Great Victorian Lives – An Era in Obituaries is published by Times Books at £20. Copies can be ordered for £18 (including UK p&p) from The Times BooksFirst on 0870-160-8080; timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst.

The Times has recorded notable deaths from its beginnings (as The Daily Universal Register) in 1785, and by the middle of the 19th century obituaries were established as one of the glories of the paper. There was no attempt at comprehensive coverage, and nothing like the daily obituary page of modern times, but under the 36-year editorship of John Thadeus Delane (1841-77) the paper began to respond to the deaths of significant national and international figures in a style –and on a scale – that none of its rivals could match. The death of Wellington, Delane told his deputy, “will be the only topic”. A new book, Great Victorian Lives, brings together more than 70 obituaries from the Times of Delane and his successors, and shows how some of the leading personalities of the 19th century were viewed by a paper that was itself one of the defining institutions of the age. The brief extracts we print here give something of the flavour of the full obituaries collected in the book.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

There is so much in the character, as well as in the works of William Words-worth, to deserve hearty admiration, that we may indulge in the language most grateful to our feelings without overstepping the decent limits of propriety and plain sincerity. We point out, in the first place, one of the great excellencies of the departed worthy. His life was as pure and spotless as his song. It is rendering a great service to humanity when a man exalted by intellectual capacities above his fellow-men holds out to them his own person the example of a blameless life. 1850

ISAMBARD KINGDOM BRUNEL

While noticing these great efforts to improve the art of shipbuilding, it must not be forgotten that Mr. Brunel, we believe, was the first man of eminence in his profession who perceived the capabilities of the screw as the propeller.

He was brave enough to stake a great reputation upon the soundness of the reasoning upon which he had based his conclusions. From his experiments on a small scale in the Archimedes he saw his way clearly to the adoption of that method of propulsion which he afterwards adopted in the Great Britain. 1859

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Abraham Lincoln had grown to be regarded, in a higher degree than any soldier or sailor, as the impersonation of the war power of the Union. Creeping into Washington in disguise and with timid resolution to be inaugurated as the chief magistrate upon the 4th of March, 1861, he lived so to conciliate and, within four brief years, to win popular affection that his second inauguration upon the 4th of March, 1865, was the ovation of an almost unanimous people.

The estimates of his character and of the calibre of his intellect since he was suddenly tossed to the surface of a great nation have been numerous and contradictory; but the opinion seems to be daily gaining ground that impartial history will assign to him one of the highest places among the statesmen who have hitherto presided over the North in the supreme agony of the nation. 1865

CHARLES DICKENS

Of late years he had frequently appeared before the public as a ‘reader’ of the most popular portions of his own works, of which he showed himself to be the most vivid and dramatic interpreter. He retired from this work on in March last, when his reputation stood at its highest. His renderings of his best creations, both humorous and pathetic, of his most stirring scenes and warmest pictures of life, will not readily be forgotten. Men and women, persons and places, we all knew all before in the brilliant pages of his novels; but the characters lived with a new life, and the scenes took the shape of reality in the readings of the master. 1870

JOHN STUART MILL

We need hardly add that many of his opinions on society and government have been generally and justly condemned; and that, in his more appropriate domain of mental and moral philosophy, he was engaged in unceasing feuds. He was, however, the most candid of controversialists, and too amiable to indulge in scorching sarcasm or inflict unnecessary pain. He was often a wrongheaded, but always a kind-hearted man. 1873

JOHN THADEUS DELANE

The work of an Editor can only be appreciated by those who have had the fortune to have had some little experience of it. The Editor of a London daily newpaper is held answerable for every word in 48, and sometimes 60, columns. The merest slip of the pen, an epithet too much, a wrong date, a name misspelt or with a wrong initial before it, a mistake as to some obscure personage only too glad to seize the opportunity of showing himself, the misinterpretation of some passage perhaps incapable of interpretation, the most trifling offence to the personal or national susceptability of those who do not even profess to care for the feelings of others, may prove not only disagreeable, but even costly mistakes; but they are among the least of the mistakes to which an Editor is liable.

As it is impossible to say what a night may bring forth, and the most important intelligence is apt to be the latest, it will often find him with none to share his responsibility, without advisers, and with colleagues either preengaged on other matters or no longer at hand.

The Editor must be on the spot till the paper is sent to the press, and make decisions on which not only the approval of the British public, but great events, and even great causes, may hang. 1879

GEORGE ELIOT

A mere catalogue of her writings will stir many memories, and far better than a critical estimate of their value will remind her innumerable readers of the keen and innocent pleasure she has afforded them, of the stirring and elevated thoughts she lavished on their entertainment. Those who only knew her books will deplore an irreparable loss to English letters, while those who also knew the writer will feel that a great and noble spirit, supreme in intellect as in culture, as tender as it was strong, has passed away from the world. 1880

BENJAMIN DISRAELI

We have remarked that, like a man of spirit and shrewdness, in his writings as in his speeches, Disraeli boldly prided himself on his Jewish descent and the glories of his race. Jews rich in gifts as in gold are the mythical heroes of the Utopias in his fictions. But this most eloquent defence of his people against the prejudices of Christendom is to be found in that chapter of the “Political Biography” which precedes the explanation of Lord George Bentinck’s conduct with respect to the Jewish disabilities. 1881

CHARLES DARWIN

In 1859 was published what may be regarded as the most momentous of all his works, ‘The Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection.’ No one who had not reached manhood at the time can have any idea of the consternation caused by the publication of this work. We need not repeat the anathemas that were hurled at the head of the simple-minded observer, and the prophecies of ruin to religion and morality if Mr. Darwin’s doctrines were accepted. No one, we are sure, would be more surprised than the author himself at the result which followed. But all this has long passed. 1882

RICHARD WAGNER

That the death of Wagner extinguish-es a star of the first magnitude, and that his work will have a lasting effect on the art of the present and of the future, that he was indeed a great power – all this is acknowledged by those most hostile to the movement inaugurated by him. It may, indeed, be doubted whether a similar combination of gifts has ever been witnessed in the same individual. 1883

THOMAS COOK

In 1841, while walking from Market Harborough to Leicester to attend a temperance meeting, he read in a newspaper a report of the opening of a part of the Midland Counties Railway, and the idea burst upon him that the new means of travel might be used for the benefit of the temperance movement.

If, thought Mr. Cook, the railway company could be induced to run a special train from Leicester, many persons might be removed from the temptations of the races and great results might be achieved. He broached the subject to his friends, and arranged with the railway company for a special train to Loughborough on the 5th of July, 1841. 1892

FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE

Almost the entire range of nursing seems to have been embraced by that revolution which Florence Nightingale was the chief means of bringing about. Following up the personal services she had already rendered in the East in regard to Army nursing, she prepared, at the request of the War Office, an exhaustive and confidential report on the world of the Army Medical Department in the Crimea as the precursor to complete reorganization at home; she was the means of inspiring more humane and more efficient treatment to the wounded both in the American Civil War and the Franco-German War. 1910

SARAH BERNHARDT

No temperament more histrionic than Mme Bernhardt’s has, perhaps, ever existed. To read her memoirs is to live in a whirl of passions and adventures – floods of tears, tornadoes of rage, deathly sickness and incomparable health and energy, deeds of reckless bravado, caprices indescribable and enormous. The marvellous voice of gold, that wide range of beautiful movement, queenly, sinuous, terrible, alluring, that intensity of passion and that bewitching sweetness have brought men and women of all degrees – from professional critics to ranchers, from anarchists to kings, from men of pleasure to Puritan ladies – in homage to her feet. 1923

Great Victorian Lives – An Era in Obituaries is published by Times Books at £20. Copies can be ordered for £18 (including UK p&p) from The Times BooksFirst on 0870-160-8080; timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst.