Walter Besant
14 August: WB born in Portsea. England. As a child, WB shows great academic progress.
WB sent as a boarder to Stockwell grammar school in south London.
Enters King's College, London, where he plans to become a minister in the Church of England.
Enters Christ's College, Cambridge. WB is an avid reader, especially of Dickens.
WB and Walter William Skeat (later the Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge) take first prizes in Charles Stuart Calverley's Pickwick Papers Examination, held at Christmas 1857 in Calverley’s rooms at Christ’s College, Cambridge. Around ten of his friends and colleagues sat the exam, which Calverley, dressed in cap, gown and hood, conducted with mock formality. The prizes awarded were two first editions of Pickwick. Dickens himself admitted that would have failed the exam.
WB is graduated from Christ’s College, Cambridge. Begins teaching math at Rossall School, Fleetwood, Lancashire and at Leamington College.
Makes a walking tour in Tyrol with a few of his university friends including Calverley.
Rejects Holy Orders and becomes a professor of mathematics at the Royal College, Mauritius.
Becomes a Freemason.
Begins to write articles on social topics for the Daily News, Macmillan Magazine, and the British Quarterly Review.
Becomes the Acting Secretary to the Palestine Exploration Fund, which initiates and surveys archaeological excavations in Palestine. WB does not go to Palestine himself, but works in the Fund's London office.
WB coauthors, with Edward Palmer, Jerusalem: The City of Herod and Saladin. He continued writing critical and biographical works, including The French Humorists from the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century (1873), Montaigne (1875), Rabelais (1879), and Readings in Rabelais (1883).
WB begins a literary collaboration with James Rice, a magazine editor. Together they write a series of highly successful popular novels, short stories, and two plays. After Rice’s death in 1882, Besant continues to write his books alone.
Publishes a collection of highly erudite literary essays, Studies in French Poetry.
Becomes Master Mason of the Marquis of Dalhousie Lodge in London.
WB marries Mary Garat Foster Barham, daughter of Eustace Foster-Barham, of Bridgwater, with whom he will have four children.
For some time following 1974, he takes care of his sister-in-law Annie Besant, a prominent women’s rights activist, socialist, and theosophist. She separated from her clergyman husband, Frank Besant, Walter's younger brother, due to difference of views over religion and politics. Annie Besant was
one of the most remarkable British women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A gifted public speaker and prolific writer, she campaigned for free thought, birth control, improved education, and women’s rights. Continuously criticizing orthodox religion, conventional marriage and the political, economic and social discrimination of women, she represented attitudes incompatible with the dominant Victorian norms" Diniejko (Annie)
WB was intimidated by the emerging New Woman movement and distanced himself from his sister-in-law's controversial feminist views. However, like many late Victorians, he was concerned with the Woman Question, but his views were ambivalent.
Through the next two decades, WB works tirelessly for charities that sought to help London’s poor. He cares deeply about his many projects, often funding them out of his own pocket, and he leaves an impressive legacy.
WB's debut solo novel, All Sorts and Conditions of Men, anticipates the emergence of slum fiction in the last decades of the Victorian era. The novel, which immediately becomes very popular and sells 250,000 copies, describes the working-class inhabitants of London's East End slums who live in a cultural void resulting in their almost total social exclusion.
WB's novel All in a Garden Fair inspires Rudyard Kipling to leave India and make a career as a writer.
WB's The Revolt of Man is possibly the first dystopian novel in English.
25 April: delivers a lecture, “The Art of Fiction,” at the Royal Institution on April 25, 1884. It is what he is remembered most for today, because it starts a debate on the purpose of literary fiction that includes contributions by Andrew Lang, R. H. Hutton, Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, Paul Bourget, Edmund Gosse, and Vernon Lee (Violet Paget). In his lecture, RB deals with the professional development of an author, complaining that there are no training institutions for writers. He argues that fiction is a fine art and its rules and conventions should be studied by beginning authors who want to enter the profession. Finally, he claims that fiction has moral purpose which should raise a reader's social conscience.
September: Henry James publishes his famous essay “The Art of Fiction,” as a rebuttal to WB's arguments.
Founds a Masonic research lodge, the Quatuor Coronati Lodge ("The Four Crowned Ones").
Founds and becomes first Chairman of the Society of Authors, the first successful organization for writers in the United Kingdom, established for the protection of literary property. WB calls for the amendment of the laws of domestic copyright and the promotion of international copyright. The Society offers great assistance to young authors by explaining the intricacies of the principles of copyright law and literary profit. It protect the interests of writers in their dealings with publishers and to establish the ownership of an author in his productions.
Along with American folklorist Charles Leland, contributes to the foundation of the Home Arts Association, which establishes evening schools to promote handicrafts, such as such woodcarving, leatherwork, fretwork, weaving, and embroidery.
Children of Gibeon, another slum novel, recounts the miserable lives of three young girls working in an East End sweatshop.
14 May: The People's Palace is opened by Queen Victoria. It provides facilities for recreation, culture, amusement, sport, training and education for the people of East London. WB's slum novels are instrumental in both inspiring and funding this public project.
Admitted to the prestigious Athenaeum Club in London.
The Inner House, his best dystopian novel, is published.
WB's fame is at its height. Boege: “Only Meredith and Hardy of the living novelists were ranked clearly above him.”
Throughout this decade WB authors, coauthors, and edits a number of books on the history and topography of London from prehistoric times until the nineteenth century, of which the most important is an unfinished exhaustive ten-volume Survey of London published after his death. His other books on London include London (1892), Westminster (1895), South London (1899).
WB admitted as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquities.
WB is knighted for his literary and humanitarian achievements, as well as his widely-recognized intellectual authority.
WB serves as the first President of the Hampstead Antiquarian Historical Society and Vice-President of the Hampstead Scientific Society and the Hampstead Arts Society.
9 June: WB dies after two weeks of influenza. Diniejko (Walter): "When he died . . . at his home at Frognal End, Hampstead, on June 9, 1901, his popularity in the English-speaking world reached its peak."
Boege, Fred W. “Sir Walter Besant, Novelist.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 10 (1956), pp. 249-280, and vol. 11 (1956), pp. 32-60.
Diniejko, Andrzej. "Walter Besant: A Biographical Sketch." Victorian Web, www.victorianweb.org/authors/besantw/bio.html, 30 December 2012.
---. "Annie Besant's Multifaceted Personality. A Biographical Sketch." Victorian Web, www.victorianweb.org/authors/besant/diniejko.html, 20 November 2014.