Dockers unloading wine barrels

Social history

Living in sin: unmarried relationships in Victorian Britain.

How to celebrate a Victorian wedding.

American actress Charlotte Cushman and Matilda Hayes. (Image by Alamy)

How Georgian and Victorian same-sex couples co-opted marital traditions and made them their own.

How gruelling was the Victorian workhouse?

What working-class autobiographies can tell us about the Industrial Revolution.

A late 19th-century image shows a group of ‘pit lasses’, employed to work at the surface of coal mines. An earlier law had explicitly banned women from working below ground. (Photo by The Print Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images)

Industrial revolution

From family to factory: women's lives during the Industrial Revolution

Nelson & Winnie: inside the Mandelas' marriage.

'Monster soup commonly called Thames water, being a correct representation of that precious stuff doled out to us!!!', 1828; showing an ugly woman holding a spy glass which touches the circumference of a large circle representing a magnified drop of water filled with grotesque aquatic creatures. A satire on the Metropolitan Water Supply.

From murder bottles to arsenic wallpaper: 5 hidden killers in Victorian Britain.

Victorian healthcare | HistoryExtra Academy video lecture.

The surgeon Robert Liston prepares to cut open a patient in the first half of the 19th century. Known as the “fastest knife in the west end”, Liston could remove a leg in less than 30 seconds. For most patients, however, the agony was more prolonged. (Wellcome Library, London)

An appointment at the house of death: the horror of the early Victorian hospital.

The surgeon Robert Liston prepares to cut open a patient in the first half of the 19th century. Known as the “fastest knife in the west end”, Liston could remove a leg in less than 30 seconds. For most patients, however, the agony was more prolonged. (Wellcome Library, London)

"An enlightened turn": how medicine (and the vaccination) developed in Victorian Britain.

A mural in Bristol of activist Roy Hackett, one of the primary organisers of the 1963 Bristol Bus Boycott (Photo by Steve Taylor ARPS/Alamy Stock Photo)

Hakim Adi | “Racism in Britain has a long history – but so does anti-racism”.

Members of the National Front speak to the press in 1978. Chairman John Tyndall (second from left) was a neo-Nazi who later founded the British National Party (Photo by Evening Standard/Getty Images)

From Mosley to the summer riots of 2024: the opportunistic evolution of Britain’s far right.

William Dalrymple (Photo by David Hartley/Shutterstock)

“Like ancient Greece, India is one of the seedbeds of civilisation” | William Dalrymple on putting India back at the centre of global history.

An 1872 illustration from the weekly newspaper Days’ Doings shows a shoplifter being apprehended (Photo by Look and Learn/Rosenberg Collection/Bridgeman Images)

Lady swindlers: 6 women who turned to lives of crime and became queens of the underworld.

Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "Many are turning against prejudice. But we cannot be complacent".

Victorian education and school | HistoryExtra Academy video lecture.

Schools of hard knocks: Georgian and Victorian public schools.

The Shaftesbury Welcome Ragged School in Battersea , 1899. Classes of 40 were not rare, and they could stretch to 80 during staff shortages. (Photo by Mary Evans)

Class warfare: a day in the life of a Victorian schoolchild.

The golden age of the country house.

Video podcastMedieval make do and mend.

Visitors promenade alongside a lake with Surrey Zoological Gardens in the background, 1844 (Photo by Guildhall Library & Art Gallery/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

Victorian zoosAnimal attraction in the 19th century.

Manchester dog show, c1909

The surprising history of Victorian dog shows.

Victorian cricket. (Photo by Getty Images)

Cricket, cocaine and cocoa houses: 5 ways Victorians spent their free time.

London crowds celebrating the signing of the armistice at the end of the First World War.

First World War

Armistice Day: what does it commemorate? Why are poppies worn? Plus 4 more things you need to know

Week one quiz: Victorian life.

Charlotta Bass, the first black woman to be nominated to the US Vice Presidency

Charlotta Bass: the first woman of colour to run for US vice president

Victorian life | HistoryExtra Academy video lecture.

5 things you (probably) didn't know about Victorian Britain.

Gustave Doré's famous engraving, produced to illustrate the 1872 book 'London: A Pilgrimage', depicts (and exaggerates) the squalor of tightly packed terraced houses. Yes, as Rosalind Crone observes, the washing lines in Doré's picture demonstrate that "slum-dwellers were not all very dirty - or, at least, they didn't choose to be". (Photo by Getty Images)

Was Victorian life really so grim? 5 reasons why the Victorians were 'happy'.