Also in March 1853
4th: Franklin Pierce is inaugurated as the 14th US President. At 48, he is the youngest person thus far to have held the post.
The opening weeks of Pierce’s tenure are, however, a time of sadness, as in January his 11-year-old son Benjamin was killed in a railway accident. ‘You have summoned me in my weakness,’ Pierce says at his inauguration; ‘you must sustain me by your strength.’
6th: The premiere of Verdi’s La traviata receives a hostile reception at Venice’s La Fenice opera house. Though soprano Fanny Salvini-donatelli enjoys a murmur of approval as Violetta Valéry, tenor Lodovico Graziani and baritone Felice Varesi struggle as Alfredo and Giorgio Germont . ‘La traviata last night a failure,’ wrote Verdi. ‘Was the fault mine or the singers’? Time will tell.’
10th: Under the leadership of Hong Xiuquan, a failed civil servant who believes he is the son of God, over 1,000,000 fanatical Taiping rebel forces capture the Chinese city of Nanjing from the Qing government. The defending garrison are executed and the city renamed Tianjing, meaning ‘heavenly capital’. 17th: The Austrian physicist and mathematician Christian Doppler dies aged 49. He is most famous for the Doppler effect, proposed in his 1842 thesis On the coloured light of the binary stars and some other stars of the heavens. This is the effect in which the frequency or length of a wave changes in relation to movement by the source towards or away from the observer.
29th: Manchester becomes a city. Since 1847, the Lancashire town has had a cathedral and its own diocese, and its borough council has been informally calling it a ‘city’. However, following a visit from Queen Victoria, a petition is now made for that elevated status to be made official.