Chronology

Selected Events - Personal and Public

13 June 1865	WBY born in Sandymount, Dublin.
1872	Thomas Hardy anonymously publishes his romantic novel Under the Greenwood Tree.
July 1872	Family moves to Sligo.
1874	The Home Rule movement is established to protest British Government control over Ireland.
15 April – 15 May 1874	First exhibition of the group of young painters, Société Anonyme Coopérative des Artistes, Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs in Paris. Louis Leroy's review published on 25 April gives rise to the term Impressionism for the movement, with reference to Claude Monet's Impression, Sunrise.
1877	Enters Godolphin School in Hammersmith, West London. Leo Tolstoy publishes Anna Karenina complete in book form.
1881	Family moves to Dublin from London. Enters Erasmus Smith High School.
7 April 1881	Gladstone's Land Act is introduced.
1882	Begins to write and be published; writes in imitation of Shelley and Spenser, mostly dramatic poetry.
2 May 1882	Charles Stewart Parnell is released from jail following his October 1881 arrest under the Coercion Act "for sabotaging the Land Act."
6 May 1882	"Phoenix Park murders" of Lord Frederick Cavendish and T.H. Burke.
20 November 1883	Attends a lecture at the Gaiety Theatre given by Oscar Wilde.
1884	Attends Metropolitan School of Art; meets George W. Russell (AE). Begins writing Mosada and The Island of Statues. Mark Twain publishes The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
4 January 1884	The Fabian Society, a British intellectual socialist movement, is founded in London. Members included G.B. Shaw, H.G. Wells and Virginia Woolf, among others.
1 February 1884	First edition of the Oxford English Dictionary is published.
21 April 1884	Begins writing Love and Death, which he describes as "a long play on a fable suggested by one of my father's early designs."
22 April 1884	The Colchester Earthquake, the UK's most destructive, occurs in England.
8 July 1884	The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) is founded in London.
October 1884	The International Meridian Conference in Washington, D.C. fixes the Greenwich meridian as the world's prime meridian.
22 October 1884	The first woman receives a degree from the Royal University of Ireland.
1 November 1884	The Irish Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) is founded in Thurles, Ireland.
1885	First meeting of the Dublin Hermetic Society. First poems and Mosada published in Dublin University Review. Meets Katherine Tynan and John O'Leary.
1886	Meets William Morris. First Home Rule bill defeated.
1887	Family moves to London. Meets Madame Blavatsky.
13 November 1887	Bloody Sunday: Police clash with pro-Irish independence protesters.
1888	Meets G.B. Shaw and Lady Wilde. Publishes Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry.
1889	Publishes The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems.
30 January 1889	Meets Maud Gonne.
31 March 1889	The Eiffel Tower is inaugurated in Paris; it opens 6 May.
1890	Helps found Rhymers' Club.
7 March 1890	Joins the Order of the Golden Dawn. Asked to resign from the Esoteric Section of the Theosophical Society.
20 June 1890	Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray published in Philadelphia-based Lippincotts Monthly Magazine.