Victorian

There are cultures, and subcultures, and sub, sub, sub cultures. There’s science fiction, there’s alternative history, there’s steampunk. There’s hip hop and there’s chaphop. There’s an anachronistic Victorian gentleman wearing a…

Victoriocity is back! After an extremely successful Kickstarter campaign, the detective comedy audio drama Victoriocity has just returned for a second season. For those of you who haven’t been following the adventures of Detective…

In the 19th century, a very popular form of entertainment was the mummy unwrapping party. You could go to a private or public event at which an ancient Egyptian mummy would be unrolled and examined. Bandages would be passed around,…

This year marks the centenary of a great turning point in social history. After several decades of suffrage struggle, The Qualification Act of 1918 permitted women (over the age of 30) to vote and stand as candidates in elections. In the…

Medicinal cannabis seems like one of the health topics du jour but it has a long history grounded in medical research. In 1841, an Irishman named William Brooke O’Shaughnessy noticed folk use of cannabis as a medical treatment in Calcutta.…

William Palmer, known to his doting mother as “Billy”, was born in Staffordshire in 1824. His father Joseph was described later as a sawyer, though it seems that meant that he actually owned his own lumber business. And it was a profitable…

Charlie Peace was born in Sheffield in 1832. His father, John Peace, was a shoemaker by trade, though that was not his first profession. John had originally been a coal-hauler, but he lost a leg in a workplace accident. One story is that…

Cora Pearl, one of the most infamous woman in the empire of Napoleon III, was born plain Emma Crouch in Plymouth, England. She was probably born in 1835 though she would claim later to have been born in 1842, shaving seven years off her…

Adam Worth, the man who would be hunted by the police forces of two continents, was born in Germany in 1844. Appropriately (since he used a fake name for the majority of his career) we don’t actually know what name he was born under - it…

It’s a common misnomer to refer to William Burke and William Hare as "body snatchers". A body snatcher is one who steals a dead body to sell for profit, but they never stole a body - one they "inherited", and the rest they made themselves.…