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…
‘A fairyland amongst the wildflowers’, Realism and Romance in the works of Beatrix Potter
An eager student of both the arts and the sciences Beatrix Potter’s childhood was equally enchanted by the discovery of…
Survival of the Thesis, Writing Advice from Charles Darwin
NB: For more on Charles Darwin’s outlook on human emotion see the article that prompted this post Thomas Dixon’s piece…
Dietary Didacticism in Wonderland
[NB: I wrote this piece for the Journal of Victorian Culture Online for ‘Alice’ Day who have kindly agreed that…
Growing your PhD Research
In the first year of your PhD, thoughts often feel scattered. Your PhD floats around unanchored and sometimes it feels like…
The Victorian Botanical Clock
The botanical clock, or ‘Watch of Flora’, was a garden plan hypothesised by the eighteenth-century naturalist Carl Linnaeus. This ‘pretty fancy…
