Noel Fielding in The Completely Made-up Adventures of Dick Turpin.
Apple+
Not the dandy highwayman of popular imagination, Dick Turpin was a violent and, according to records, ugly criminal.
E.E. Hillemacher/Wellcome Collection
Victorian anti-vaccine literature shows that the fears and concerns remain largely the same today.
An online exhibition includes access to personal newspaper advertisements from 1860 to 1879 transcribed from archives.
(Jacquelyn Sundberg and Nathalie Cooke)
Personal ads of ‘the Agony Column’ were full of longing, tragedy and profound misfortune. Intrigue they generated has had an enduring effect on literature and film.
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.
(Shutterstock)
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.
Warner Bros.
A new film about the author mixes biography with mythology and some dramatic reinvention.
Brian A Jackson / Shutterstock
Arthur Conan Doyle wasn’t the only author spinning tales of cunning detectives.
Forbidden Books.
Alexander Mark Rossi
Moral prudishness pushed Thomas Hardy and George Eliot to develop more creative and thoughtful writing practices.
A legend, even in his own lifetime: stamps to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’s birth.
Royal Mail/PA Archive/PA Images
Almost as soon as Dickens died in 1870, writers and illustrators began to take liberties with his life and career.
Dickens in his study at Gad’s Hill Place in Higham, Kent.
Samuel Hollyer via Shutterstock
Two sequels which show how the Victorian novelist’s stories can be adapted to reflect post-colonial narratives.
Illustration from Our Mutual Friend by Marcus Stone. Wood engraving by Dalziel.
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham
Dickens had some clever little narrative tricks, which become clear when his work is analysed as a single data set.
BLACKDAY/Shutterstock.com
The focus on the ageing of women is by no means a modern phenomenon.
The Bookshelf for boys and girls: Children’s Book of Fact and Fancy.
University Society, New York via Wikimedia Commons
In children’s literature, mothers are rarely more than anonymous homemakers – unless they are wicked queens.
The Nightmare by John Henry Fuseli.
Detroit Institute of Arts
Written in the same house party as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Polidori’s creature was based on the “mad, bad and dangerous to know” Lord Byron.
The Premature Burial.
Antoine Wiertz (1854)
New research is uncovering medieval legends about the undead in Britain.
Olivia Cooke as Becky Sharpe in ITV’s Vanity Fair.
Mammoth Screen for ITV
Many viewers think that the recent adaptation of Vanity Fair plays fast and loose with Thackeray’s novel. But the writer was surprisingly modern.
The Brontë family, by Branwell, who painted over himself after realising the ‘composition was too cramped’.
National Portrait Gallery/Wikimedia
Since the 1930s, Wuthering Heights has been used to claim the Brontë family had an incestuous secret.
Sir Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon in the 1939 film Wuthering Heights.
Wikimedia
Wuthering Heights is anything but a straightforward love story.
publicdomainpictures
Sharp-eyed Victorian writers exploded the myth of tranquil village life.