Author: Darrel Pratt

Many poor people in the Victorian era, spent their Christmas in the workhouse. This was a place where those who didn’t have a home usually lived and worked. The workhouse wasn’t a place which was mandatory, people could come and go if they pleased. However, the alternative for people, was to live on the streets. […]

In the 19th century, it was apparently not uncommon for some to hang upside-down Christmas trees from the rafters of homes. “In the small common rooms of the lower classes, there was simply no space,” CBC reports Bernd Brunner wrote in his book, Inventing the Christmas Tree. Why did Victorians hang Christmas trees upside down? […]

English plum cake. The 1840 wedding of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha took this old tradition and turned it into something new. Their cake was big: three tiers of English plum cake that stood 14 inches tall, measured nearly 10 feet across, and weighed 300 pounds. What was the Queen’s wedding […]

Perhaps best known as the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the man born as Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and known as Lewis Carroll was truly a Renaissance man of the Victorian era. What type of writer was Lewis Carroll? Lewis Carroll was an English novelist and poet. He is best known as the author of […]

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland marks the shift in Victorian ideals of childhood from work, discipline, and essential sinfulness to education, play, and innocence, however fleeting. The character of Alice also represents a real recognition of child agency, particularly in response to the Queen’s death threat. What does Alice in Wonderland represent? Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland […]

As the recipe evolved with the invention of baking powder, it’s no surprise that the sponge cake was renamed in honour of its royal patron. The way Queen Victoria would have enjoyed her cake was what we have come to recognise as the definitive Victoria sponge cake today. Is the Victoria sandwich named after Queen […]

The Victorians also transformed the idea of Christmas so that it became centred around the family. The preparation and eating of the feast, decorations and gift giving, entertainments and parlour games – all were essential to the celebration of the festival and were to be shared by the whole family. Was Christmas celebrated in the […]

Today Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë (1818-1848) is regarded as a classic of English literature and as one of the most important works of the Victorian Age. Is Wuthering Heights Romantic era? Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte is a classic example of a novel from the Romantic Movement in literature, in which there is […]

The pipe style that was popular in Victorian England was the billiard pipe. It was a simple design with a slight forward tilt to the bowl. The simplicity was due to the pipe simply being thought of as a functional tool for smoking and the era’s interest in mass production. What did people smoke in […]

– Smoking was as bad for the Victorians as it is for anyone today, but back in those days it seems it did far more damage to their teeth. In the mid-19th century, prior to the invention of the cigarette, when tobacco was copiously consumed through clay pipes, smoking often resulted in nasty dental disfigurement. […]