Victorian

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. 

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.”

Robert Rhodes James profiles the man rivalled only by Gladstone as the most able politician and Parliamentarian of his time.