January 14 in Victorian History
What the Victorians were up to on this date, year by remarkable year.
1878
The Queen tries the telephone
At Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, Alexander Graham Bell demonstrates his new telephone to Queen Victoria herself. She listens as calls are placed to Cowes, Southampton and London, and asks to keep the instruments beside her bed. The 58-year-old queen calls the device most extraordinary.
1898
Lewis Carroll dies
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, dies of pneumonia in Guildford aged 65. The Oxford mathematics lecturer had conjured Alice's Adventures in Wonderland from a boat trip with the Liddell sisters three decades earlier. He leaves behind the century's most beloved nonsense and some of its most ingenious logic puzzles.