The world in 1861

General

• †  Daily weather forecasts began on 1 January.
• †  The First horse-drawn trams appeared on the streets of London.
• †  The opening of the Post Office Savings Bank saw within its first year 180,000 investors, who between them deposited nearly £2,000,000.

Census

• †  The census taken on the night of 7 April gave the total population as 20,066,000. To put this in perspective the population of Russia was 76 million, USA 32 million and Italy 25 million.

Sanitation

• †  Queen Victoria had been on the throne since 1837, with Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, as her husband and Prince Consort. Victoria was devastated when on 14 December Prince Albert died at Windsor Castle. The cause of Prince Albert’s death was thought to be due to typhoid, caused by contaminated water and lack of proper sewage disposal.
• †  Thomas Crapper, manufacturer, supplier and installer of sanitary goods and improver and promoter of the ‘Water Waste Preventer’ founded the firm of Thomas Crapper & Co. in 1861.

Literature

• †  Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management.
• †  Charles Dickens – Great Expectations.
• †  The first issue of the Vatican’s newspaper L’Osservatore Romano was published.

Political and Military

• †  Viscount Palmerston Prime Minister.
• †  William Ewart Gladstone was Chancellor of the Exchequer and introduced a clever new practice in the way laws dealing with financial practice were passed by Parliament, combining them all into one large bill for the 1861 budget.
• †  Earl Haig, Commander in chief of the British forces in France during most of the First World War, was born in Edinburgh.
• †  James Buchanan was succeeded by Abraham Lincoln as American President.
• Tsar Alexander II of Russia initiated sweeping social reforms, the most historically important of which was the Emancipation of the Serfs Act, 1861.

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