Today viewers may be preoccupied by the methods used by spirit photographers, but spirit photographs had a notable impact on the bereaved who commissioned the portraits.
Articles on Victorian era
Displaying 21 - 40 of 53 articles
Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction when it comes to the magicians of the Victorian era.
The afterlife envisioned by spiritualism appealed to women who rejected the idea that their unbaptized children could be damned to hell.
Victorian-era engineering is struggling under decades of underinvestment.
Colonel Majendie was also a pioneer in forensic investigations.
In the 19th century, Purim became an occasion to hold fancy dress parties, the proceeds from which were given to charities. These parties helped American Jews gain a standing among the elite.
How 19th-century audiences could experience the sound of live theatre in their living rooms.
Dickens’s novels highlighted the poverty of education for the working classes. The all-important Education Act was finally passed in the year of his death.
Almost as soon as Dickens died in 1870, writers and illustrators began to take liberties with his life and career.
The statue was part of a push in the Victorian era to create mercantile heroes. Colston’s slaving activities were conveniently glossed over.
In the past, maintaining physical distance was an important aspect of public life – and clothes played a big role.
Anti-vaccinators today echo 200-year-old debates.
We may think tattooing is a modern phenomenon, but the reasons for its popularity are not dissimilar to those seen in the prisons and convict ships of the Victorian era.
Born the same year as Queen Victoria, Eliot faced similar life choices to many young women today
In an act of ‘mummy-shaming’ to rival anything today’s internet has to offer, Queen Victoria is thought to have named a cow in the royal dairy after her daughter, who had decided to breastfeed.
Images of wildfires are powerful, but can make climate catastrophe seem like something spectacular and distant. So some artists are focusing on the plants and bugs in our immediate surroundings.
Most Victorian convicts left prison weighing the same as when they arrived. Some even gained weight.
Buildings built for writing and reading the news altered the urban fabric.
If it hadn’t been for A Christmas Carol, the menu may well have centred on goose (or a boar’s head).
For Victorian shop workers, Christmas could be a miserable time of long hours and low pay.
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Professor of English, Macalester College
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PhD Candidate and Public Scholar, Communication Studies, Concordia University
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Professor of History, University of Warwick
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Senior Lecturer in Journalism, University of Lancashire
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Vice-Chancellor's Fellow, School of Education, University of Sheffield
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Reader in Psychology, Edge Hill University
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Pro Vice-Chancellor of Research, University of Technology Sydney
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Associate Professor, History, University College Dublin
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Professor In Criminology, University of Staffordshire
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Professor of History, Keele University
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Professor of Modern British History, Royal Holloway, University of London
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Professor in Modern History, University of York