On Death & Curiosities: The Great Victorian Hobbies

In 1838, scarcely a year into Queen Victoria’s reign, writer William Howitt predicted that a ‘leisure revolution’ would soon be underway in Britain. It came far sooner than he thought.

Edouard Manet’s ‘Luncheon on the Grass’ | WikiMedia Commons

After decades of hard toil building infrastructure and servicing a manufacturing boom that resulted in an industrialized Britain, the people were ready for some downtime. The Industrial…