Social Victorians/Timeline/1884

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5 January 1884, Saturday
Gilbert and Sullivan's Princess Ida opens at the Savoy.

March 1884
It would be eight years before the Prince [of Wales] spoke to the Churchills again. Then, in March 1884, pressed by the Queen and well aware of Lord Randolph's rising reputation in the House of Commons, His royal Highness consented to attend a dinner given by the Attorney General where the guests included a Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone and Lord and Lady Randolph Churchill. The meeting passed off well, but another two years elapsed and Lord Randolph had become Secretary for India before the Prince could bring himself to enter the Churchill home (Leslie 66).

28 March 1884, Friday
Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany, died, his wife Helen pregnant with their second child. He was 30.

7 April 1884, Monday
Helena Blavatsky comes to London from Paris, "arriving unexpectedly on the evening of a meeting of the 'London Lodge,'" and then returns a week later (Sinnett, A. P., Incidents in the Life of Madame Blavatsky. P. 110 of this pdf; p. 214 in the edition they digitized: http://www.theosophical.ca/books/IncidentsInTheLifeOfMadameBlavatsky_APSinnett.pdf).

9 April 1884, Wednesday, through 20 April, Sunday
Henry Steel Olcott and perhaps Blavatsky attended "Almost nightly meetings aid receptions at the Sinnetts. [Olcott] Meets Edwin Arnold, F. W. H. Myers, William Stead, Camille Flammarion, Oscar Wilde, Prof. Adams, discoverer of Neptune, the Varleys, the Crookes, Robert Browning, Sir Oliver Lodge, Matthew Arnold, Lord and Lady Borthwick, C. C. Massey, Stainton Moses ('M. A. Oxon.') (Diaries)." (Chronological Survey: xxviii–xxix)

13 April 1884, Sunday
Easter Sunday

14 April 1884, Monday
Helena Blavatsky returns to Paris from London, having been there a week.

16 May 1884, Friday
Meeting of the Fabian Society, the first meeting George Bernard Shaw attended (Holroyd, vol. 1, p. 131).

28 May 1884, Wednesday
Derby Day.

According to the Morning Post, Mrs. Warner Hyde's first reception at 24, Grosvenor-place. / Mrs. W. H. Smith's evening party, 3, Grosvenor-place. / Chevalier and Mrs. Desanges' at home, at 16, Stratford-place, four till seven. No cards. / The New Club Dance. / ... Royal College of Music, annual meeting, Albert Hall, 4. / ... Royal Society of Literature, meeting, 8. ("Arrangements for This Day." The Morning Post Wednesday, 28 May 1884: p. 5 [of 8], Col. 7A).

1 June 1884, Sunday
Whit Sunday

29 June 1884, Sunday
Helena Blavatsky returned to London: "She came over to London again on the 29th of June, and stayed with friends [the Arundales, I think] in Elgin Crescent, Notting Hill, where she remained till early in August, going over then to Germany with a party of Theosophists on a visit to friends in Elberfeld. Her presence in London during the period referred to became rather widely known, and large numbers of people contrived to make her acquaintance. Streams of visitors were constantly pouring in to see her, and with her usual abandon of manner she would receive her callers in any costume, in any room which happened to be convenient to her for the moment — in her bedroom, which she also made her writing-room and study, or in her friends' drawing-room thick with the smoke of her innumerable cigarettes, and of those which she hospitably offered to all who cared to accept them." (Sinnett, A. P., Incidents in the Life of Madame Blavatsky. P. 111 of this pdf; p. 215 in the edition they digitized: http://www.theosophical.ca/books/IncidentsInTheLifeOfMadameBlavatsky_APSinnett.pdf)

3 July 1884, Thursday
Bret Harte met Oscar Wilde for the first time at an "at home" at the Lawrence Barretts (Axel Nissen, Bret Harte: Prince and Pauper. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2000: 216)

August 1884
"Early in August," Helena Blavatsky left London (Sinnett, A. P., Incidents in the Life of Madame Blavatsky. P. 111 of this pdf; p. 215 in the edition they digitized: http://www.theosophical.ca/books/IncidentsInTheLifeOfMadameBlavatsky_APSinnett.pdf).

25 August 1884, Monday
Summer Bank Holiday

31 October 1884, Friday
Halloween

5 November 1884, Wednesday
Guy Fawkes Day

25 December 1884, Thursday
Christmas Day

26 December 1884, Friday
Boxing Day