What are you curious about?

Why Did Victorians Give Each Other Jewellery Made from Hair?

A bracelet made from your mother's hair. A locket containing your sweetheart's. To Victorian eyes, these could be gifts of affection rather than reminders of death. The surprising history of hairwork reveals how people carried a little of someone they loved wherever they went.

6 min read

Why Did Victorians Fear Being Buried Alive?

The terrifying history of safety coffins, graveyard bells and the nineteenth-century obsession with premature burial.

7 min read

Why Did Victorian Families Decorate Their Homes with Poison?

The extraordinary story of arsenic-green wallpaper, deadly Victorian fashions and the beautiful colour that concealed a dangerous secret.

8 min read

How Did a Children’s Author Become a Secret Radio Operator in Nazi-Occupied Paris?

Before the war, Noor Inayat Khan wrote stories for children. In 1943, she returned to France carrying a false identity and instructions for sending secret messages to London. Soon the agents around her were being arrested. The writer who had escaped occupied France now chose to stay there.

Why Was the Young Chemist Behind a Leprosy Treatment Almost Forgotten?

Alice Ball helped turn a difficult medicinal oil into an injectable treatment at just 23. After she died, the work continued, but her name slipped out of the story. One doctor put her contribution into print. It would take decades more for that acknowledgement to become lasting public recognition.

Who Was the Inventor Who Entered a Poisonous Tunnel to Save Strangers?

The men sent into the tunnel to save trapped workers had themselves become casualties. Now Cleveland needed someone who could enter the same dangerous air and return. Garrett Morgan brought a breathing hood of his own invention. What followed made its value unmistakable, although recognition of the Black inventor proved much less straightforward.

How Did a Woman Disguised as a Man Sail Around the World?

In 1767, a French expedition sailed with a botanical assistant known as Jean. The assistant carried equipment, collected plants and helped preserve the material of a scientific voyage. Jean was Jeanne Baret. She became the first woman known to circumnavigate the globe, although the familiar story of her disguise is much tidier than the surviving evidence.

How Did an Enslaved Man Sail a Confederate Ship to Freedom?

Before dawn, a Confederate transport steamed past the guns guarding Charleston harbour. Its movements appeared familiar, its signals correct. At the helm was Robert Smalls, an enslaved man taking his family and fellow freedom seekers out of the Confederacy. Getting past the forts was only the first danger. Ahead lay Union warships with reasons to fire on an approaching Confederate vessel.

How Did a Woman Born Without Arms Become a Celebrated Royal Portrait Painter?

Audiences paid to watch Sarah Biffin paint without hands. Royal patrons later paid for the paintings themselves. Between those two kinds of attention lies the career of a skilled miniaturist who learned to turn public curiosity into a profession, although fame never guaranteed her security.

Artist's reconstruction of a Victorian photographic portrait discovered among the remains of a nineteenth-century shipwreck beneath the Atlantic Ocean.

Why Did a Mysterious Woman's Photograph Survive 150 Years Beneath the Sea?

In 1857, a steamship carrying California gold sank in the Atlantic. More than 150 years later, salvagers discovered a remarkably preserved photograph of an unidentified young woman among its wreckage. Who was the Mona Lisa of the Deep?

7 min read