The Victorians invented mass entertainment. As the nineteenth century's growing industrialized class acquired the funds and the free time to pursue leisure activities, their desires were satiated by determined entrepreneurs building new venues for po...

In Victorian London, filth was everywhere: horse traffic filled the streets with dung, household rubbish went uncollected, cesspools brimmed with 'night soil', graveyards teemed with rotting corpses, the air itself was choked with smoke. In this inti...