Victorian

The visitors’ books of 19th-century hotels, pubs and inns show Victorians on holiday, revealing them to be irreverent pleasure seekers, capable of highfalutin pomposity and touristic wrath.

Illustrated picture books in Victorian England reached new aesthetic heights. But was it always for the benefit of the children?

A thief who had been dead for more than a century caused a moral panic in the theatres of Victorian London. 

A celebrated novelist and tireless social reformer, Mary Ward has been all but forgotten because of her support for the anti-suffrage movement.

In the Victorian countryside, what did going to church on Sundays actually mean?

In Victorian Britain, attitudes towards race, gender, disability and Empire were all to be found in the popular ‘freak shows’.

Turning chaotic havens of ‘sloth and debauchery’ into systemised institutions of ‘pain and terror’, Victorian ‘model’ prisons were anything but. 

Marrying the sister of a deceased wife was illegal in Victorian England.

An examination of the ‘fleeting, fine-grained intimacies’ of letters, diaries and memoirs produces a witty and scholarly account of Victorian attitudes to the body.

Many assumptions and values separate us from the Victorians, but belief in the supernatural is not one of them, argues Simone Natale.