RESOURCES

This section covers a wide range of resources for readers to take further their interest in Victorian cinema, or Victorian life as reflected through the projected image. Follow the links on the left-hand menu for individual sections.

CHRONOLOGY

Below is a chronology of events for the late Victorian period, both general historical events and milestones in the development of motion pictures. The chronology begins with Eadweard Muybridge's first attempts at photographing motion and ends with the death of Queen Victoria. For fuller chronologies of the birth of cinema, see Stephen Herbert, When the Movies Began... (1994) and Deac Rossell, The New Thing with the Long Name and the Old Thing with the Name That Isn't Much Shorter (1995).

Victorian cinema Victorian era
1871
1871
Jan - Germany unified under Kaiser Wilhelm I; Bismarck becomes Chancellor
Mar - France is defeated in the Franco-Prussian War
May - Paris Commune crushed
1872
May - Eadweard Muybridge photographs Leland Stanford's horse Occident
1872
Nov - First international Association Football match England v Scotland
The first picture postcard is produced
1873
Apr - Muybridge manages to photograph Occident showing all four legs off the ground at once
E-J. Marey publishes La machine animale
1873
Sep - Financial 'Panic' in USA
Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina
Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days
1874
Dec - Jules Janssen uses an 'astronomical revolver' to photograph the transit of the planet Venus
1874
Feb - Conservative election victory in Britain, Benjamin Disraeli becomes prime minister
Edison invents the quadruplex telegraph
First Impressionist exhibition held in Paris
Verdi's Requiem performed
1875 1875

Edison invents the Mimeograph duplicating process
Aug - Captain Matthew Webb swims the English Channel
Bizet's opera Carmen
1876
1876
Mar - Turkish massacre of Bulgarians causes international outcry
Mar - Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone
Jun - Sioux annihilate Custer's cavalry at Battle of Little Big Horn
National Baseball league founded in USA
Mark Twain publishes The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
1877
Jul - Eadweard Muybridge resumes action photography experiments for Leland Stanford and produces a photograph of Occident galloping at full speed
Dec - Emile Reynaud patents the Praxinoscope
1877
Jan - Queen Victoria proclaimed Empress of India
Mar - Republican Rutherford Hayes becomes US president
Apr - Britain annexes the Transvaal
May - Russia declares war on Turkey
May - Porfirio Diaz becomes president of Mexico
Dec - Thomas Edison invents the Phonograph
First All-England Lawn Tennis championships at Wimbledon
1878
Jun - Muybridge sets up a camera shed at Palo Alto for photographing horses in sequence
Dec - E-J. Marey reads about Muybridge's sequence photography in La Nature and writes to him, asking him to photograph birds in flight
1878
Jun-Jul - Treaty of Berlin to settle 'Eastern question'
Tchaikovsky's ballet Swan Lake
William Booth founds the Salvation Army
1879
Feb - W.K-L. Dickson writes to Thomas Edison asking for a job (unsuccessfully)
Aug - Muybridge begins photographing humans in motion
Muybridge demonstrates his Zoogyroscope (later the Zoopraxiscope)
1879
Jan-Jul - British-Zulu war
Oct - Britain invades Afghanistan
Nov - Edison patents his electric light bulb
War of the Pacific, Chile against Peru and Bolivia
Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House
1880
May - First public exhibitions of the Zoopraxiscope
1880
Apr - Liberal election victory, William Gladstone become prime minister
Oct - Transvaal declares independence from Britain
First street lighting in New York
First cricket Test match, between England and Australia
1881
Sep - Muybridge gives the first European demonstration of the Zoopraxiscope and meets E-J. Marey
1881
Feb - Boers defeat British at Majuba
Mar - Republican James Garfield becomes US president
Apr - Britain recognises Transvaal independence
Jul - President Garfield assassinated, replaced by Chester Arthur
1882

Le Station Physiologique opens, headed by E-J. Marey with Georges Demenÿ as his assistant
E-J. Marey's photographic gun used to photograph the flight of birds
Albert Londe constructs a nine-lens camera for medical chronophotography
1882
May - Phoenix Park murders in Dublin
May - Italy joins Austro-German alliance (Triple Alliance)
Society for Psychical Research founded
1883
Apr - W.K-L. Dickson begins working for Edison
1883
Apr - Paul Kruger becomes president of the Transvaal
Nov - Britain evacuates the Sudan
First skyscraper built in Chicago
1884 1884
Nov - Berlin Conference sparks off the 'Scramble for Africa'
Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
1885
Oct - Ottomar Anschütz begins sequence photography at Hanover cavalry school
George Eastman perfects process for manufacturing coated photographic paper
1885
Jan - Madhi captures Khartoum and General Gordon killed
Mar - Democrat Grover Cleveland inauguarated US president
Jun - Gladstone resigns, Lord Salisbury forms Conservative administration
The Indian National Congress meets for the first time
Louis Pasteur introduces innoculation against rabies
Work begins in Britain on Dictionary of National Biography
Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado
Karl Benz builds the first successful petrol-driven motor car, in Mannheim, Germany
1886
Nov - Louis Le Prince files a patent for a sixteen lens motion picture camera
1886
Jan - Salisbury resigns, Gladstone becomes Liberal prime minister once more
Apr - Liberals introduce Irish Home Rule Bill
Jun - Liberals defeated over Home Rule Bill
Aug - Conservatives win British general election under Lord Salisbury
1887

Ottomar Anschütz devises the Electro-Tachyscope
Eadweard Muybridge publishes Animal Locomotion
1887
Jun - Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee
Arthur Conan Doyle publishes the first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet
Zamenhof invents Esperanto as an international language
1888
Jan - Le Prince patents a single lens motion picture camera
Feb - Thomas Edison sees Muybridge's Zoopraxiscope
Oct - Edison writes his first motion picture caveat, stating that he will produce 'an instrument which does for the Eye what the phonograph does for the Ear'. He puts the task to his assistant W.K-L. Dickson
Oct - Le Prince takes paper negatives of scenes in his father-in-law's garden in Leeds, and traffic crossing Leeds bridge
George Eastman introduces the 'Kodak' box camera
1888
Mar - Karl Benz begins selling petrol-driven motor cars
Nov - Republican Benjamin Harrison wins US presidential election
First beauty contest held at Spa, Belgium
1889
Jan - Emile Reynaud patents his Théâtre Optique
Jan 22 - William Friese Greene and Mortimer Evans patent a camera which takes four or five pictures per second
Feb - Eastman begins production of celluloid roll film
Aug - Thomas Edison visits E-J. Marey at Le Station Physiologique
1889
Jan - General Boulanger's attempted coup d'état in France fails
Jan - Crown Prince Archduke Rudolf of Austria commits suicide at Mayerling
Nov - Brazil declared a republic
Paris Exposition, for which the Eiffel Tower is built
1890
Jan 18 - Anschütz Electrotachyscope demonstrated at Photographic Association, Berlin
Mar 10 - William Friese-Greene writes to Thomas Edison about his motion picture work
Sep - Louis Le Prince disappears
Nov - Earliest surviving examples of Edison/Dickson's motion picture experiments
Nov 3 - E-J. Marey demonstrates sequence camera for the Académie des Sciences, Paris
Wordsworth Donisthorpe and W.C. Crofts film Trafalgar Square
1890
Mar - Bismarck dismissed as German chancellor
Jul - first general election in Japan
Aug - William Kemmler is the first person to be executed by electric chair, at Auburn Museum, NY
1891
May 16 - Anschütz Electrical Schnellseher opens at International Electrotechnical Exhibition in Frankfurt am Main
May 20 - Edison Kinetoscope demonstrated to National Federation of Women's Clubs
Jul 27 - Georges Demenÿ demonstrates the Phonoscope before the Académie des Sciences in Paris
1891
Sep - General Boulanger commits suicide
Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbevilles
Oscar Wilde's The Portrait of Dorian Gray
1892
Feb 12 - Léon-Guillaume Bouly patents a sequence camera and calls it a Cinématographe
Oct - W.K-L. Dickson comes up with vertically-fed 35 mm celluloid film with double row of perforations, the basis of successful cinematography
Oct 28 - Emile Reynaud opens his Pantomimes lumineuses at the Théâtre Optique, Paris
1892
Jul - Liberals win British general election, Gladstone premier again
Nov - Democrat Grover Cleveland wins US presidential election
Nov - Panama Canal scandal in France
C.F. Cross and E.J. Bevan create the first artifical fibre, rayon, out of cellulose
Rudyard Kipling's Barrack Room Ballads
1893
Feb - Edison's Black Maria studio fully fitted at West Orange, New Jersey
May 9 - Kinetoscope production model demonstrated at Brooklyn Institute
1893

Karl Benz introduces the four-wheeled car
Chicago World's Fair
New Zealand becomes the first country to give women the vote
1894
Jan 9 - First film deposited for copyright at the Library of Congress, Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze, featuring Fred Ott
Mar 6 - Eugen Sandow filmed for the Kinetoscope at the Black Maria studio
Apr 14 - First Kinetoscope parlour opened by the Holland brothers at 1155 Broadway, New York
Oct 1 - Kinetoscope first exhibited to the public in France at 20 boulevard Montmartre
Oct 17 - preview of Kinetoscope parlour managed by Maguire and Baucus at 70 Oxford Street, London, opens to public next day
Nov 30 - Kinetoscope parlour opens at 148 Pitt Street, Sydney, Australia
1894
Mar - Gladstone resigns and Lord Rosebery becomes Liberal prime minister
Oct - Alfred Dreyfus arrested on charges of treason
Nov - Nikolas II becomes Tsar of Russia
Guglielmo Marconi sends his first radio message
1895
Feb - Around this date Birt Acres takes a film outside his Barnet home, with Paul camera
Mar 22 - Lumière Cinématographe shown to the Société d'Encouragement à l'Industrie Nationale, 44 rue de Rennes, Paris - a single film is shown, Sortie d'usine
Apr 21 - The Lathams' Panoptikon projector demonstrated to the press at 35 Frankfort Street, New York
May 20 - Eidoloscope (the renamed Panoptikon) opens to paying public at 153 Broadway, New York
Jun 10 - Lumière Cinématographe presented to Congrèes des Sociétés Françaises de Photographie, Lyons
Sep - Jenkins-Armat projectors demonstrated at Cotton States Exposition, Georgia
Sep 22 - formation of the KMCD group, later to become the American Mutoscope Company, to exploit the Mutoscope
Nov 1 - Skladanowsky Bioskop exhibited at Wintergarten Theatre, Berlin
Nov 10 - Lumière Cinématographe shown to Belgian Photographic Association, Palais du Midi, Brussels
Dec 28 - Lumière Cinématographe opens to paying public at Salon Indien, Grand Café, 14 boulevard des Capucines, Paris
1895
May - Oscar Wilde brings unsuccessful libel action against Marquess of Queensberry of allegations of homosexuality
Jun - Lord Salisbury becomes British prime minister leading Unionist administration
Jul - Tension between Britain and USA over British Guiana-Venezuela boundary and the Monroe doctrine
Nov - Wilhelm Röntgen discovers X-rays
Dec - The Jameson Raid
H.G. Wells publishes The Time Machine
1896
Jan 10 - Birt Acres exhibits projected film to the Lyonsdown Photographic Society, Barnet
Feb 20 - Lumière Cinématographe given press show at Polytechnic, Regent Street and opens to the public the following day
Mar 9 - Lumière Cinématographe begins engagement at Empire Theatre of Varieties, Leicester Square, London
Apr 23 - Edison Vitascope opens to the public at Koster & Bial's Music Hall, New York
May - Georges Méliès makes his first film, Une partie de cartes
May 14 - Doublier and Moisson film the coronation of Tsar Nikolas II for Lumière and three days later Doublier gives Russia's first projected film show, in St Petersburg
Jul 7 - Lumière Cinématographe opens in India
Aug 6 - Gabriel Veyre demonstrates the Lumière Cinématographe before President Profirio Diaz in Mexico City
Aug 11 - First projected film show in China
Sep 18 - Barnett and Sestier introduce projected film to Australia with the Lumière Cinématographe
Oct 3 - Queen Victoria is filmed at Balmoral
Oct 12 - Public debut of the Biograph at Hammerstein's Olympic Music Hall
Nov 3 - Marius Sestier takes the first Australian film, of the Melbourne Cup horse race
1896
Mar - Ethiopia defeats Italy at Adowa
Mar-Apr - The first modern Olympic Games held in Athens
Jun - Persimmon wins the Derby
Aug - Armenian massacre at Constantinople
Nov - Republican William McKinley wins US presidential election
Nobel prizes established
Daily Mail newspaper founded in Britain
1897
Jan - Alexandre Promio films in Egypt and Palestine
Jan 24 - Gabriel Veyre exhibits the Lumière Cinématographe in Havana, Cuba
Feb 15 - First projected film show in Japan, presented by Inabata Katsutaro, with Constant Girel operating the Lumière Cinématographe
Mar 17 - World heavyweight championship between Corbett and Fitzsimmons at Carson City, Nevada filmed by Enoch Rector and Veriscope Company, resultant film over ninety minutes long
May 4 - Nitrate film fire at the Bazar de la Charité causes many deaths
Jun 22 - Diamond Jubilee procession of Queen Victoria filmed by many of the major British and European film businesses
1897
Apr - Greco-Turkish War
Jun - Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee
Aug - Formation of the Automobile Club of Great Britain (later the Royal Autombile Club)
First Zionist Congress held in Basel, Switzerland
Joseph John Thomson discovers the electron
Edmond Rostand's play Cyrano de Bergerac
1898
Apr - James White and Frederick Blechynden film for Edison in China and Japan
Jun - Affonso Segreto starts taking the first native Brazilian films
Sep - A.C. Haddon takes the first ethnographic films, of the Torres Straits islanders
Birt Acres introduces the first narrow-gauge camera-projector, the Birtac
1898
Jan - Emile Zola produces J'accuse in response to Dreyfus trial
Feb - Sinking of U.S.S. Maine at Havana
Apr - USA declares war on Spain
Aug - US forces capture Manila
Sep - British victory at Omdurman under Kitchener
Sep-Nov - Fashoda Incident
Marie and Pierre Curie discover radium
1899
Apr - Gabriel Veyre films in Indo-China
Nov - H.S. Bhatvadekar takes the first native Indian film, of a wrestling match
Spaniard Don Ramirez puts on the first film show in Turkey for Sultan Abdul Hamid II
1899
May - peace conference held at The Hague
Jun - retrial ordered in Dreyfus case
Sep - Dreyfus found guilty but pardoned by presidential decree
Oct - Anglo-Boer War begins
1900
Jan - First films of the Anglo-Boer War conflict in South Africa shown in Britain
Jul - The Shah of Persia see the Lumière exhibit at the Paris Exposition and instructs court photographer Akkas Bashi to bring back a camera to Teheran, where he gives the first film shows
1900
Feb - Relief of Ladysmith
Feb - Formation of Labour Representation Committee in Britain (later the Labour Party)
Apr - Paris Universal Exposition opens
May - Relief of Mafeking
Jun - Start of Boxer uprising in China
Sigmund Freud's The Intepretation of Dreams
Daily Express founded in Britain
Max Planck first proposes the quantum theory
1901
Jan - Edison's Black Maria studio closes
Feb 1 - The funeral of Queen Victoria is filmed by many British and European film companies
1901
Jan 1 - Commonwealth of Australia founded
Jan 22 - Death of Queen Victoria