Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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By 22 March 1780
The British government raised its tax on newspaper advertising by an extra sixpence per notice: this probably deterred many publishers and authors from advertising new books.
Spring 1946
Violet Markham
chaired a radio discussion insisting domestic work was uniquely feminine and required proper training.
1986
The Women's Press published the feministscience fictionnovelQueen of the States by Josephine Saxton
.
June 1973
A power-sharing assembly was elected in Northern Ireland, but its first sitting, the following month, was disrupted by Ian Paisley
and his followers.
August 1791
Parliament debated the Sierra Leone Bill: Sierra Leone in West Africa (where an attempt to establish free black settlers had failed) was designated an asylum for emancipated slaves, organized by British Evangelicals.
3 November 1978
Dominica became independent from Britain.
Early November 1959
The first significant stretch of motorway in Britain was opened: the M1, running northwards from London, successor to the Great North Road.
The standard translation of the Arabian Nights, made by Edward William Lane
and issued in instalments, appeared in three massive volumes.
18 March 1958
The attendance of debutantes at Court for formal presentation to the Queen
took place for the final time.
1910
Kathleen Ainslie
published Votes for Catherine, Susan and Me, a children's book which is also anti-suffragepropaganda.
By 1859
Aniline dyes (discovered three years before) were introduced in manufacturing; clothing brightened considerably.
1681-5
Of 217 Catholic estates sequestered during the last four years of Charles II
's reign, over half were worth less than £100.
Author profile
Helen Craik
During the last decade of the eighteenth century and the first decade of the nineteenth, HC
wrote both poetry and novels. Her fiction included some historical and some contemporary works.
Author profile
Aldous Huxley
In addition to Brave New World, 1932, one of the most famous dystopian novels of the twentieth century, AH
penned more than forty other novels, often satirical, frequently mystical, that confront the dogmas, idiosyncrasies...
1726
The University of Edinburgh
established a medical faculty and the first chair of obstetrics in Great Britain.
27 January 1839
Charter newspaper began publication in London.
January 1975
The first home computer appeared on the market in the USA: the MITS Altair 8800, selling at $395 in the form of a kit for home assembly.
Late March 1673
The Test Act barred from office (even local office) anyone who declined to take the sacrament of the Church of England
and an oath against the Catholic
doctrine of Transubstantiation.
Marie Curie
became the first woman honoured by burial as a national figure in the Panthéon in Paris.
1749
The philosopheBuffon
began publishing his Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, one of the great Enlightenment collaborative projects for the advancement of learning.
31 October 1517
Luther
pinned his manifesto (Ninety-Five Theses) to the door of the castle church at Wittenberg in Germany. The theses were intended points for a university discussion which in the event never took place.
One of the best-known poems of John Skelton
, The Bowge of Courte, probably dates from this season. It was printed by Wynkyn de Worde
the following year.
1790
Newspaper sales in England totalled more than 16 million.
6 November 1860
Oil was struck at the first Canadian oil well, sunk at Petrolia, Ontario.
About 1885
Tolbert Lanston
patented the Monotype ™ system for book typesetting.
1 January 1841
The Total Abstinence Charter Association
, one of many societies linking working-class political activism and temperance reform, was formed in Leeds.
21 March 1918
German forces launched their Great Offensive, an all-out attack on the Western Front before the USA could get troops moved in.
1828
Andrew Halliday
argued that because England was the most civilized, industrialized and advanced country in the world, it also exhibited the highest incidence of insanity.
Author profile
Anne Sexton
AS
, American poet of the mid twentieth century, flirted for most of her adult life with the idea of killing herself. Her poems are intensely personal, centred on death, as well as on psychic...
28 June 1905
Sailors on the Russian battleship Potemkin mutinied. The ship was lying in port at Odessa, now in Ukraine.
3 February 1731
The Daily Advertiser was launched in London: one of four newspapers (only two dailies) which dominated publishers' book advertising until nearly the century's end.
The first thread sewing machine for bookbinding was invented by David McConnell Smyth
of Hartford, Connecticut.
February 1921
Car manufacturer Henry Ford
published two antisemitic essays in his company newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, about the supposed control exercised by Jews over the movie industry.
AG
was a French novelist, playwright, diarist, autobiographer, essayist, and founder of an influential literary magazine. He also wrote controversial works on sexuality and colonialism. He began publishing in the last decade of the nineteenth...
July 1867
The Association for Promoting the Extension of the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1866 to the Civilian Population was founded.
October 1794
The The Free-Masons's Magazine carried a fiercely anti-slavery poem by someone calling herself Clorinda: An Elegy to the Island of Jamaica.
26 September 1879
The London King's Cross to Leeds train service installed its first regular restaurant car.
1860
Charles Frederick Worth
introduced in Paris a short crinoline for walking which exposed the wearer's ankles.
1900
Gertrude Jekyll
published her influential, highly personal Home and Garden, which describes the creation of her famous cottage garden at Munstead Wood in Surrey.
Less than two months into his pontificate, Pope Paul VI
issued his encyclical Humanae Vitae on The Regulation of Birth, reaffirming the Roman Catholic Church
's anti-contraceptive position.