They Ate Arsenic For a Pretty Face, Honestly
Victorian ladies popped arsenic tonics and 'complexion wafers' to look pale and flawless, then wondered why their teeth fell out and their skin joked back.Read More 
They Bound Books In Human Skin, Proper Mad
Victorians sometimes literally used human skin to bind books and a few are still in libraries - disgusting and oddly useful.Read More 
They Really Put Waterloo In Your Mouth
In the Victorian era respectable smiles were sometimes built from other peoples teeth-often nicked from battlefields and graves-and nobody used the word 'awkward' with sufficient gravitas.Read More 
How Photographers Sold You Ghosts and Everyone Took the Money
A quickly fashionable Victorian business model: take a portrait, add a faint pallor, bill a grieving family for their dearly departed's cameo and then argue about the receipts in court.Read More 
Victorians Unwrapped Mummies For Fun
They hosted drawing-room soires where the evening's entertainment was peeling ancient bandages off a corpse and calling it science.Read More 
They Literally Blew Smoke Up People
Victorian rescuers had a toolkit that included bellows, a tobacco plug, and a plan to blow smoke into a drowning person's rectum - and yes, they absolutely meant business.Read More 
Knocker-Ups: Victorians Paid People To Tap Your Window
Before alarm clocks were cheap, Victorians hired 'knocker-ups' who banged on windows, poked curtains with long poles or even shot dried peas to wake factory hands.Read More 
Victorian Doctors Invented the Vibrator (and Didn't Mention It at Dinner)
In the late 19th century respectable physicians treated 'female hysteria' with manual pelvic massage, then invented noisy mechanical contraptions to stop their hands aching - and yes, the machine was called a medical instrument.Read More 
When the Victorians Went Mad for Leeches
They bled society dry by sending jars of wriggling leeches to every parlour and pharmacy, and then invented 'leech diplomacy' to explain why the marshes were crying.Read More 
Victorian Wallpaper That Secretly Poisoned Parlors
They papered the nursery in emerald and called it tasteful; the pigment was arsenic and sometimes made people ill - proper domestic terror, darling.Read More 