Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield ('He educated the Tories and dished the Whigs to pass Reform...')

This portraitback to top

This is an original drawing, published as a chromolithograph in Vanity Fair on 30 January 1869, the first caricature to appear in the magazine's fifty-year history. As such it is a landmark work in the history of Victorian graphic satire. The society magazine Vanity Fair was founded in 1868 and introduced a distinctive type of satirical portraiture new to British journalism. Appearing every week, these caricatures were reproduced by the revolutionary new process of chromolithography and included many of the best-known personalities of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods.

Events of 1869back to top

Current affairs

Gladstone introduces the Irish Church Disestablishment Act, which disestablishes the Church of Ireland, disassociating it from the state and repealing the paying of tithes to the Anglican Church of Ireland.
Girton College is founded in Cambridge by Barbara Bodichon and Emily Davies, the first residential college for women in England; women were granted full membership to the University in 1948.

Art and science

Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev invents the periodic table of elements, which arranges elements within a group in order of their atomic mass.
The British scientist Mary Somerville publishes her last book On Molecular and Microscopic Science.
Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir paint together in the open air at La Grenouillère, developing the Impressionist style.

International

The Suez canal opens, linking the Red Sea and the Gulf of Suez with the Mediterranean Sea, and transforming trade routes between Europe and Asia as merchants no longer had to circumvent Africa. The canal was largely in British and French control until Egyptian nationalisation in 1956, which sparked off the international Suez crisis.
Serialisation of Leo Tolstoy's epic novel of Russian society during the Napoleonic wars, War and Peace finishes.

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