How 19th-century audiences could experience the sound of live theatre in their living rooms.
Dotheboys Hall, from Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens. Illustration by ‘Phiz’ (Hablot K. Browne).
Image scan and text Jacqueline Banerjee, Associate Editor, Victorian Web
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.
A legend, even in his own lifetime: stamps to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’s birth.
Royal Mail/PA Archive/PA Images
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.
George Eliot (1819-1880), aged 30.
Alexandre-Louis-François d'Albert-Durade/National Portrait Gallery
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.
Visitors walk through Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s installation ‘Fireflies on the Water.’
maurizio mucciola/flickr
Kate Flint, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
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.
Prisoners picking oakum at Coldbath Fields Prison in London (circa 1864)
Wikimedia Commons
As the industry continues its decline, a look back at how the Victorians valued their local news gathering operations.
As extreme weather events, like Hurricane Florence, become more common it is time to ask what it will take for the world to finally tackle climate change. Encouragingly, there may be a historical precedent: Victoria London’s handling of the ‘Great Stink’, where growth had turned the River Thames into an open sewer.
EPA/JIM LO SCALZO
As climate extremes mount, let's reflect on Victorian London's 'Great Stink' sewage crisis - when things finally became so bad authorities were forced to accept evidence, reject sceptics, and act.
Mad, bad or dangerous – the gripping true crime story of Grace Marks, who caused a sensation in the 19th century and still holds fascination today.
Almost 1,500 immigrant boys, aged 10 to 17, were separated from their parents and brought to stay at Casa Padre in Brownsville, Texas.
Department of Health and Human Services
There are strong parallels between the Trump administration’s policy on immigrant families and the 19th century's 'New' Poor Laws of England, whose cruelty was illuminated by writer Charles Dickens.
Professor of Earth Science and Climate Change, Director of PANGEA Research Centre, Director of Chronos 14Carbon-Cycle Facility, and UNSW Director of ARC Centre for Excellence in Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, UNSW