More in ‘victorian england’

These are dark times for American conservatives. When they aren’t issuing recriminations at one another for the loss of the White House, they’re resorting to increasingly desperate tactics against the new president. Obama’s international allure, many on the right insist, is at odds with his duty to uphold and defend strictly American interests; his cosmopolitan ...

Benjamin Disraeli, from an 1828 portrait by D. Maclise
At a time when most European Jews lived in abject poverty and weren’t even allowed to vote, Benjamin Disraeli’s career reached stratospheric heights. Intimate with royalty and the elite of British society, he was twice prime minister, and served as leader of the Tory party. Yet, because ...

An undated portrait of Disraeli
By the beginning of 1830, when he was twenty-five, Benjamin Disraeli was tired of England. For three years, he had been suffering from acute depression, brought on by the triple fiasco that marked his entrance into public life. Before he turned twenty-two, Disraeli had lost thousands of pounds in stock-market speculations; ...

Grace Aguilar depicted on the frontispiece to The Mother’s Recompense, 1850
Though schoolchildren today are undoubtedly acquainted with Robin Hood, the merry outlaw who steals the spotlight in Sir Walter Scott’s 1819 novel Ivanhoe, they’re unlikely to recognize the knight who lends the book its title, or Scott’s long-suffering heroine Rebecca. Beautiful, modest, and brave, Rebecca ...