The Real Harry Potter: Magic, Empire and Beastly Bullies (TRIH ep 367)
1857 · Resource
Hosts Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook examine Harry Potter as a continuation of a long British boarding-school tradition. Using Tom Brown's School Days (Thomas Hughes) as the central exemplar, they trace how Victorian public-school culture — Dr Thomas Arnold's character-forming pedagogy, house systems, prefects, sport (notably cricket and codified games), fagging, rites, punishments and a classical curriculum — shaped narratives later echoed by J. K. Rowling. They survey children's literatu...
On these timelines: The Rest Is History (podcast), Resources: Combined
Around 1857
- On the Origin of Species (1859)
- Pasteur develops germ theory of disease (1861)
- American Civil War (1861)
- Commodore Perry opens Japan (1853)
- Presidency of Abraham Lincoln (1861)
- Communist Manifesto (1848)
- British Raj (1858)
- Wars of German Unification (1864)
- Italian unification (Risorgimento) begins (1859)
- Emancipation Proclamation (1863)