January is named after the two-faced Roman god Janus, and the Victorians understood this has long been a season of looking backward as much as forward, and not just in search of lessons.
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The 1859 book ‘Self-Help’ by Scottish journalist and physician Samuel Smiles was written in bite-sized pieces reminiscent of today’s wellness and lifestyle New Year tips.
‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ didn’t begin life as a song, but being set to music helped it find fame.
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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.
Hugh Jackman in The Prestige.
TCD/Prod.DB / Alamy Stock Photo
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.
Electrophone listening salon in the London headquarters, Pelicon House on Gerrard Street (approximately 1903).
George R. Sims (1847-1922)
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.’
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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
Pro Vice-Chancellor of Research at the University of Technology Sydney and Chief Investigator of ARC Centre for Excellence in Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, University of Technology Sydney