Victorian Literature and Culture

Victorians were mesmerized by the hair of the dead -- which reveals something about about how they saw life.

Charlotte Brontë, a woman whose life was steeped in stifled near-romance, refused to write love as ruly, predictable, or safe.

Long before today's opioid epidemic, doctors shared stories of their own experiments with the drugs they prescribed their patients.

Victorian London became obsessed with Ward's cases, which protected plants from the city's toxic pollution -- and piqued peoples' imaginations.

In the Victorian era, a different kind of ghostwriting became popular—largely because it allowed men to take all the credit.

Vernon Lee was a widely-read writer of 19th-century ghost stories, called the "cleverest woman in Europe." Her life story was pretty fascinating, too.

The loss and recovery of a poetic genre shows how the canon of literary history treats women writers the moment they start to gain attention and approval.

The Thames Tunnel, the world's first underwater tunnel, is still in use 175 years after its long-delayed opening, but you can't shop there anymore.

Tea is bound up in the nation's history of colonial expansion. British tea drinkers preferred Chinese tea at first, and had to be convinced on patriotic grounds to drink tea from India.

One scholar sees more in the Christmas food of authors like Charles Dickens—English national identity and class.