Adah Isaacs Menken as 'Mazeppa'

This portraitback to top

A startling example of the poet as celebrity, Menken was also an actor who rose to fame in the early 1860s in the melodrama Mazeppa (1861-66), a role that saw her wearing flesh-coloured tights whilst strapped to a horse. A savvy self-promoter, she made sure her photographic image was circulated widely. She enjoyed scandal-provoking relationships with Algernon Charles Swinburne and Alexandre Dumas, père. Her poetic volume, Infelicia (1868) was published posthumously, following her untimely death, aged thirty-three.

Events of 1864back to top

Current affairs

First of the Contagious Diseases Act. These acts allowed for the arrest, medical inspection and confinement of any woman suspected of being a prostitute in the port towns. Following huge public outcry over their discrimination against women, notably led by Josephine Butler, leader of the Ladies' National Association, the acts were eventually repealed.
Octavia Hill starts work on slums, and the International Working Men's Association is founded in London.

Art and science

The Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell presents his discoveries in the field of electromagnetics to the Royal Society. His paper A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field expresses the basic laws of electricity and magnetism in unified fashion. Maxwell's equations, as his rules came to be known, helped create modern physics, laying the foundation for future work in special relativity and quantum mechanics.

International

Austria and Prussia combine forces to seize Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark.
Britain cedes Corfu, acquired from France in the Second Treaty of Paris (1815) to Greece. Although Britain had vigorously suppressed an uprising in 1849 in Cephalonia aiming to restore Iolian islands, the government changed policy throughout the 1850s and 60s.

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