Victorian

The proper pastime for a young lady in the 19th century was the pursuit of marriage – the magical rituals and folk charms she used might be less proper.

Marie Jeanneret was born on 13 January 1836 in Switzerland. By the time she was brought to justice, she had attempted to murder at least 30 people.

On 13 November 1854, the Victorians combined their love of heavy industry and heavy mourning, with the opening of the London Necropolis Railway.

On 26 October 1881, three men were shot dead in Tombstone, Arizona. A survivor, Wyatt Earp, turned it into a legend.

Confinement: The Hidden History of Maternal Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Jessica Cox looks at the engine of the Victorian population boom: motherhood.

Older than their Egyptian counterparts, the preserved remains of Andean peoples fascinated 19th-century Europe, leading to a ‘bone stampede’ for Inca mummies. But to what end?

When it arrived on the Victorian stage, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre had a cast of new characters and a new social order.

Bismarck’s War: The Franco-Prussian War and the Making of Modern Europe by Rachel Chrastil argues that German victory was a catastrophe for Germany and the world.

The visitors’ books of 19th-century hotels, pubs and inns show Victorians on holiday, revealing them to be irreverent pleasure seekers, capable of highfalutin pomposity and touristic wrath.