Victorian era in the context of Varney the Vampire

British people or Britons, also known colloquially as Brits, are the citizens and diaspora of the United Kingdom, the British Overseas Territories, and the Crown dependencies. British nationality law governs modern British citizenship and nationality, which can be acquired, for instance, by descent from British nationals. When used in a historical context, "British" or "Britons" can refer to the Ancient Britons, the Celtic-speaking inhabitants of Great Britain during the Iron Age, whose descendants formed the major part of the modern Welsh people, Cornish people, Bretons and considerable proportions of English people. It also refers to those British subjects born in parts of the former British Empire that are now independent countries who settled in the United Kingdom prior to 1973.

Though early assertions of being British date from the Late Middle Ages, the Union of the Crowns in 1603 and the creation of the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707 triggered a sense of British national identity. The notion of Britishness and a shared British identity was forged during the 18th century and early 19th century when Britain engaged in several global conflicts with France, and developed further during the Victorian era. The complex history of the formation of the United Kingdom created a "particular sense of nationhood and belonging" in Great Britain; Britishness became "superimposed on much older identities", of English, Scots and Welsh cultures, whose distinctiveness still resists notions of a homogenised British identity. Because of longstanding ethno-sectarian divisions, British identity in Northern Ireland is controversial, but it is held with strong conviction by Unionists.

European influence in Afghanistan has been present in the country since the Victorian era, when the competing imperial powers of Britain and Russia contested for control over Afghanistan as part of the Great Game.

Bilston is a market town in the City of Wolverhampton in the West Midlands, England. It is in the Black Country, 2.5 miles (4 kilometres) south east of Wolverhampton city centre and close to the borders of Sandwell and Walsall. The town was known for enamelling from the mid-17th century, and is a former coal and iron mining district. Iron works dominated in Victorian times and the area became a centre for steel production. The town had a population of 34,639 at the 2021 Census.

The Regency era of British history is commonly understood as the years between c. 1795 and 1837, although the official regency for which it is named only spanned the years 1811 to 1820. King George III first suffered debilitating illness in the late 1780s, and relapsed into his final mental illness in 1810. By the Regency Act 1811, his eldest son George, Prince of Wales, was appointed Prince Regent to discharge royal functions. The Prince had been a major force in Society for decades. When George III died in 1820, the Prince Regent succeeded him as George IV. In terms of periodisation, the longer timespan is roughly the final third of the Georgian era (1714–1837), encompassing the last 25 years or so of George III's reign, including the official Regency, and the complete reigns of both George IV and his brother and successor William IV. It ends with the accession of Queen Victoria in June 1837 and is followed by the Victorian era (1837–1901).

Although the Regency era is remembered as a time of refinement and culture, that was the preserve of the wealthy few, especially those in the Prince Regent's own social circle. For the masses, poverty was rampant as urban population density rose due to industrial labour migration. City dwellers lived in increasingly larger slums, a state of affairs severely aggravated by the combined impact of war, economic collapse, mass unemployment, a bad harvest in 1816 (the "Year Without a Summer"), and an ongoing population boom. Political response to the crisis included the Corn Laws, the Peterloo Massacre, and the Representation of the People Act 1832. Led by William Wilberforce, there was increasing support for the abolitionist cause during the Regency era, culminating in passage of the Slave Trade Act 1807 and the Slavery Abolition Act 1833.

A melodrama is a dramatic work in which plot, typically sensationalized for a strong emotional appeal, takes precedence over detailed characterization. Melodrama is "an exaggerated version of drama". Melodramas typically concentrate on dialogue that is often bombastic or extremely sentimental, rather than on action. Characters are often flat and written to fulfill established character archetypes. Melodramas are typically set in the private sphere of the home, focusing on morality, family issues, love, and marriage, often with challenges from an outside source, such as a "temptress", a scoundrel, or an aristocratic villain. A melodrama on stage, film, or television is usually accompanied by dramatic and suggestive music that offers further cues to the audience of the dramatic beats being presented.

In scholarly and historical musical contexts, melodramas are specifically Victorian dramas in which orchestral music or song was used to accompany the action. However the term melodrama is now also applied to stage performances (Victorian or otherwise) without incidental music, novels, films, television, and radio broadcasts that display the previously mentioned qualities. In modern contexts, the term melodrama is generally pejorative, as it suggests that the work in question lacks subtlety, character development, or both. By extension, language or behavior that resembles melodrama is often called melodramatic; this use is nearly always pejorative.

The John Rylands Research Institute and Library is a late-Victorian neo-Gothic building on Deansgate in Manchester, England. It is part of the University of Manchester. The library, which opened to the public in 1900, was founded by Enriqueta Augustina Rylands in memory of her husband, John Rylands. It became part of the university in 1972, and now houses the majority of the Special Collections of The University of Manchester Library, the third largest academic library in the United Kingdom .

Special collections built up by both libraries were progressively concentrated in the Deansgate building. The special collections, believed to be among the largest in the United Kingdom, include medieval illuminated manuscripts and examples of early European printing, including a Gutenberg Bible and a Mainz Psalter, the second largest collection of printing by William Caxton, and the most extensive collection of the editions of the Aldine Press of Venice. The Rylands Library Papyrus P52 has a claim to be the earliest extant New Testament text. The library holds personal papers and letters of notable figures, among them the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell and the scientist John Dalton.

The Georgian era was a period in British history from 1714 to 1837, named after the Hanoverian kings George I, George II, George III and George IV. The definition of the Georgian era is also often extended to include the relatively short reign of William IV, which ended with his death in 1837. The subperiod that is the Regency era is defined by the regency of George IV as Prince of Wales during the illness of his father George III. The term Georgian is typically used in the contexts of social and political history and architecture. The term Augustan literature is often used for Augustan drama, Augustan poetry and Augustan prose in the period 1700–1740s. The term Augustan refers to the acknowledgement of the influence of Latin literature from the ancient Roman Republic. The term Georgian era is not applied to the time of the two 20th-century British kings of this name, George V and George VI. Those periods are simply referred to as Georgian.

When Victoria became Queen in 1837 the Georgian era was followed by the Victorian era. The Victorians emphasized moral earnestness and propriety, as well as industrial and scientific progress and scientific advancement. There was a growing tension between faith and doubt and more Realism in literature and art (moving away from Romantic idealism).

The five Ralli brothers, Zannis a.k.a. John (1785–1859), Augustus (1792–1878),Pandia a.k.a. Zeus (1793–1865),Toumazis (1799–1858), andEustratios (1800–84), founded Ralli Brothers, perhaps the most successful expatriate Greek merchant business of the Victorian era.

Born to a wealthy merchant family of Chios, their father, Stephanos Ralli (1755–1827), had settled in Marseille, France, but recognised that the nexus of trading had changed in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, and sent his eldest son, John, to London to explore business opportunities.

Victorian literature is English literature during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837–1901). In the Victorian era, the novel became the leading literary genre in English. English writing from this era reflects the major transformations in most aspects of English life, from scientific, economic, and technological advances to changes in class structures and the role of religion in society. The number of new novels published each year increased from 100 at the start of the period to 1000 by the end of it. Famous novelists from this period include Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, the three Brontë sisters (Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë), Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), Thomas Hardy, and Rudyard Kipling.

The Romantic period was a time of abstract expression and inward focus; during the Victorian era, writers focused on social issues. Writers such as Thomas Carlyle called attention to the dehumanizing effects of the Industrial Revolution and what Carlyle called the "Mechanical Age". This awareness inspired the subject matter of other authors, like poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning and novelists Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy. Barrett's works on child labor cemented her success in a male-dominated world where women writers often had to use masculine pseudonyms. Dickens employed humor and an approachable tone while addressing social problems such as wealth disparity. Hardy used his novels to question religion and social structures.

Alice is a fictional character and the titular protagonist of Lewis Carroll's children's novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass (1871). A child in the mid-Victorian era, Alice unintentionally goes on an underground adventure after falling down a rabbit hole into Wonderland; in the sequel, she steps through a mirror into an alternative world.

The character originated in stories told by Carroll to entertain the Liddell sisters while rowing on the Isis with his friend Robinson Duckworth, and on subsequent rowing trips. Although she shares her given name with Alice Liddell, scholars disagree about the extent to which she was based upon Liddell. Characterized by Carroll as "loving and gentle", "courteous to all", "trustful", and "wildly curious", Alice has been variously seen as clever, well-mannered, and sceptical of authority, although some commentators find more negative aspects of her personality. Her appearance changed from Alice's Adventures Under Ground, the first draft of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, to political cartoonist John Tenniel's illustrations of her in the two Alice books.

Variety show, also known as variety arts or variety entertainment, is entertainment made up of a variety of acts including musical performances, sketch comedy, magic, acrobatics, juggling, and ventriloquism. It is normally introduced by a compère (master of ceremonies) or host. The variety format made its way from the Victorian era stage in Britain and America to radio and then television. Variety shows were a staple of English language television from the late 1940s into the 1980s.

While the format is still widespread in some parts of the world, such as in the United Kingdom with the Royal Variety Performance, the Philippines with Eat Bulaga! and It's Showtime, and South Korea with Running Man, the proliferation of multichannel television and evolving viewer tastes have affected the popularity of variety shows in the United States. Despite this, their influence has still had a major effect on late night television whose late-night talk shows and NBC's variety series Saturday Night Live (which originally premiered in 1975) have remained popular fixtures of American television.

Vaudeville (/ˈvɔːd(ə)vɪl, ˈvoʊ-/; French: [vodvil] ) is a theatrical genre of variety entertainment which became popular in the United States and Canada from the early 1870s until the early 1930s.

In some ways analogous to music hall from Victorian Britain, a typical North American vaudeville performance was made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill. Types of acts have included popular and classical musicians, singers, dancers, comedians, trained animals, magicians, ventriloquists, strongmen, female and male impersonators, acrobats, clowns, mimes, illustrated songs, jugglers, athletes, lecturing celebrities, or scenes from plays, one-act plays, minstrels, and films. A vaudeville performer is often referred to as a "vaudevillian."

Music hall is a type of British theatrical entertainment that was most popular from the early Victorian era until around World War I. It faded away after 1918 as the halls rebranded their entertainment as variety. Perceptions of a distinction in Britain between bold and scandalous music hall entertainment and subsequent, more respectable variety entertainment differ. Music hall involved a mixture of popular songs, comedy, speciality acts, and variety entertainment. The term is derived from a type of theatre or venue in which such entertainment took place. In North America vaudeville was in some ways analogous to British music hall, featuring rousing songs and comic acts.

Originating in saloon bars within pubs during the 1830s, music hall entertainment became increasingly popular with audiences. So much so, that during the 1850s some public houses were demolished, and specialised music hall theatres developed in their place. These theatres were designed chiefly so that people could consume food and alcohol and smoke tobacco in the auditorium while the entertainment took place, with the cheapest seats located in the gallery. This differed from the conventional type of theatre, which seats the audience in stalls with a separate bar-room. Major music halls were based around London. Early examples included: the Canterbury Music Hall in Lambeth, Wilton's Music Hall in Tower Hamlets, and The Middlesex in Drury Lane, otherwise known as the Old Mo. By the mid-19th century, the halls cried out for many new and catchy songs. As a result professional songwriters were enlisted to provide the music for a plethora of star performers, such as Marie Lloyd, Dan Leno, Little Tich, and George Leybourne. All manner of other entertainment was performed: male and female impersonators, lions comiques, mime artists and impressionists, trampoline acts, and comic pianists (such as John Orlando Parry and George Grossmith) were just a few of the many types of entertainments the audiences could expect to find over the next forty years.

Nature versus nurture is a long-standing debate in biology and society about the relative influence on human beings of their genetic inheritance or biology (nature) and the environmental conditions of their development (nurture). Nature is what people think of as pre-wiring and is influenced by genetic inheritance and other biological factors. Nurture is generally taken as the influence of external factors after conception e.g. the product of exposure, experience and learning on an individual.

The phrase in its modern sense was popularized by the Victorian polymath Francis Galton, the modern founder of eugenics and behavioral genetics when he was discussing the influence of heredity and environment on social advancement. Galton was influenced by On the Origin of Species written by his half-cousin, the evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin. The complementary combination of the two concepts is an ancient concept (Ancient Greek: ἁπό φύσεως καὶ εὐτροφίας).

The Glasgow Necropolis is a Victorian cemetery in Glasgow, Scotland. It is on a low but very prominent hill to the east of Glasgow Cathedral (St Mungo's Cathedral) in an area bordered by the Townhead and Dennistoun districts to the north east of the modern city centre. Fifty thousand individuals have been buried here. Typical for the period, only a small percentage are named on monuments and not every grave has a stone. Approximately 3,500 monuments exist here.

Glasgow is the most populous city in Scotland, located on the banks of the River Clyde in west central Scotland. It is the fourth-most populous city in the United Kingdom and the 27th-most populous city in Europe, and comprises 23 wards which represent the areas of the city within Glasgow City Council. Glasgow is a leading city in Scotland for finance, shopping, industry, culture and fashion, and was commonly referred to as the "second city of the British Empire" for much of the Victorian and Edwardian eras.

In 2020, it had an estimated population as a defined locality of 632,350. More than 1,000,000 people live in the Greater Glasgow contiguous urban area, while the wider Glasgow City Region is home to more than 1,800,000 people (its defined functional urban area total was almost the same in 2020), around a third of Scotland's population. The city has a population density of 3,562 people per km, much higher than the average of 70/km for Scotland as a whole. Glasgow grew from a small rural settlement close to Glasgow Cathedral and descending to the River Clyde to become the largest seaport in Scotland, and the tenth-largest by tonnage in Britain. Expanding from the medieval bishopric and episcopal burgh (subsequently royal burgh), and the later establishment of the University of Glasgow in the 15th century, it became a major centre of the Scottish Enlightenment in the 18th century.

Hong Kong was under British rule from 1841 to 1997, except for a brief period of Japanese occupation during the Second World War from 1941 to 1945. It was a Crown colony of the United Kingdom from 1841 to 1981, and a dependent territory from 1981 to 1997. The colonial period began with the British occupation of Hong Kong Island under the Convention of Chuenpi in 1841 of the Victorian era, and ended with the handover of Hong Kong in July 1997.

In accordance with Article III of the Treaty of Nanking of 1842, signed in the aftermath of the First Opium War, the island of Hong Kong was ceded in perpetuity to Great Britain. It was established as a Crown colony in 1843. In 1860, the British expanded the colony with the addition of the Kowloon Peninsula and was further extended in 1898 when the British obtained a 99-year lease of the New Territories. Although the Qing had to cede Hong Kong Island and Kowloon in perpetuity as per the treaty, the leased New Territories comprised 86.2% of the colony and more than half of the entire colony's population. With the lease nearing its end during the late 20th century, Britain did not see any viable way to administer the colony by dividing it, whilst the People's Republic of China would not consider extending the lease or allowing continued British administration thereafter.

Victoria (Alexandrina Victoria; 24 May 1819 – 22 January 1901) was Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 20 June 1837 until her death. Her reign of 63 years and 216 days, which was longer than those of any of her predecessors, constituted the Victorian era, a period of industrial, political, scientific, and military change within the United Kingdom marked by a great expansion of the British Empire. In 1876, the British parliament voted to grant her the additional title of Empress of India.

Victoria was the daughter of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn (the fourth son of King George III), and Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. After the deaths of her father and grandfather in 1820, she was raised under close supervision by her mother and her comptroller, John Conroy. She inherited the throne aged 18 after her father's three elder brothers died without surviving legitimate issue. Victoria attempted privately to influence government policy and ministerial appointments; publicly, she became a national icon who was identified with strict standards of personal morality.

Gilbert and Sullivan were a Victorian-era theatrical partnership of the dramatist W. S. Gilbert and composer Arthur Sullivan. The two men collaborated on fourteen comic operas between 1871 and 1896, of which H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado are among the best known. The producer Richard D'Oyly Carte brought Gilbert and Sullivan together and nurtured their collaboration. He built the Savoy Theatre in 1881 to present their joint works (which came to be known as the Savoy Operas) and founded the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, which performed and promoted Gilbert and Sullivan's works for more than a century.

Gilbert, who wrote the witty, satiric libretti for these operas, created fanciful "topsy-turvy" worlds where each absurdity is taken to its logical conclusion: fairies rub elbows with British lords, flirting is a capital offence, gondoliers ascend to the monarchy, and pirates emerge as noblemen who have gone astray. Sullivan, six years Gilbert's junior, composed the music, contributing memorable melodies that could convey both humour and pathos.

Herbert James Draper ((1863-11-26)26 November 1863 – (1920-09-22)22 September 1920) was an English Neoclassicist painter whose career began in the Victorian era and extended through the first two decades of the 20th century.