Victorian

A mid-Victorian competition to design new Government Offices in Whitehall fell victim to a battle between the competing styles of Gothic and Classical. The result proved unworthy of a nation then at its imperial zenith, as Bernard Porter explains.

As the final preparations are made for the Royal Wedding on Friday April 29th, we explore the history of regal marriages, from Tudor times to the twentieth century, through a selection of articles from our archive, historic photographs and videos.

On the centenary of the death of W.S.Gilbert Ian Bradley examines the achievements of the surprisingly radical Victorian dramatist and librettist who, in collaboration with the composer Arthur Sullivan, created classic satires of English national identity.

The Victorian era was an age of faith – which is why it was also a golden period of progress, argues Tim Stanley.

Jacqueline Riding examines how a 19th-century painting, created almost 150 years after the Jacobite defeat at Culloden, has come to dominate the iconography of that event.

Glittering monument to Britain’s colonial achievement or fragile symbol of a fragmenting imperial dream? Jan Piggott charts the efforts to make Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace flourish as an ‘Acropolis of Empire’.

Nicholas Dixon asks whether there was a radical transition between the two eras.

Wilkie Collins’ haunting mystery of false identity and female instability reflected one of the lunacy panics of the age. Sarah Wise looks at three events that inspired The Woman in White.

Rosie Llewellyn-Jones recalls the Victorian economist who helped resolve the financial crisis in India after the Mutiny of 1857.

The Great Exhibition of 1851 was not only a celebration of Victorian Britain’s scientific and economic pre-eminence but also a hymn to the religion that underpinned it, argues Geoffrey Cantor.

‘Garotting’, or the strangulation of a victim in the course of a robbery, haunted the British public in the 1850s. Emelyne Godfrey describes the measures taken to prevent it and the range of gruesome self-defence devices that were often of greater danger to the wearer than to the assailant.

Roland Quinault looks at how the Victorians saw the old English system of trial by jury as a defining feature of British good government and fair play and as an example to other nations. Admiration for the system at home and abroad, though, contrasted with the practical realities faced by 19th-century juries.

Richard Willis charts how order was brought to the medical profession by the foundation of the General Medical Council 150 years ago.