Victorian

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 Britain’s ‘model’ prisons were anything but.

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

Newfoundland was England’s first overseas colony, but its settlement did not follow the usual patterns: its communities were nomadic, moving around the island with the seasons.

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.

Louis Braille’s tactile reading system made literacy for the blind a reality, but he was indebted to an officer in Napoleon’s army. 

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

Roger Hudson details the rebuilding of the world’s first theme park in south London in 1853.

Carroll’s perceived paedophilia seems to have little scholarly evidence.

Although unmentioned in modern reference books and works of economic history, Thornton was one of the greatest commercial figures of the day and, writes W.G. Hoskins, when he died, left “by far the largest fortune of the century to that date.”