On Death & Curiosities: The Great Victorian Hobbies
By: Aimee Dyamond
Tags: Victorian, Hobby, History, Culture, Europe

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 Revolution had improved the general standard of living across society and the Victorians were about to reap the benefits. A mood of libertarianism and prosperity crackled at every juncture of society, and, not unlike the perk-heavy start-up culture of today, employers began creating aspirational leisure spaces for workers to enjoy in their off-time.

Baths, gymnasia, libraries and botanical gardens became increasingly common amenities, promising workers spaces for quiet contemplation and study, socializing and exercise. Commoner and aristocrat alike found themselves with more free time, shorter working hours, and more disposable income. The middle classes, accustomed to punctuality, conscientious study and prolific knowledge production, struggled to fill their newfound leisure time, but the aristocracy — the original leisure class — embraced it. They were, after all, accustomed to having large swathes of disposable time on their hands. Noble people simply spent more time at the horse races, swanning around manicured gardens or galloping across their vast country estates hunting foxes.

The Great Exhibition of 1851 was held at the Crystal Palace, Hyde Park, London | WikiMedia Commons

The dazzling Great Exhibition of 1851 is perhaps the best example of the Victorian proclivity for wonder and marvel, both of which are reflected in leisure pursuits of the time. The Exhibition, which Queen Victoria herself described as a “magical fairyland”, while, at the same time, some factions of the general public complained of its borderline epileptic visual intensity, flexed the British Empires achievements in science, innovation, industry and dominion over the natural world. Attending the Exhibition was a leisurely outing in itself, yet beyond that landmark event that drew thousands to its doors in the summer of 1851, Victorian past-times continued to reflect the era’s obsession with with the strange, the exotic , the whimsical, and the downright macabre.

Fern Hunting

In the first half of the 19th century, Britain developed an insatiable appetite for ferns. Originally marketed as a plant for the erudite elite, the craze spread far beyond the Victorian intelligentsia, and the shores of Britain itself. Fern collecting was especially appealing to the amateur naturalist, the type who might have admired Darwin’s work on the Galápagos Islands finches and sought to establish their own portfolio of botanical curiosities.

Ferning was so popular among Victorians that writer Charles Kingsley coined the term pteridomania, or fern madness. The wealthy built specialized greenhouses and shady grottoes for their collections and commissioned cutting-edge botanical technology to house them indoors. A visitor to an upper-class home might have noticed a Wardian case —a protective glass container resembling a miniature greenhouse — positioned in the stately drawing room, the owner’s most prized ferns on display inside. George Loddiges, a botanical celebrity of the day, attracted visitors from far and wide to his fernery in London, the Grand Palm House, one of the world’s largest greenhouses at the time.

Ascog Fernery, The Gardener’s Chronicle (25 October 1879) | www.ascogfernery.com

Fern mania saw well-to-do women abandoning genteel indoor past-times like embroidery for adventurous woodland expeditions in Devon, packing picnics and passing happy afternoons collecting fronds from nearby glades and brooks. Soon, full-blown scavenger hunts erupted in the lesser-traveled wildernesses of Britain. The fern contagion spread across the Atlantic, and soon the American leisure classes began expanding their own fern taxonomies from the other side of the pond. Today, there are more than 20 000 known fern species, but at the time, many varieties remained uncatalogued.

All types joined the feeding frenzy: from amateur botanists nobly attempting to expand Britain’s biodiversity catalogue to woodland-trekking ladies of leisure competing for the best specimens with which to impress their social circles. Fern-atics hailed from all social classes. The wealthy built ferneries and greenhouses for their collections, while those on more modest budgets pressed, dried and mounted their fronds in keepsake albums, immortalizing their precious finds between the pages. Ferning, like many examples of Victorian leisure, transcended class lines, but, upon closer inspection, more intricate aspects of the hobby revealed how different social groups responded to fern mania: for example, the wealthier classes commissioned technologies like Wardian cases to maintain and display living specimens and sponsored fern hunting expeditions to the West Indies, while the rest settled for simply preserving their locally-found cuttings as mementos.

Fern motifs feature in a Victorian advert for fabric starch | Miami University Library/Public Domain

Keen to learn as much as possible on the subject, enthusiasts stocked up on fern literature, books, digests and magazines written by eminent botanists of the day. Edward Newman’s A History of British Ferns and Thomas Moore’s The Ferns of Great Britain and Ireland were the quintessential fern bibles of the pteridomania era. Fern imagery was ubiquitous in the decorative arts, adorning furniture, tapestries, architectural trimmings, ceramics and crockery, lasting evidence of an aesthetic obsession that lasted more than fifty years.

Amateur Naturalism & the Everyday Scientist

As Charles Darwin, himself a ‘gentleman naturalist’, rose to prominence following his ground-breaking scientific voyage to faraway archipelagos on the HMS Beagle and later, for his most notable work, The Origin of Species, Victorians developed an inclination for natural history collecting. Ordinary people took to collecting unusual natural objects — stones, orchids, birds’ eggs, shells, butterflies, beetles, taxidermied birds and mammals. Anyone could become a budding naturalist. Take, for example, Mary Anning, a fossil collector and early paleontologist who hawked her unusual wares in Lyme Regis, a town on West Dorset’s Jurassic Coast. Her fossil-rich environs and lifelong vocation made her an expert amateur in these ancient imprints.

Anning, a poor young woman from rural England, went on to discover several important prehistoric specimens, scouring the treacherous Blue Lias cliffs in the depths of winter with her dog, Tray. She was a precocious fossil hunter. At the age of twelve Anning, along with her brother Joseph, uncovered the first complete icthyosaur. While out prospecting in 1823, she discovered the first intact plesiosaur skeleton, and over the years, several more ichthysaurs in varying states of completion.

Anning and Darwin, two self-trained Victorian scientists whose love of natural history and lifelong contributions to their fields left irreplaceable legacies, heavily influencing our understanding of the natural world (they did not, however, receive equal degrees of recognition for their work at the time; Anning wasn’t credited for her discoveries, while Darwin shot to fame).

Illustration from “The Taxidermist’s Guide” (1870) | Internet Archive Book Images

Victorian women took an interest in the natural world. While most weren’t as daring as Manning, who risked her life daily in her search for ancient treasures, many delighted in more innocuous outdoor pursuits like gardening and fern collecting. The study of plants was a more fitting option for Victorian ladies with interests in naturalism. A notoriously conservative society, it was considered inappropriate for women to embark on dangerous expeditions abroad, trekking through bogs and thickets, scaling trees in search of rare birds’ eggs, debating with men about the hibernation habits of swallows, or performing dissections.

One Victorian woman, Mary Philadelphia Merrifield, became Britain’s formative expert on seaweed. The children’s illustrator and naturalist Beatrix Potter looked to her expansive backyard, the bucolic English countryside, for inspiration. Her specialties were mushrooms, lichen and fossils. She was known to conduct experiments in her kitchen, germinating fungi from spores and analyzing them through a microscope.

Many wanted to contribute to the crowd-sourced cataloging of the natural world. Amateurs and scientists collaborated, and wannabe Darwins shared their private collections with established biologists. The alliances resulted in special interest forums, such as the London’s Linnaean Society, where the nascent scientific community gathered to debate the many remaining mysteries of nature (women were typically barred from attending).

In Victorian Britain, science wasn’t just work; science was leisure. The study of natural phenomena and the burgeoning interest in collecting, analyzing and documenting the natural world were products of rapidly improving technologies and tools of inquiry; simultaneously, hobby naturalism in itself gave rise to wider interest and debate. Science was a form of entertainment and not exclusively an academic pursuit. In their ample free time, Victorians wandered around lush botanical gardens, built terraria to house scores of exotic plant life, gawked at strange-looking animals at the London Zoo, and marveled at primeval materials — fossils, rocks, shells, gemstones— behind glass at the British Natural History Museum. To gaze upon the strange and unfamiliar — and, if you were lucky enough, to collect it — was a mark of prestige in the Victorian imagination.

A typical Victorian album of pressed flowers and ferns | ephemera-society.org.uk

At the time, the British Empire was at the height of its prowess. Its pervasive colonial project had dilated to cover most of the globe. It was an age of expedition and discovery, of triumphing over the wild, the savage, and the primitive. People were obsessed with the idea of collecting, documenting and exhibiting the natural world, both on the British Isles and further afield, in conquered colonial biomes. Natural history collecting was, in many ways, a show of Victorian materialism, a kind of materialism that transcended the acquisition of beautiful man-made objects, revealing an insatiable desire to collect and preserve traces of the natural world.

Still Life: The Advent of Post-mortem Photography

It’s no secret that the Victorians were preoccupied with death. After all, death lurked in close quarters with rich and poor alike, thriving in an age where recurrent disease epidemics, poor sanitation and an absence of vaccines kept lifespans short. In 1839, a French photographer invented a photographic process that made portraiture more accessible and affordable for the middle classes. The daguerreotype process required relatively shorter exposure times and produced crystal-clear images. It was an ideal medium for immortalizing the dead.

The youngest child on the far left is deceased, their body propped up on a specialized stand | BBC.com

Although Victorian Britain was a society ruled by taboo, death was not one of these. Critic John Kucich noted Victorian ‘death worship’ as a display of extravagance where the death event provided an emotional indulgence for the living and a moment of reverence for the deceased. It was true that Victorians went all out when a loved one passed on: families draped death beds in garlands of flowers, held extravagant funerals (attendance at which required an entire mourning wardrobe, complete with ‘weeping veils’ for widows) and hired post-mortem photographers to capture the unblemished stillness of the deceased before the onset of decay.

Domesticity and death existed side by side. The home was central to both life and death. Deaths often occurred at home; shortly after, a portraitist arrived at the house with his photographic equipment to memorialize the deceased on daguerreotype film. While waiting on the photographer’s arrival, the remaining family members hurriedly moved around the house, drawing the curtains and covering up every mirror to prevent the deceased’s likeness becoming trapped in the glass for eternity. At the moment of death, they stopped all the clocks and changed into dark-colored attire.

After washing and dressing the body and arranging the limbs into a flattering pose — done as quickly as possible before rigor mortis set in — somebody leaned over to snip a lock of hair from the deceased’s resting head, later to be spun into jewelry or a wreath, or preserved inside a locket. The photographer, if blessed with a steady hand, took a fine brush to the closed eyelids and painted on a set of eyes. He might have also added a touch of rouge to the cheeks to offset the pallor. There were no visible wounds on the cherubic children and virginal young women taken by consumption, typhus, cholera, scarlet fever and measles, diseases that haunted Victorian Britain for years.

Once printed, the images were sent far and wide as pocket-sized carte de visites, notifying others of the death. Larger prints were mounted in expensive frames and given pride of place on mantle-pieces. There, the dead lived on in memory, captured as they were known in life.

Post-mortem photograph with an elaborate bower | BBC.com

Post-mortem photographs were nothing like the ghoulish subjects of modern day forensics. In memorial portraiture, the subject matter was artfully arranged, poignant, unviolent, exemplified by the serene faces of recently deceased children and consumptive ladies, all of them uncannily beautiful, stylized mementos of death. The post-mortem photograph was just one part of the larger cult of death, the extravagant mourning ritual, the dramatic displays of grief and the strange materialistic partiality for memento mori, or keepsakes of death.

In some mourning tableaux, it was not only the deceased who featured. The grieving family surrounded them, an unsettling juxtaposition of the living and the dead. At first glance, you cannot always tell that the deceased subject is, well, dead. Some were propped up on stands like porcelain dolls or held upright on their mothers’ laps. This masquerade of life may seem macabre to the modern viewer, but for the people of the time, it might’ve been the first and only opportunity to own such a realistic image of their memorialized loved one.

Photography was still a relative novel technology, and over the course of the 19th century experienced rapid progression and improvement. Portraiture still a luxury, despite innovations that made it more accessible. For many middle class Victorians (especially children, who struggled to remain still during a sitting), a death photograph as the only photographic record of their lives.

Mourning, memorialization, death and its related ephemera might not be considered conventional forms of leisure to most, but they were an important part of how Victorians spent their time. From post-mortem portraiture, to funerals, memento mori crafts, pilgrimages to family graves or mausoleums and entire wardrobes dedicated to the act of mourning, death and leisure in Victorian life cannot be easily separated.

Freak Shows

Public gatherings at music halls, saloons and public houses and attending live spectacles were typically the reserve of the working classes. An especially abominable form of weekend entertainment comes to mind: the freak show.

Spectators gathered in their droves to view human oddities on display. Some would have encountered Krao Fahini, a young girl with hypertrichosis snatched from her home in Laos and placed in the custody of ‘The Great Fahini’, aka William Leonard Hunt, a famed funambulist, daredevil and showman. He exhibited Krao in 1880s London, proclaiming her to be an example of the missing link between apes and humans, evidence of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Joseph Merrick, exhibited as ‘the Elephant Man’, was another well-known feature on the freak show circuit.

William Leonard Hunt with Krao | WikiMedia Commons

Freak shows were immensely popular among all social classes, mostly due to their accessibility and relatively inexpensive tickets. Clever marketing by show organizers meant that the working classes attended on cut-price days, sparing the wealthier set from having to fraternize with those beneath their social position, middle-class ladies could purchase tickets for private viewings, and children went in half-price, suggesting that attending the local freak show was a wholesome enough as a Saturday afternoon activity.

The Great American Prize Lady, a 40-stone woman | www.bl.uk

Exhibitions of anomaly and disfigurement, of monstrosities and congenital abnormalities relied on the hype leading up to the great reveal. As spectators rolled up in anticipation, each with a penny in hand, the showrunner blasted his sale spiel against a background of posters featuring highly caricatured illustrations of monstrous entities in contorted poses. Once all the money had been safely pocketed, the excited crowd was ushered into a dingy sideshow or tumbledown tent to gawk at the terrifying novelties within.

Many freak show acts hinged on a bogus premise. The showrunners and performers alike drew handsome profits swindling an ever-curious, ghoulish public with cooked-up stories about a 160-year old nurse who once cared for George Washington, a man billed as ‘The Last of the Aztecs’ who was allegedly born in the Bronx and had never been an Aztec at all, and the discovery of a ‘Fiji mermaid’ that was actually the head and torso of a young monkey sewn to a fish tail and set in papier-mache. The use of hyperbole and caricature in freak shows ramped up the demand for the strange and grotesque, often employing gross exaggerations of the performers’ backstories, such as the Elephant Man’s mother’s original encounter with an elephant to justify his tagline ‘Half Man, Half Elephant!’

So insatiable was the Victorian public’s appetite for human anomaly that Punch magazine coined the term ‘Deformito-Mania’ to describe what it termed a “prevailing taste for deformity, which seems to grow by what it feeds upon”. But, as the 20th century dawned, widespread interest in the theatrical performance of biological rarity waned. A new, medicalized model of disability shifted understandings of human abnormality away from marvel and spectacle towards pathology. As science illuminated the truth behind the mysteries of freakish natural phenomena, so the freak show box office darkened and eventually, shut forever.

Cabinet of Curiosities

True to their predilection for collecting and exhibiting the exotic — no doubt the larger colonial project’s influence on the individual — Victorians naturally gravitated toward the notion of the wunderkammer, or wonder room.

Cabinet of Curiosities / www.okeeffemuseum.org

The practice of collecting oddities, trinkets and souvenirs from distant lands began centuries earlier. The cabinet was a miniaturized version of the expansive wonder rooms of old. This wasn’t your average printer’s tray. Depending on their personal obsessions or vocations, collectors filled their cabinets of curiosities with all manner of interesting objects: locks of hair from deceased loved ones, framed daguerreotypes, amber-hued apothecary bottles containing sera and mandrake sleep remedies, fine medical instruments, shrunken heads, conches and preserved butterflies.

Cabinets weren’t single pieces of furniture — they were entire rooms, museums, even, filled floor-to-ceiling with weird treasures. Many famous cabinets far preceded the Victorian era. The Habsburg Imperial Collection in Vienna, famous for housing Montezuma’s elaborate quetzal-feather headdress was one of the most spectacular cabinets in the Holy Roman Empire. The home of 17th century polymath Sir Thomas Browne in Norwich, England, was itself a veritable ‘cabinet of rarities’ both natural and human-made. Tradescant’s Ark, which claimed to house objects of myth like a Piece of the True Cross, a phoenix feather and a dragon’s egg, was the first public museum to open in Britain. A century later, the idea of the cabinet of curiosities had taken off. As gullible, gawking publics craved spectacle — both natural and artificial—and the appetite for the cabinet spread across the ocean, the likes of Barnum’s American Museum in Manhattan, whose five floors made it more of a mall than a museum, drew crowds in their thousands.

Floriography

Imagine a language whose syntax is not represented by the order of its words, but by the astute arrangement of carnations and primroses? A language that permits you to send hemlock-laced hate bouquets to your nemesis or garlands of red roses to your secret lover? The notoriously prudish Victorians were enamored by the notion of communicating their deepest desires, envies, regrets and passions without having to utter or write a word. They soon became fluent in floriography.

Floriography — the language of flowers — first became popular in France in the early 19th century. The British cottoned on about a decade later, with a sudden blooming of floriography publishers who started printing hundreds of volumes on the subject. Soon, ‘flower writing’ became a respectable vocation: the art of using a floral motif where words failed.

The precise origin of floriography in Britain is unclear, though it is commonly attributed to the explorer and writer, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Among her achievements, which included advocating for smallpox inoculation in Britain (hear that, anti-vaxxers?), teaching herself Latin, eloping with a politician against her father’s will and composing eyebrow-raising satirical poetry, Lady Montagu lived in Constantinople, Turkey between 1717 and 1718 when her Ambassador husband was assigned there. During this time, she penned many detailed letters about her experience.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti & Henry Treffry Dunn, “Lady Lilith” (1867) | Metropolitan Museum of Art

In a letter to a female friend, Lady Montagu enclosed what she called ‘a Turkish love letter’. The verse mentioned the significance of the jonquil (Have pity on my passion!), rose (May you be pleased, and your sorrows mine!) and cinnamon (But my fortune is yours). Her next line (‘There is no colour, no flower, no weed, no fruit, herb, pebble, or feather, that has not a verse belonging to it; and you may quarrel, reproach, or send letters of passion, friendship, or civility, or even Of news, without ever inking your fingers.’) implies that the use of natural symbolism as a substitute for spoken or written language is something she has observed as distinctly Turkish. It alludes to the practice of sélam, the coquettish, ink-free language of lovers used in harems. You could communicate salaciously without leaving a paper trail. Flower-talk didn’t catch on in Britain at the time, but, more than a century later, somebody must’ve unearthed Mary’s Embassy letters, because by the early 19th century, scores of floral literature began to emerge. It began with the French almanac, Le Langage des Fleurs, in 1819.

Weaving flower language into everyday life was a playful part of Victorian leisure time. A passing fancy and an occasional show of sentimentality, floriography appeared in coffee table books for casual study and inspired floromancy, the practice of divination using flowers. Floral symbolism added unspoken sentiment to special occasions and courtship. Strategically-selected flower cuttings appeared in Victorian fashion, tucked into corsages, buttonholes, adorning hairpieces, sewn into evening gowns. A marigold tucked into a bodice or pinned to a buttonhole at a funeral symbolized grief; a red rose, passionate love; a daffodil, unrequited.

The tussie-mussie, a small, circular bouquet, was a personalized fashion accessory that sent a very specific message to the holder. A bouquet for a close friend, for example, might contain geranium or acacia (friendship), honeysuckle (generous and devoted affection) and apple blossoms (good fortune). For your enemy, a scathing arrangement of begonia (beware), lavender (distrust), tansy (hostility), monkshood (animosity), petunia (resentment), bilberry (treachery) and yellow carnations (disdain). If you wanted to finish the job, simply include a sprig of hemlock.

The pre-Raphaelites featured cryptic florals in their paintings, many of their subjects entangled in or surrounded by bowers of floral symbolism. Victorian ladies reclined in their parlor rooms, absorbed in floral dictionaries, such as Henry Phillips’ Floral Emblems and Frederic Shoberl’s The Language of Flowers, which typically contained exhaustive alphabetical lists of flowers and their symbolic meanings. The evolution of floriography came from the authors of these almanacs, who delved into classical mythology, Shakespearean motifs, folklore and Arthurian legends for inspiration. Kate Greenaway’s The Language of Flowers, has enjoyed an impressive print run. It was first published in 1884, but remains popular with modern readers who share the Victorian fascination with floriography.

Anthropomorphic Taxidermy

Another manifestation with the Victorian preoccupation with death, this time featuring dead birds, frogs, rats, kittens, stoats and weasels dressed in coats and hats. Anthropomorphic taxidermy involved the preservation of small animals, dressing them up and carefully arranging them in familiar scenes, given a second life in arrested, part-human form.

“Kittens At Tea — Miss Paulina Singing” (Hermann Ploucquet) | WikiMedia Commons

Domestic tableaux, uncanny in their familiarity and hypnotizing in their miniature likeness to our own world, depicted everyday scenes in which animals engaged in human activities like playing the piano, drinking tea or going to school. (A side note: it’s very possible that anthropomorphic taxidermy was the inspiration for Sylvanian Families).

Queen Victoria’s personal favorite anthropomorphic taxidermist was Hermann Ploucquet of Stuttgart, Germany. Ploucquet’s work was so remarkable that it earned him a place in the Great Exhibition of 1851. His tableaux inspired the illustrations for The Comical Creatures of Wurtenburg. In the book, small mammals are depicted in recreational and vocational activities: a stoat physician examining a patient, a lady weasel with her children, sword-wielding dormice engaged in a duel and kittens seated around a table having tea, one playing animatedly on a nearby piano.

Walter Potter, another Victorian amateur who chose anthropomorphic taxidermy as his main leisure interest, soon made a name for himself in the art. Likely inspired by the earlier Ploucquet, Potter became so prolific that he established a museum in his hometown of Bamber in which to display his whimsical dioramas. Potter’s career began at age 15 when he taxidermied his beloved pet canary. Continuing his use of avian subjects, he produced his first notable work, “The Original Death and Burial of Cock Robin” four years later. This elaborate taxidermy narrative, an interpretation of a popular nursery rhyme, features 98 embalmed birds attending Cock Robin’s funeral procession. Perched in overhanging trees, the mourners look on, glass-bead tears placed delicately on their eyes. The Dove plays the role of chief mourner, while Parson Rook and Owl feature as the gravediggers. Even the Robin’s killer, Sparrow, who ended him with his bow and arrow, is present.

Some of Potter’s work was grotesque, which of course delighted the macabre Victorian eye —a penchant for creating monstrous farm animals like four legged chickens or two-headed lambs. Unsurprisingly, Potter’s work did not age well. The fad ended, the museum space repossessed, repurposed, the abominable collections dispersed. If you’re lucky enough, you might find one of his strange dioramas in a bric-à-brac shop somewhere.

Walter Potter’s ‘Rabbit School’

To the modern eye, Victorian leisure pursuits may seem to represent some of the most whimsical, crackpot things a person could possibly do with their free time. It is as though people were competing with one another to think up the next most peculiar or downright bizarre activity, hoping it might catch on and become the new mania.

To truly attain the gold standard of Victorian leisure, a past-time should meet three essential criteria: 1) It should involve the collection, categorization and exhibition of curious objects and/or people. All the better if achieving the above means taking a exotic sojourn abroad; 2) It should have something to do with death; 3) There should be an element of spectatorship (bonus points if you can charge an entry fee).

For all its eccentricities, perhaps the most fascinating of part of Victorian passion is the idea of creativity in the presence of death. To artificially regenerate a deceased subject —be it a young woman died from consumption, a stillborn baby, or a dead fox —was a quintessential Victorian concern. The post-mortem photographer carefully arranging the deceased among living flowers in preparation for their final image, the taxidermist re-animating woodland animals in dynamic poses, the naturalist preserving butterfly specimens in glass cases, were each concerned with allowing the dead to take on one last form before departing the mortal world permanently. It is at this curious intersection that spectatorship, materialism, preservation and memory collide. Post-death generativity, perhaps. A reluctance to let go. A way to mourn. The Victorian hand, eye and imagination was a consummate Master over nature. Hands that dared to endow taxidermied animals with additional limbs and fishtails, usurping the Creator with acts of leisure hubris!

Victorians loved arranging things: their dead children for postmortem portraits, flowers in cryptic bouquets and taxidermied animals in human-like poses. Lifeless, but with the illusion of dynamism. There is, however, a fine line between curiosity and cruelty in the treatment of human anomalies. Re-arranging nature into monstrosity and, in the case of freak shows, displaying extant examples of ‘monstrosity’ as spectacle, remains, to this day, a mysterious obsession. One thing seems clear: nobody was creeped out by these practices. On the contrary, Victorians seemed to view leisure as a hard-won right to be enjoyed by people of all social classes. And, to fully enjoy their right to leisure, it was every Victorian’s duty to go all out with the time and technologies they had at their disposal, even if these pursuits appear macabre and morally questionable today.