollstonecraft believed that women could contribute more to society than just a wife and mother. 

She writes, “I attribute to a false system of education, gathered from the books written on this subject by men who, considering females rather as women than human creatures ...are only anxious to inspire love, when they ought to cherish a nobler ambition, and by their abilities and virtues exact respect”. The thinking at this time was that women’s obsession with marriage and delicacy was natural, but Wollstonecraft uses her work to demonstrate that this is a result of women’s artificial education. She argues that if men and women are raised with the same aspirations, than the differences between them will/can be considered more natural. She suggests a total education — one that shapes the whole person —  of both sexes. This, she argues, will benefit all of society. 

Although Wollstonecraft’s work was well-received within within her own intellectual circle, the rest of society’s reaction was negative. The ideas expressed in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman were very radical for her time, but would later provide a solid platform for Romantic feminists who worked to improve the lives of women. 

To learn more about the reactions to Wollstonecraft’s work, click here.

To learn more about Romantic Feminism, click here.

To learn more about Mary Wollstonecraft, click here.

Sources:

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mary-Wollstonecraft

http://web.utk.edu/~gerard/romanticpolitics/feminism.html

https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/mary-wollstonecraft-a-vindication-of-the-rights-of-woman

http://www.josephpriestleyhouse.org/wp-content/uploads/Joseph-Johnson-Priestleys-Publisher-and-Bookseller.pdf

http://shelleysghost.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/godwin-meets-mary-wollstonecraft#Description

Execution of King Louis XVI

On January 21, 1793, King Louis XVI of France was executed. Image: Isidore-Stanislas Helman, The Death of King Louis (1794), Bibliothèque nationale de France. This work is in the public domain in the United States.

1793 was a key juncture in the revolution, beginning with this execution on 21 January. The increasing violence prompted Britain to cut its ties to France, leading to declarations of war by the two countries. Violence peaked during the Reign of Terror (5 September 1793 – 27 July 1794), which resulted in the execution of the Queen (16 October) as well as of many suspects of treason and members of the Girondins, the more moderate faction that the radical Jacobins brought down on 2 June 1793

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Death of Wollstonecraft

Death of Mary Wollstonecraft on 10 September 1797. Mary Shelley, Wollstonecraft’s second daughter, was born on August 30th, after which complications from childbirth set in. Wollstonecraft developed a fever, and died on September 10th. She was buried at St. Pancras Churchyard. Image: William Blake's frontispiece to the 1791 edition of Mary Wollstonecraft's Original Stories from Real Life. This image is in the public domain in the United States because its copyright has expired.

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Ghislaine McDayter, "On the Publication of William Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1798"

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Napoleonic Wars

These are actually a set of individual wars that sometimes overlap, succeed, or run parallel to each other. Image: Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1800), Kunsthistorisches Museum. The work of art depicted in this image and the reproduction thereof are in the public domain worldwide. The reproduction is part of a collection of reproductions compiled by The Yorck Project (DVD-ROM, 2002). The compilation copyright is held by Zenodot Verlagsgesellschaft mbH and licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.

Historians do not agree on the exact beginning or end of the wars. November 9, 1799 is an early candidate since that is when Napoleon seized power in France. Hoping to ease the difficulty, historians date by isolated wars. They disarticulate the Napoleonic Wars in a linear series:

• War of the Second Coalition 1798-1802
• War of the Third Coalition 1805
• War of the Fourth Coalition 1806-7
• War of the Fifth Coalition 1809
• War of the Sixth Coalition 1812-14
• War of the Seventh Coalition 1815

The successive numerical coordinates for the Coalitions offer regularity, but that regularity is undercut by the shifting make-up of that Coalition (sometimes Prussia was in, sometimes not; sometimes Russia, sometimes not) and by the discontinuity and ambiguity of the dates.

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Mary Favret, "The Napoleonic Wars"

Napoleon made king of Italy

On 26 May 1805, Napoleon crowns himself King of Italy in Milan Cathedral, with the iron crown of Lombardy. Image: The Iron Crown of Lombardy, from Cesare Cantù Grande illustrazione del Lombardo-Veneto ossia storia delle città, dei borghi, comuni, castelli, ecc. fino ai tempi moderni Milano, Corona e Caimi Editori, 1858. This image is in the public domain in the United States because its copyright has expired.

In a flamboyant and highly theatrical gesture, Napoleon Bonaparte signifies his political and military dominance over the Italian peninsula with a ceremony in Milan Cathedral, where he crowned himself King of Italy with the ancient, iconic iron crown of Lombardy. This crowning of Napoleon as King is a result of the French conquest of Italy. His full title was "Emperor of the French and King of Italy."

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Battle of Waterloo

On 18 June 1815, Wellington led Allied troops to a final victory over Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo, ending Napoleon’s “Hundred Days” of rule after his escape from Elba on 26 February. The war is officially ended by the 1815 Treaty of Paris, and Napoleon is sentenced to permanent imprisonment at St. Helena, where he dies in 1821. Image: Richard Knötel, Print of English Life Guards (left) and Horse Guards (right) of 1815 charging (Band IV, Tafel 4, Uniformenkunde, Lose Blätter zur Geschichte der Entwicklung der militärischen Tracht, Berlin, 1890). This image is in the public domain in the United States because its copyright has expired.

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Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus

Mary Shelley releases the first edition of Frankenstein. The more popular modern version was released on October 31, 1831, which includes the introduction that explains the novel's origins at Villa Diodati. Frankenstein follows many tenets of Romanticism and takes much influence from Milton's Paradise Lost, which is quoted to open to novel and is read by Frankenstein's monster during the events that take place. The novel focuses on a number of themes, one of the most prominent of which is the idea of "nature against nurture" (itself a key idea of Shelley's mother Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women). Contrary to thinking in oral or even medieval societies, Romanticism, where characters are unchanging, readers are encouraged to ask the question on what would have happened to the monster had Frankenstein not screamed and ran away from it. The monster shows the ability to be a monster, but it also shows the ability to show empathy and care. The scientist Frankenstein himself worries constantly about the wholly unnatural creature that he has brought into the natural world and what should happen if he gives the monster what it wants - someone to love. Much like the thought of Romanticism that perhaps Satan was the party in the right during Paradise Lost, the monster's growth mentally and emotionally with his own deeply flawed Maker in Frankenstein invites to question the rights of the individual. The vivid descriptions of nature and the thought-provoking themes of the novel make it a standout of the Romantic era and a phenomenal story to this day.

Gag Acts

On 30 December 1819, the British parliament passed the Six Acts (or Gag Acts), which labeled any meeting for radical reform as “an overt act of treasonable conspiracy.” The acts were aimed at gagging radical newspapers (the Blasphemous and Seditious Libels Act, the Newspaper and Stamp Duties Act, and the Misdemeanors Act), preventing large meetings (the Seditious Meetings Prevention Act), and reducing what the government saw as the possibility of armed insurrection (the Training Prevention Act and the Seizure of Arms Act). Image: The Royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

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Joanna Baillie, A Collection of Poems

Joanna Baillie published A Collection of Poems, Chiefly Manuscript, and From Living Authors in April 1823. The purpose of the volume was to raise funds for a family in financial distress. The collection includes work by Anna Barbauld, William Wordsworth, and Sir Walter Scott. Image: Joanna Baillie (1762-1851), Dramatist, by Mary Ann Knight. This image is in the public domain in the United States as its copyright has expired.

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Trial of William Burke

In January 1829, William Burke was tried for the murder of sixteen people in Edinburgh, for the purpose of selling their bodies to anatomists in Edinburgh. His accomplice, William Hare, turned King’s evidence and avoided prosecution. He was hanged and sentenced to be anatomized and displayed; his skeleton still hangs today in the Anatomy Museum at Edinburgh University Medical School. Image: Drawing of Hare and Burke (c. 1850). This image is in the public domain in the United States because its copyright has expired.

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Irish Church Temporalities Act

The Irish Church Temporalities Act received the Royal Assent (i.e. became law) on 14 August 1833. The Act reorganized the ecclesiastical structure of the Irish Church by suppressing ten of its twenty-two bishoprics and removing those parish clergy who had no parishioners.

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Second Chartist Petition

Presentation of the Second Chartist Petition to the House of Commons on 2 May 1842. Like the first Chartist Petition, which was presented in June 1839, this was rejected without a hearing on the next day, 3 May 1842. Image: Engraving depicting a Chartist riot from 1886 book True Stories of the Reign of Queen Victoria by Cornelius Brown. This image is in the public domain in the United States because its copyright has expired.

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British Army withdraws from Afghanistan

On 12 October 1842, the British Army withdrew from Afghanistan, ending the First Anglo-Afghan War. Image: Detail: ‘Remnants of an Army’ by Elizabeth Butler portraying William Brydon arriving at the gates of Jalalabad as the only survivor of a 16,500 strong evacuation from Kabul in January 1842. This image is in the public domain in the United States as its copyright has expired.

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Founding of St. John’s House Training Institution for Nurses

Founding of St. John’s House Training Institution for Nurses in July of 1848. Image: Supplement to the Nursing Record (20 December 1888). This image is in the public domain in the United States as its copyright has expired.

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Carlyle's "Negro Question"

On December 1849, Thomas Carlyle published “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question” in Fraser’s Magazine; the article was later republished in his Critical and Miscellaneous Essays as “On the Nigger Question.” Image: Photograph of Thomas Carlyle, circa 1860s, by Eliott & Fry. This image is in the public domain in the United States as its copyright has expired.

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Crimean War

The Crimean War was a conflict fought between the Russian Empire and an alliance of the French Empire, the British Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Kingdom of Sardinia. Britain enters the conflict on 28 March 1854. Image: Photograph of Cornet Henry John Wilkin, by Roger Fenton (1855). Wilkin survived the Charge of the Light Brigade. This image is available from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID cph.3g09124. The image is in the public domain in the United States because its copyright has expired.

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Charge of the Light Brigade

On 25 October 1854, British forces undertook the charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaklava. Image: Tinted lithograph showing the embarkation of sick persons at the harbor in Balaklava" (William Simpson, artist; Paul & Dominic Colnaghi & Co., publishers, 24 April 24 1855). This image is available from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID ppmsca.05686. The image is in the public domain in the United States because its copyright has expired.

No other engagement of the war has stuck so vividly in the popular consciousness, aided by Tennyson's poem of the same name, by far the best-remembered cultural product of the war. On the morning of October 25th, 1854, over six hundred British men rode the wrong way down a “valley of death” (so christened first by The Times and later by Tennyson) as enemy guns attacked from all sides. Not two hundred made it out alive. The charge resulted from a series of miscommunications between Lord Raglan, the Commander-in-Chief of the British Forces, and Lord Lucan, the Commander of the Cavalry. Both Tennyson’s poem and many other contemporary responses to the charge suggest that reactions to this event were deeply conflicted, expressing real bewilderment about how to integrate it into preexisting models of patriotic feeling. Moreover, a new form of heroism grew out of the bewildering experience of the Light Brigade’s defeat—and a new sense of a national identity that was based in part on this new heroism.

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Aurora Leigh

On 15 November 1856, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh was published by Chapman and Hall in Great Britain. Aurora Leigh—a verse-novel and modern epic—set off literary, social, and political reverberations in Britain, North America, and Europe up to the end of the century. Given its innovative, generically mixed form and its controversial contemporary subject matter, it figured in debates over poetry and poetics, the nature of the realist novel, class divisions and social reform, women’s rights, religion, and the politics of nations. Image: An 1871 engraving of an 1859 photograph of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (photograph by Macaire Havre, engraving by T. O. Barlow). This image is in the public domain in the United States because its copyright has expired.

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Victoria and Albert Museum opened

On 22 June 1857, Queen Victoria opened the Victoria and Albert Museum. Image: George Hayter, State portrait of Queen Victoria, 1860 (oil on canvas), from the Government Art Collection of the United Kingdom. This image is in the public domain in the United States because its copyright has expired.

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Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857

On 28 August 1857, passage of the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857. The Act legalized divorce and protected a divorced woman’s property and future earnings. The grounds for divorce for men was adultery (in legal terms, criminal conversation), for women adultery combined with bigamy, incest, bestiality, sodomy, desertion, cruelty, or rape. Image: The Royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

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British Novelists and their Styles

In June 1859, publication of David Masson’s British Novelists and their Styles, which establishes novels as objects of academic study. Image: Engraved Portrait of David Masson by W. B. Hole (Edinburgh University). This image is in the public domain in the United States because its copyright has expired.

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Book of Household Management

On 1 October 1861, Isabella Beeton’s Book of Household Management was published in one-volume form. The book has been called “the most famous English cookery book ever published.” Image: Title Page of Beeton's Book of Household Management. This image is in the public domain in the United States because its copyright has expired.

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George William Gordon executed

Gordon, a Jamaican former slave and elected member of the Jamaica House of Assembly, is executed by hanging after a court martial condemns him to death for his alleged role in encouraging the Morant Bay rebellion.

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