Victorians
How the travel industry convinced us we needed holidays
In September 2019, Thomas Cook filed for compulsory liquidation, leaving 600,000 customers stranded abroad. It was a sorry end to…
Why were the Victorians so obsessed with the moon?
In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a group of slightly ramshackle workmen decide to put on a play. The play…
Women’s toplessness caused less offence to Victorians than their trousers
‘They did not look like women, or at least a stranger new to the district might easily have been misled…
What can we learn from Jeremy Bentham’s pickled head?
Under the central dome of UCL — an indoor crossroads where hordes of students come and go on their way…
Britain über alles
David Cannadine was a schoolboy in 1950s Birmingham, which was still recognisable as the city that Joseph Chamberlain had…
Cathedral of creation
Sometimes, it pays to rediscover what’s already under your nose. I’ve been umpteen times to the Natural History Museum but…
Maximum wattage
On his deathbed in 1904, George Frederic Watts saw a extraordinary spectacle. He witnessed the universe coming into being: the…
Twee, treacly and tearful: Pre-Raphaelites at the Walker Art Gallery reviewed
Dear, good, kind, sacrificing Little Nell. Here she is kneeling by a wayside pond, bonnet pushed back, shoes and stockings…
Banish the canapé and give me a cocktail sausage!
Let’s get rid of these ridiculous thimble-sized offerings
Victorian music-hall comedy wasn’t funny. Why pretend it was?
Let’s start this week with a joke: ‘You know Mrs Kelly? Do you know Mrs Kelly? Her husband’s that little…
Why is the garden absent in English painting?
One of the default settings of garden journalists is the adjective ‘painterly’ — applied to careful colour harmonies within a…
The artist who only turned into a major painter once he became a homicidal maniac
Charles Dickens’s description of Cobham Park, Kent, in The Pickwick Papers makes it seem a perfect English landscape. Among its…
The reopened V&A Cast Courts are a fabulous spectacle of Victorian theft and reverence
The great municipal museums are products of the 19th-century imagination, evidence of lofty ambitions and cringe-making limitations. They are exact…
Tate Britain’s Turner show reveals an old master - though the Spectator didn’t think so at the time
Juvenilia is the work produced during an artist’s youth. It would seem logical to think, therefore, that an artist’s output…
Introducing the celebs of Victorian reality TV
Did Dr Jekyll turn into Jack the Ripper? Besides becoming evil Mr Hyde, did Robert L. Stevenson’s fictional creation morph…
