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The Times Great Victorian Lives
Ian Brunskill
Obituaries of the most influential Victorians as profiled by The Times, including Dickens, Darwin, Ruskin, Peel, WG Grace and Florence Nightingale.For over 150 years, The Times obituaries have been providing the most respected and perceptive verdicts on the lives of the great and the good. Scientists, social reformers, composers, writers, sportsmen and politicians…Times Great Victorian Lives examines the achievements of eminent Victorians, from Isambard Kingdom Brunel to Charles Darwin, Disraeli to Gladstone and Florence Nightingale to Sarah Bernhardt.Figures have been chosen according to their importance today and are ordered chronologically. The Times Great Victorian Lives gives a fascinating insight into Victorian history, revealing how the Victorian figures we now consider 'great' were seen in their day.
The Times Great Victorian Lives
An Erain Obituaries
GENERAL EDITOR: IAN BRUNSKILL EDITED BY PROFESSOR ANDREW SANDERS
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#u17c1e305-39cc-5d68-b5b0-2c412b4fb314)
Title Page (#uf7ab1253-065e-5c18-935a-2dab379ae16f)
Introduction (#u708a235b-29b7-5251-bef5-1d562abf8a64)
Thomas Arnold (#u7895024f-9285-5658-a4aa-2c1232726f3f)
Felix Mendelssohn (#u19d43b39-636c-50af-8f5c-1e863ad1fbae)
George Stephenson (#uaa462427-1fdd-5b5d-a08b-b71a6f4c0677)
William Wordsworth (#u86707ce9-030f-5db5-9813-e0b212a1698d)
Sir Robert Peel (#uf4b693c0-7e01-5da4-a18e-72310feef308)
J. M. W. Turner, R. A. (#u4dad6b6d-bd5d-5627-97a8-9e4a00cb7f6e)
Isambard Kingdom Brunel (#u2aa6d9bd-b5c0-5169-a924-285313202192)
Robert Stephenson (#u9f094042-e8c2-5cdf-90a0-f9ac27722ebf)
William Makepeace Thackeray (#ucc6c9b5f-dd39-5c1e-b058-b7c0ec6f0023)
Nicholas, Cardinal Wiseman (#uc9309e5f-f3e2-508b-ba1f-3f0a39ee752d)
Abraham Lincoln (#u4f48fca4-97a3-52d6-857f-d07777f5863c)
Lord Palmerston (#ue71c0de0-0ad6-51ac-8c8b-f47b49c655ce)
Michael Faraday (#u1eb682b1-942d-5fd6-9d88-b3db669f6aaf)
Charles Dickens (#u2eb08fb5-993a-54fc-ad9c-42d0f81ba6e4)
General Robert E. Lee (#u2d78353a-e894-5ca7-9a76-42bd768587bf)
Charles Babbage, F. R. S. (#u019d017e-1dc3-51e9-b9b6-3c0d613580d0)
Emperor Napoleon Iii (#ub0f01605-17cc-5a6f-861b-3c71491cc39c)
William Charles Macready (#u83ccc395-c370-5f9d-be6d-53fd69e40f77)
David Livingstone (#ud7997bc9-bb42-538a-b134-d70d3f4cf83b)
John Stuart Mill (#u6a607a32-7b44-5230-8f27-174083f50f4c)
Sir Edwin Landseer (#u81b4b6f7-3561-5070-8890-ecc2de657892)
Harriet Martineau (#litres_trial_promo)
Sir Titus Salt (#litres_trial_promo)
William Henry Fox Talbot (#litres_trial_promo)
Pope Pius Ix (#litres_trial_promo)
George Gilbert Scott (#litres_trial_promo)
John Thadeus Delane (#litres_trial_promo)
George Eliot (#litres_trial_promo)
Thomas Carlyle (#litres_trial_promo)
Benjamin Disraeli, First Earl Of Beaconsfield (#litres_trial_promo)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (#litres_trial_promo)
Charles Darwin (#litres_trial_promo)
Anthony Trollope (#litres_trial_promo)
Richard Wagner (#litres_trial_promo)
Karl Marx (#litres_trial_promo)
Victor Hugo (#litres_trial_promo)
Sir Moses Montefiore (#litres_trial_promo)
Franz Liszt (#litres_trial_promo)
Matthew Arnold (#litres_trial_promo)
George Charles Bingham, 3rd Earl Of Lucan (#litres_trial_promo)
Wilkie Collins (#litres_trial_promo)
Robert Browning (#litres_trial_promo)
John Henry Newman (#litres_trial_promo)
Charles Bradlaugh (#litres_trial_promo)
Charles Stewart Parnell (#litres_trial_promo)
Thomas Cook (#litres_trial_promo)
Alfred Lord Tennyson (#litres_trial_promo)
Louis (lajos) Kossuth (#litres_trial_promo)
Robert Louis Stevenson (#litres_trial_promo)
Christina Rossetti (#litres_trial_promo)
T. H. Huxley (#litres_trial_promo)
Friedrich Engels (#litres_trial_promo)
Louis Pasteur (#litres_trial_promo)
Lord Leighton (#litres_trial_promo)
Clara Schumann (#litres_trial_promo)
Sir John Everett Millais (#litres_trial_promo)
William Morris (#litres_trial_promo)
Johannes Brahms (#litres_trial_promo)
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (lewis Carroll) (#litres_trial_promo)
William Ewart Gladstone (#litres_trial_promo)
Sir Edward Burne-jones (#litres_trial_promo)
Otto Von Bismarck (#litres_trial_promo)
Helen Faucit (#litres_trial_promo)
Henry Tate (#litres_trial_promo)
John Ruskin (#litres_trial_promo)
Sir Arthur Sullivan (#litres_trial_promo)
Oscar Wilde (#litres_trial_promo)
Dr Barnardo (#litres_trial_promo)
Sir Henry Irving (#litres_trial_promo)
Josephine Butler (#litres_trial_promo)
Lord Kelvin (#litres_trial_promo)
Florence Nightingale (#litres_trial_promo)
Count Leo Tolstoy (#litres_trial_promo)
W. S. Gilbert (#litres_trial_promo)
Octavia Hill (#litres_trial_promo)
W. G. Grace (#litres_trial_promo)
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (#litres_trial_promo)
Sarah Bernhardt (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
INTRODUCTION (#ulink_b0527052-a02a-5f14-9a6e-9bc695536c4d)
Ian Brunskill
Obituaries Editor of The Times
By the middle of the 19th century, when the obituaries collected here began to appear, The Times was well on the way to becoming a British institution, secure in its values, confident of its position and proud of the influence it exercised in the world. That confidence and influence had been hard won. The London press, when The Times was founded (as the Daily Universal Register) in 1785, was notable as much for its venality as for anything else. In the rough and tumble of political life, newspapers and journals were there to fight a corner or settle a score. Precisely which corner or score was not always important, if the price was right.
The Times had dragged itself on to higher ground. Thomas Barnes, Editor from 1817 to his death in 1841, began to build the paper into a significant independent force in British politics. His successor, John Thadeus Delane, whose obituary is reprinted here, consolidated the work; at the height of his 36-year editorship, the paper’s prestige was considerable, its power much feared – and its support could not be bought.
In 1854 Delane gave a ringing summation of the paper’s understanding of its role. Attacked in Parliament by the Leader of the Opposition, he replied the next morning in a leading article: ‘We hold ourselves responsible, not to Lord Derby or the House of Lords, but to the people of England, for the accuracy and fitness of that which we think proper to publish…This journal never was, and we trust never will be, the journal of any Minister, and we place our own independence far above the highest marks of confidence that could be given us by any servant of the Crown.’
That defiant firmness of judgement and independence of thought lent significant weight to the paper’s obituary coverage. In an area where the risks of personal bias and parti-pris are great, Delane saw that The Times’s unique authority gave it a valuable advantage over less high-minded rivals. He determined to make the most of it, expanding the paper’s reporting of important deaths to the point where obituaries became an essential and enduring element of The Times’s editorial core. Other papers’ efforts came nowhere near.
Delane was aware that he lived in an age both fascinated by historical greatness and well stocked with remarkable personalities of its own. He saw that the demiseof a prominent national figure would capture the public imagination as nothing else could. It was worth covering in depth and, if necessary, at considerable length. The death of the Duke of Wellington, he told his deputy, ‘will be the only topic’.
Readers seemed to agree. Wellington’s obituary, all 47,000 words of it, dominated The Times over two days in September 1852; such was the demand that it was republished as a pamphlet for separate sale. Similarly, in 1865, when the paper’s circulation stood at 65,000, the publication of Palmerston’s obituary on 18 October added more than 11,000 copies to the daily sale.
In its early days, the paper’s approach to obituary coverage had been haphazard. Notable deaths had been recorded, from the French Revolution onwards, but there was no great consistency of quality or tone. If The Times found itself without an obituary of an important person who had died, it was not above plagiarism, or simply reprinting a notice from another publication (as it did with the life of General Lee, included here). All this changed under Delane. There was no attempt to be comprehensive, and nothing like the daily obituary column of modern times, but Delane made sure that The Times would rise to the big occasion in matchless style.
