Gerard Manley Hopkins, selected poems Timeline

Year Historical Literary Author
1839 First Factory Inspector's report Carlyle's Chartism
Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle
Ellis' The Women of England:Their Social Duties and Domestic Habits
1840 Penny post begins
Queen Victoria marries her cousin Albert, who becomes Prince Consort.
1841 The Tories come to power. Sir Robert Peel becomes Prime Minister
Punch begins
1842 Jowett becomes tutor at Balliol College, Oxford
Chartist riots. Report on Sanitary Conditions of Labouring Population
Mudie's Lending Library opens
Illustrated London News begins
1843 Theatre Regulation Act Thomas Carlyle's Past and Present
Ruskin's Modern Painters (vol. 1)
1844 Co-operative Society founded in Rochdale
Factory Act (women and children)
Expansion of railways across Britain
Disraeli's Coningsby, or The New Generation published Hopkins born on 28th July
1845 John Henry Newman converts to Catholicism
Financial speculation in Railways
Onset of the Irish potato famine
The first Anglican sisterhood, Park Village, is founded in the Christ Church parish
Disraeli's Sybil, or The Two Nations published
E. A. Poe, Tales of Mystery and Imagination
1846 Repeal of Corn Laws
Famine in Ireland
Whigs come to Power
1847 Railway reaches Dorchester
Ten Hours' Factory Act
Disraeli's Tancred
1848 Chartist demonstrations in London following by the collapse of the Chartist movement
Democratic Revolutions in Europe.
Cholera epidemic
Public Health Act
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood founded
Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto
Newman's Loss and Gain
1849 Bedford College for Women founded Charles Kingsley's Alton Locke
1850 Roman Catholic hierarchy established
Public Libraries Act
Charles Kingsley, Alton Locke
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
1851 Great Exhibition in London
Taylor Mill's The Enfranchisement of Women
Ruskin's Stones of Venice

Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe

1852 Hopkins' family move to Hampstead
1853 Cholera epidemic
Crimean War
Yonge's Heir of Redclyffe
1854 Onset of Crimean War Hopkins attends Highgate Grammar School
1855 Daily Telegraph
Repeal of stamp duty on newspapers
Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South
1856 Crimean War ends Dickens, Little Dorrit
1857 Railway extended to Weymouth
Indian Mutiny
Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act
Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary
Hughes' Tom Brown's School days
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh
1858 Ballantyne's Coral Island
English Woman's Journal begins
George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life
1859 Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species published
Rise of movement for Home Rule in Ireland
Smiles' Self Help published
Mill's On Liberty
1860 Cornhill Magazine begins
1861 Death of Prince Consort
American Civil War begins
Dickens, Great Expectations
Beeton's Book of Household Management
Wood's East Lynne
1862 Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret
1863 The Oxford Declaration published Kingsley's The Water Babies Hopkins enters Balliol College, Oxford University
1864 John Henry Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua
1865 American Civil War ends
Women's Suffrage Campaign
Transatlantic cable laid
Joseph Lister establishes antiseptic surgery
Completion of St. Pancras' railway station
Slavery is abolished in the USA
Matthew Arnold's Essays in Criticism
1866 Cholera epidemic
Former slaves granted citizenship and equal rights in America
Ku Klux Klan founded
Swinburne's Poems and Ballads (dedicated to Rossetti) published Newman receives Hopkins into the Catholic Church in October
1867 Second Reform Act
Fenian Rising in Ireland
Marx's Das Kapital published
George Eliot's Felix Holt, the Radical
1868 Gladstone becomes Prime Minister Hopkins enters the Jesuit order
1869 Opening of Suez Canal
Mill's The Subjection of Women
Arnold's Culture and Anarchy
Blackmore's Lorna Doone
1870 Education Act: free education in new board schools
First Married Women's Property Act
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Poems Studies at Stoneyhurst
1871 Trade Union Act
Darwin's The Descent of Man
1872 MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin
1873 Mill's Autobiography
Pater's Studies in the Renaissance
Hopkins teaches at Roehampton
1874 Hopkins studies at St. Bueno's near St. Asaph, North Wales
1875 Gilbert & Sullivan's Trial by Jury Hopkins writes The Wreck of the Deutschland
1876 Invention of telephone by Alexander Graham Bell
Queen Victorian proclaimed Empress of India
1877 Hopkins writes God's Grandeur; The Windhover; Pied Beauty
1878 Gramophones first produced by Thomas Edison
Newman made Cardinal
Revolutions in Europe
Hardy's Return of the Native published
Gilbert and Sullivan's HMS Pinafore
Hopkins teaching at Stonyhurst and London
1879 Electric lightbulb invented George Meredith's The Egoist published Hopkins in Oxford. Writes Binsey Poplars; Duns Scotus' Oxford etc
1880 (-1881) First Boer War, also known as the Transvaal War Hardy's The Trumpet Major is published Hopkins writes Felix Randal. Lives in Liverpool
1881 First Anglo-Boer War Hardy's A Laodicean published
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ballads and Sonnets
Uncle Remus series, J C Harris 
1882

First commercial production of electricity


Married Women's Property Act, enables women to buy, own and sell property and to keep their own earnings
Hopkins writes Ribblesdale. Lives in Stonyhurst
1883 Fabian Society founded

Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathrustra

1884 Ruskin's Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth-Century
Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain

Hopkins goes to University College, Dublin as professor

1885 Haggard's King Solomon's Mines Hopkins writes the Terrible Sonnets
1887 Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee celebrating 50 years of her reign Haggard's Allan Quartermain
1888 Jack the Ripper murders five women in London
Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society
Arnold's Essays in Criticism (Second Series) Hopkins writes That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire
1889 Newman dies Death of Gerard Manley Hopkins Hopkins writes Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord; in April contracts typhoid fever, then dies on June 8th
1890 First underground railway in London
Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough (first two vols; complete 13 vols., -1915)
First of the Jim Crow laws passed to segregate blacks from whites in the South
Southern states pass series of laws to restrict black voting rights
William Morris' News from Nowhere
Emily Dickinson, Poems
1891 William Morris, Kelmscott Press Gissing's New Grub Street
1892 Daimlers sell their first motor car
1893 Independent Labour Party formed
1895 Oscar Wilde arrested and imprisoned for homosexuality
1897 Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee
1899 ( - 1902) Second Boer War
Irish Literary Theatre founded
Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken
Pinero's Trelawney of the 'Wells'
Symons' The Symbolist Movement in literature
Wells' Tales of Space and Time
1900 Most children under eleven attending elementary school
Daily Express founded
Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams
1901 Queen Victoria dies. Edward VII king
First transatlantic radio communication by Marconi
Wells' The First Men in the Moon
1902 Balfour Education Act establishes state system of secondary schools
Second Boer War ends
Bennett's Anna of the Five towns
Mare's Songs of Childhood
Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles
Kipling's Just So Stories
1903 Wilbur and Orville Wright make first powered flight
New York-London news service begins using wireless telegraphy
Emmeline Pankhurst founds the Women's Social and Political Union
Butler's The Way of All Flesh
James' The Ambassadors
The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. du Bois
1904 Entente Cordiale settles colonial differences between UK and France
Offset printing invented
Abbey Theatre, Dublin, founded
Freud's The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
Hardy's The Dynasts, Part I published
J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan first performed on stage
James' The Golden Bowl
1905 Start of suffragette agitation and first suffragettes imprisoned
Einstein's special theory of relativity
Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
Doyle's The Return of Sherlock Holmes
Wells' Kipps
1906 Liberal landslide in general election; 29 Labour MPs elected and Labour Party constituted Mare's Poems
1907 Pablo Picasso introduces cubism
1908 Old Age Pensions Act introduces state pensions for the over-seventies
Ford's first Model T car sold in Britain
Pathe's first regular newsreel
First aeroplane flight in Britain
Edmund Gosse's Father & Son published
Bennett's The Old Wives' Tale
Wells' The War in the Air
1909 North Pole reached by Robert Peary (US)
NAACP founded 
Galsworthy's Strife
Pound's Personae
1910 Edward VII dies. George V becomes king
South Wales Miners' strike
First post-impressionist exhibition in London
First feature-length films
Freud's On Psychoanalysis
Collapse of cotton farming due to boll weevil damage
Galsworthy's Justice
Wells' The History of Mr Polly
1911 Ford Model T assembly plant opened in Manchester
Beatrice and Webb's Poverty
Der Blaue Reiter group of expressionist artists formed in Munich
Frazer's The Golden Bough (11 vols.-1915; first two vols., 1890)
Roald Amundsen reaches South Pole
Suffragette riots in London
Wells' The New Machiavelli
1912 First Post-Impressionism Exhibition in London
Titanic sinks
Widespread strikes in Britain
Women's Franchise Bill rejected by the House of Commons; suffragettes riot in London
Some 400 cinemas in London; establishment of British Board of Film Censors
Bridges' Poetical Works
Mare's The Listeners
Georgian Poetry, ed. Edward Marsh
Pound's Ripostes
Mann's Death in Venice
1913 Suffragette Emily Davies dies after throwing herself under the King's horse at the Derby
Freud's Totem and Taboo; also Interpretation of Dreams
Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring
'Cat and Mouse' Act
House of Commons passes Irish Home Rule Bill but rejected by the House of Lords
Suffragette deonstrations
Marcel Proust publishes first of the seven volumes of A la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past) (last volume, 1927)
1914 August: Great War breaks out (to November 1918)
Irish Home Rule Act passed but later suspended because of war
World War One - although segregated, black soldiers enlisted to fight in US armed forces
Pound's Des Imagistes
1915 War intensifies with huge losses
Zeppelin attacks on London
Sinking of Lusitania
Einstein's general theory of relativity
Second Battle of Ypres
Brooke's 1914 and Other Poems
Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps
Kafka's Metamorphosis
Maugham's Of Human Bondage
Some's Imagist Poets: An Anthology, ed. Amy Lowell (further Imagist anthologies followed in 1916 and 1917)
Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier
1916 Easter Rising, Dublin
Conscription introduced
Battle of the Somme
Theories of shell-shock develop
Jung's Psychology of the Unconscious
Battle of Verdun
Lloyd George becomes Prime Minister
The Great Migration to the north begins (US) 
Brighouse's Hobson's Choice
Wells' Mr Britling Sees it Through
1917 USA enters war
Third Battle of Ypres (Passchendaele)
Russian Revolution (March)
Freud's Introduction to Psychoanalysis
Abdication of Czar Nicholas II
Russian Revolution (October)
1918 End of the Great War: Armistice, 11 November
Rutherford splits atom
Representation of the People Act (4th Reform Bill) gives the vote to all men over twenty-one and women over thirty
Stopes' Married Love; Parenthood
Fisher Education Act raises school-leaving age to fourteen
Influenza pandemic, kills over 20 million people world-wide by 1920
Execution of Czar Nicholas II
Vote given to all men over twenty-one and women over thirty
Joyce's Exiles
Thomas' Last Poems
Robert Bridges publishes first edition of Hopkins' poems
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