John Locke "Father of English Empiricism"

John Locke (29 August 1632 – 28 October 1704), the great English proponent of what John Stuart Mill would call "the analytic philosophy of mind," and the "father of English empiricism," was born in 1632 at Wrinton in Somerset. The son of a Puritan attorney, he was educated by Puritans at Westminster and studied mathematics and medicine at Christ Church College at Oxford, still a bastion of Royalist sympathies. He held various academic posts there, and became physician and confidential adviser to the Whig first earl of Shaftesbury, in whose house he came to live in 1667. He held a number of official positions until he was expelled from England in 1684 for supposed complicity in Shaftesbury's plots. He then travelled in France and took up residence in Holland, where he came to the attention of the then Prince of Orange, who would shortly become William III. After William had assumed the throne of England Locke came back into favor, and became commisioner of appeals, an advisor on coinage, and a member of the council of trade.

His two Treatises on Govemment, written in 1679 and 1680, but too radical (and too dangerous) to be published then, finally appeared in 1690, and were employed to justify the Glorious Revolution by denying the validity of the theory of the divine right of kings. Locke's ideas contradicted the more conservative assumptions which had been put forth by Hobbes in his Leviathan, and they became the classic defenses of the political ideals of many seventeenth-century Englishmen: the origins of the state, Locke maintained, lay in a social contract between the people and their government, and the people were within their rights to remove or alter a government which betrayed their trust. Revolution, then, became the ultimate recourse (and a legitimate one) of a people whom tyranny had deprived of their rights. By the eighteenth century, Locke's theories had become as orthodox in British philosophical circles as his friend Newton's had become in physics: both were advocates of different sorts of natural laws which assumed that the universe functioned in a systematic fashion.

Locke remained a Christian, maintaining that since our minds are not capable of comprehending reality, we must supplement our knowledge with faith: he was also a strong advocate of religious liberty, writing four letters on the principle of religious toleration. He died in 1704 and was buried at High Laver in Essex.

As a philosopher Locke insisted on the primacy of experimental science and philosophy over the subtle quibbles of traditional Aristotelian modes of thought. His principal philosophical work was his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, published in 1690, although it had taken him seventeen years to complete: it comprises an attempt to determine what aspects of his existence man's understanding was capable of comprehending and which exceeded his power. He believed, with Hobbes, that man had once existed in a state of nature, but that, as a creature created in God's image, man was possessed of reason, and therefore capable of rational behavior, which permitted him to cooperate with other men to form societies and to discern the laws of nature, the most important of which guaranteed him life, liberty, and property. Man acquired knowledge not by means of divine revelation or because he possessed innate ideas, but because his senses permitted him to learn from the external world, and put him in touch with reality. (Locke, like Newton, would be one of Blake's bête noires ). Though all men were born equal, Locke maintained, some, by dint of greater industry, could legitimately accumulate more property than others: the primary responsibilities of legitimate governments, therefore, were to protect life and liberty and to to safeguard property. Locke was no democrat: he believed that laborers had neither the time, the education, nor the inclination to make rational political judgements, and should not, therefore, be permitted to have a voice in government, and he denied a role in politics or government to individuals who were not possessed of property.

Crystal Palace

Crystal Palace was a cast-iron and glass building originally erected in Hyde Park, London, England, to house the Great Exhibition of 1851. More than 14,000 exhibitors from around the world gathered in the Palace's 990,000 square feet (92,000 m²) of exhibition space to display examples of the latest technology developed in the Industrial Revolution. 
After the exhibition, the building was moved to a new park in Penge Common next to an affluent area of London called Sydenham Hill, a well-heeled suburb full of large villas. The Crystal Palace was enlarged and stood in the area from 1854 to 1936, when it was destroyed by fire. It attracted many thousands of visitors from all levels of society. The name Crystal Palace was later used to denote this area of south London and the park that surrounds the site, home of the Crystal Palace National Sports Centre.

The one who designed Crystal Palace was Joseph Paxton.

Joseph Paxton was first and foremost a gardener, and his layout of gardens, fountains,terraces and cascades left no doubt as to his ability. One thing he did have a problem with was water supply. Such was his enthusiasm that thousands of gallons of water were needed in order to feed the myriad fountains and cascades which abounded in the Crystal Palace park. The two main jets were 250 feet (76 m) high.

Initially, water towers were constructed, but the weight of water in the raised tanks caused them to collapse. Isambard Kingdon Brunel  was consulted and came up with the plans for two mighty water towers, one at the north and the other at the south end of the building. Each supported a tremendous load of water, which was gathered from three reservoirs, at either end of and in the middle of the park.

Two years later, the grand fountains and cascades were opened, again in the presence of the Queen, who got wet when a gust of wind swept mists of spray over the Royal carriage.

The huge, modular wood, glass and iron structure at the top of  was originally Sydenham Hill erected in Hyde Park in London to house The Great Exhibition of 1851, showcasing the products of many countries throughout the world.

Women in Literature

In A Literature of Their Own shows how women's literature has evolved, starting from the Victorian period to modern writing. Breaks down the movement into three stages — the Feminine, a period beginning with the use of the male pseudonym in the 1840s until 1880 with George Eliot's death; the Feminist, from 1880 till the winning of the vote in 1920; and the Female, from 1920 till the present-day, including a "new stage of self-awareness about 1960."

Looks at how other literary subcultures ("such as black, Jewish... or even American") to see how they developed. A female solidarity always seemed to exist as a result of "a shared and increasingly secretive and ritualized physical experience... the entire female sexual life cycle." Female writers always wrote with this commonality and feminine awareness in mind. Therefore, women's writing and women's experiences "implied unities of culture."
Showalter finds in each subculture, and thus in women's literature, first a long period of imitation of the dominant structures of tradition and an "internalization of its standards of art an its views on social roles." This Feminine phase includes women writers such as the Brontes, Elizabeth Gaskell, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Harriet Martineau, George Eliot, Florence Nightingale, and the later generation of Charlotte Yonge, Dinah Mulock Craik, Margaret Oliphant, and Elizabeth Lynn Linton. These women attempted to integrate themselves into a public sphere, a male tradition, and many of them felt a conflict of "obedience and resistance" which appears in many of their novels. Oddly enough, during the Victorian period, women flooded the novel market and comprised a healthy segment of the reading public — still, women writers were left "metaphorically paralyzed." The language with which they could fully express their experience as women and their sufferings as they still identified themselves within the confines of Victorian bourgeois propriety.
In the second stage, the minority — or rather, the subordinate — lashes out against the traditional standards and values, demanding their rights and sovereignty be recognized. In this Feminist phase, women's literature had varying angles of attack. Some women wrote social commentaries, translating their own sufferings to those of the poor, the laboring class, slaves, and prostitutes, thereby venting their sense of injustice in an acceptable manner. They expanded their sphere of influence by making inroads into social work. In a completely different direction, the 1870s sensation novels of Mary Braddon, Rhoda Broughton, and Florence Marryat, "explored genuinely radical female protest against marriage and women's economic oppression, although still in the framework of feminine conventions that demanded the erring heroine's destruction." Their golden-haired doll-like paradigms of womanhood mock contemporary expectations of Angels in the House by turning out to be mad bigamists and would-be murderesses.
Women such as Sarah Grand, George Egerton, Mona Caird, Elizabeth Robins, and Olive Schreiner made "fiction the vehicle for a dramatization of wronged womanhood... demand changes in the social and political systems that would grant women male privileges and require chastity and fidelity from men." On the whole, Showalter finds these women's writings not examples of fine literature. Their projects concerned themselves more with a message than the creation of art, though their rejection of male-imposed definitions and self-imposed oppression opened the doors for the exploration of female identity, feminist theory, and the female aesthetic. 

The third period, then, is characterized by a self-discovery and some freedom "from some of the dependency of opposition" as a means for self-definition. Some writers end up turning inward during the subsequent search for identity. In the early half of Female phase of writing, it "carried... the double legacy of feminine self-hatred and feminist withdrawal... [turning] more and more toward a separatist literature of inner space." Dorothy Richardson, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf worked towards a female aesthetic, elevating sexuality to a world-polarizing determination. Moreover, the female experience and its creative processes held mystic implications — both transcendental and self-destructive vulnerability. These women "applied the cultural analysis of the feminists [before them] to words, sentences, and structures of language in the novel." However, Showalter criticizes their works for their androgynistic natures. For all its concern with sexual connotations and sexuality, the writing avoids actual contact with the body, disengaging from people into "a room of one's own."
This changed when the female novel entered a new stage in the 1960s. With twentieth-century Freudian and Marxist analysis and two centuries of female tradition, writers such as Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark, Doris Lessing, Margaret Drabble, A.S. Byatt, and Beryl Bainbridge access women's experiences. Using previously taboo language and situations, "anger and sexuality are accepted... as sources of female creative power." Showalter's analysis shows how the progress of women's writing reached this phase and expresses all the conflicts and struggles still influencing the current of women's literature.

Maids in Victorian England

Maids slept in the kitchen or in cupboards under the stairs or in attics. They were often forbidden to sing or laugh and had to remain as noiseless and invisible as possible. If they came into contact with a member of the household, they were to keep quiet, avert their eyes and walk out of the room backwards. If anything was broken or damaged, the maid was made to pay and the sum would be deducted from their wages.

Victorian Scullery Maid

This was the lowest occupation of all, usually taken up by very young girls. Her day was filled with duties such as emptying and cleaning chamber pots, polishing brass work and silver, scrubbing the front stairs, washing dishes and scouring pots.

The Victorian scullery maid cleaned the kitchen floor as well as stoves, lit bedroom fires first thing in the morning, and carried heavy cans of warm water up the stairs for bathing, each load would weigh around 15kg. She would usually stumble into her bed in the attic, exhausted, at around 10.00 p.m. She would have her food and clothes provided for and earn a wage of between 10 to13 pounds per annum.

Victorian House Maid

The Victorian house maid came under the supervision of the Housekeeper and depending on the number of servants kept by the family, could fulfill a number of different positions such as chamber maid, parlour maid, in between maid (commonly known at the time as a tweeny), kitchen maid or laundry maid.

The work performed by these servants was back-breakingly strenuous and included duties such as changing linen, making up beds, dusting and cleaning bedrooms, cleaning out fireplaces, polishing grates, hauling coal up to the bedrooms and lighting fresh fires.

Other duties would include scrubbing floors on hands and knees, brushing carpets, beating rugs and cleaning and filling lamps each day. Laundry maids would typically soak loads of laundry, wash, rinse, wring out the washing and then iron the household's laundry when dry. The Victorian house maid could expect a wage of between 15 to 20 pounds per annum, the tweeny earning the least.

Victorian Lady's Maid

This was considered a more privileged position and as such the lady's maid was expected to be literate, have excellent needlework skills in case a garment needed mending and was expected to be scrupulously honest. In constant attendance on the Lady of the House, she would help her dress and undress, help style her hair and even prepare beauty lotions for Her Ladyship. The Lady's Maid could expect to earn around 24 pounds per annum.

Victorian Domestic Servants were often lonely and met with other servants on their afternoon off. If a maid happened to fall pregnant by a man servant or by one of the men of the household, she risked instant dismissal. The majority of servants would eventually get married, typically at around 25 years of age.

The live-in arrangement of maids started to go into decline at the end of the nineteenth century.

Jane Nassau Senior (1828–1877) ; The First Woman in The White Hall

Senior was born Jane Elizabeth Hughes at Uffington on the 10 December 1828, the only sister of the author Thomas Hughes and six other brothers. She married Nassau John Senior on 10 August 1848 at Shaw Church. Her relief work with soldiers returning from the Franco-Prussian War led to the foundation of the National Society for Aid to Sick and Wounded in War in 1870, forerunner of the British Red Cross; and her work with impoverished children in Surrey led to her appointment in 1873, as an assistant inspector of workhouses.

She died of 'cancer of the womb' and exhaustion on 24 March 1877, aged 48; and is buried in Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey.

Jeanie (pronounced 'Jay-nee') Senior, née Hughes, sister of Thomas Hughes, author of 'Tom Brown's Schooldays', was probably the greatest amateur singer of her day (she was selected to test the accoustics of the new Albert Hall) and was also one of the great humanitarian women of the 19th century, along with Florence Nightingale, Josephine Butler and others whose names are now sadly forgotten. Her charitable work on behalf of pauper children, friendless servant girls and others, along with the fact that she was a co-founder of the British Red Cross and the first woman to be appointed to high public office in Whitehall (i.e. central government civil service), would be enough to perpetuate her name, but the story of her life is made all the more fascinating by the remarkable number of eminent and interesting people she knew; these included George Eliot (who wrote about her), Millais (who painted her), G. F. Watts, the 'English Michelangelo' (who also painted her - and whose muse she became), Julia Margaret Cameron (who photographed her), Jenny Lind, the 'Swedish Nightingale' (who sang with her), Lord Tennyson, Florence Nightingale, Octavia Hill, co-founder of the National Trust, Prosper Mérimée, the author of Carmen (who tried to seduce her - failing miserably), and many other. 

Nonetheless, her appointment to high public office in Whitehall was fiercely resisted and her subsequent report on the education of pauper girls caused a furore and was savagely attacked in the press. She was vilified by The Times and publicly accused of lying in its correspondence columns. Her detractors, who referred to her as 'That Woman', afforded her no respite even when she was confined to her bed and dying of exhaustion and cancer. She fought the long defeat, from her bed, with the backing of Florence Nightingale, George Eliot, Octavia Hill, Lord Shaftesbury, Sir James Stansfeld and others, but 'it was too much - she fell asleep on the 24th March 1877. Sadly for the generations of pauper children concerned it was to be many years before her recommendations were implemented or another woman appointed to high public office, but her example was not forgotten, by some at least, and she became an icon for the Women's Movement during its most difficult years.

The Victorian

The Victorian era of British History was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence. Some scholars date the beginning of the period in terms of sensibilities and political concerns to the passage of the Reform Act 1832.

The era was preceded by the Georgian Period and succeeded by the Edwardian Period. The latter half of the Victorian age roughly coincided with the first portion of the Belle Epoque era of continental Europe and the Gilded Age of the United States.

Culturally there was a transition away from the rationalism of the Georgian period and toward romanticism and mysticism with regard to religion, social values, and the arts. The era is popularly associated with the values of social and sexual restraint.

In international relations the era was a long period of peace, known as the Pax Britannica , and economic, colonial, and industrial consolidation, temporarily disrupted by the Crimean War in 1854. The end of the period saw the Boer War. Domestically, the agenda was increasingly liberal with a number of shifts in the direction of gradual political reform, industrial reform and the widening of the voting franchise.

The population of England almost doubled from 16.8 million in 1851 to 30.5 million in 1901. Scotland's population also rose rapidly, from 2.8 million in 1851 to 4.4 million in 1901. Ireland's population decreased rapidly, from 8.2 million in 1841 to less than 4.5 million in 1901. At the same time, around 15 million emigrants left the United Kingdom in the Victorian era and settled mostly in the United States, Canada, and Australia.

During the early part of the era, the House of Commons was headed by the two parties, the Whigs and the Tories. From the late 1850s onwards, the Whigs became the Liberals; the Tories became the conservative. These parties were led by many prominent statesmen including Lord Melbourne, Sir Robert Peel, Lord Derby, Lord Palmerston, William Ewart Gladstone, Benjamin Disraeli, and Lord Salisbury. The unsolved problems relating to Irish Home Rule played a great part in politics in the later Victorian era, particularly in view of Gladstone's determination to achieve a political settlement. Indeed, these issues would eventually lead to the Easter Rising of 1916 and the subsequent domino effect that would play a large part in the fall of the empire.

Victoria's reign lasted for 63 years and 216 days, The Longest in Brittany History up to the present day. However, the present monarch, Elizabeth II, will surpass this if she remains on the throne until 9 September 2015.