Dates of 20th Century

1789

fall of the Bastille

1798

Wordsworth and Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads

1807

abolition of slave trade

1815

Napoleon defeated at Waterloo

1819

“Peterloo Massacre”

1830

Opening of Liverpool and Manchester Railway

1832

First Reform Bill

1833

slavery abolished

1837

Victoria became queen

1845-46

Irish Potato Famine

1846

repeal of Corn Laws

1850

Tennyson succeeds Wordsworth as Poet Laureate

1851

Great Exhibition

1857

Indian Mutiny

1859

Origin of Species

1861

death of Prince Albert

1899-1902

Boer War

1901

death of Victoria; succession of Edward VII

1901-10

Edwardian Period

1910-14

Georgian Period

1914-39

Modernist Period

1910-36

reign of George V

1914-18

WWI

1914

Joyce, Dubliners

1916

Easter Rising

1917

Eliot, Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock

1920

Treaty of Versailles; League of Nations formed

1921

Irish Free State formed

1922

Partition of Ireland; Joyce, Ulysses; Eliot, The Waste Land

1925

Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

1929

stock market crash, Great Depression begins

1939

beginning of WWII, end Modern Period

1939-45

WWII

1946

Thomas, Deaths and Entrances

1947

Independence of India

1958

Achebe, Things Fall Apart

1966

Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead

1981

Rushdie, Midnight’s Children