‘Walking into a living grave’: the Orchid Mantis & Alfred Russell Wallace
The orchid mantis, (Hymenopus coronatus) is renowned for its visual resemblance to an orchid in bloom. Its pink heart-shaped mid-and hind-legs…
Author: Rosalind White
I am a first-year PhD student at Royal Holloway looking at gender & emotions in the science & literature of the nineteenth-century. My research looks at how natural history in many ways dwelt within the feminine sphere of Victorian culture. And charts a more intimate, personal exploration of natural history that examines the lives of its practitioners beyond the impact of conventional watersheds.
The Victorian Kindle: Schloss’s Bijou Almanac
In the mid nineteenth-century no handbag was complete without a Schloss Bijou Almanac. Anticipating the portability of kindles and tablets,…
‘The Entomologist’s Dream’
In The Entomologist’s Dream (1909) by Edmund Dulac an entomologist – in a state of near collapse – bears witness to…
Mr Micawber the Hermit Crab
Welcome poverty!..Welcome misery, welcome houselessness, welcome hunger, rags, tempest, and beggary! Mutual confidence will sustain us to the end! –…
How the Victorian Craze for Conchology became a Billion-dollar Business
Throughout the nineteenth-century the mania for seashells steadily swelled; they featured on Christmas cards, and adorned countless keepsakes, jewellery, and furniture….
The Little King of Serpents: A Basilisk in the Archives
I stumbled upon these plates from a gorgeous book entitled An Essay Towards a Natural History of Serpents (1742) and had to share…
Wistful Imaginings: Reframing the Case of the Cottingley Fairies
The fairy was often thought of as a mode of rebellion against the exactitude of science and technology. This is…
This particular web: a week with George Eliot at Dickens Universe 2017
I at least have so much to do in unravelling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and…
The Secret Art of Victorian Fore-edge Painting
They say that beauty is everywhere, often hidden in plain sight. In the case of the lost art of…
Defining Curiosity in the Victorian Era
What is curiosity? Does it change according to the ebbs and flows of time? While today we might associate it with…