40 Interesting Photos That Shed A New Light On The Victorian And Edwardian Eras, As Shared On This Instagram Page

Her name was Cathy Williams and she had to pose as a MALE to be enlisted at the Time..She was part of the 38 Regiment,Infantry Division and was called a Buffalo Soldier.

At her feet is a young, sleeping baby covered by a blanket. Picture taken In Whitechapel, London circa 1890. For such homeworkers engaged in the sweated industries there was no division between work and home life. Match-box making was amongst the lowest paid work. The industry primarily employed women and children who could expect to work an average of 16 hours per day. For every 144 boxes made they received 2 pennies. This photograph appears in an album with a number of other prints depicting sweated labourers and London's poor. Such albums were often compiled by charities to raise funds and inform the public about the plight of those living and working in London's poorest areas, such as the East End

She suffered from “dog-faced” hypertrichosis, a rare condition that wasn't an uncommon sight in the world of Victorian-era so called ‘freak’ shows. Alice and her mum toured with Professor Weller’s One-Man Band from the age of five, and was exhibited in shop windows and other small venues. Other hypertrichosis sufferers made a small fortune touring in Europe, but Alice never reached their heights of fame. In 1915, aged 28, she retired in Dallas, Texas where she died in 1933

With the rise of industrialization, the number of German women who worked outside the home also increased. This usually meant factory work. But in some families with their own businesses, daughters also learned a trade so that they could help out: here, we see a master-mason’s daughter during the renovation work on the old city hall tower in Berlin

A born crowd-pleaser, she continually innovated new tricks to keep her fans yearning for more. In a male-dominated world, Blanche Allarty became famous for gracefully executing death-defying tricks. According to Hilda Nelson, author of Great Horsewomen of the 19th Century in the Circus Allarty became one of France’s “most famous and admired ecuyère of haute école (a female rider of the upper school). She was among the first women in history to perform virtuoso dressage and she was highly respected for it

Daguerrotype photography was taken around 1850 by the wishes of her family who wanted to keep her memories alive, frozen in time. But there is not only a mystery of who and where this photo was taken but whether it was 1850s and whether she was dying or already dead when taken

She was one of the first female press photographers in the United States, a significant contributor in the documentation efforts of architecture in the American south, and the beating heart of every party she attended

Unfortunately the Europeans at this time (1890s) had an almost insatiable appetite for purchasing these "mummies". There was a thriving black market in mummies, which resulted in many being "faked" by digging up more recent burials and selling them, as in the hot dry atmosphere of the Egyptian deserts it was relatively easy to bury a recent corpse and let it "dry out" naturally in the sand! Mummies were also still being used in medicine, and at the turn of the 19th/20th centuries there were many new "fads" and taking ground/powdered mummy was considered by some as very beneficial!

London, circa 1902, taken by American photographer Jack London. He was using a handheld Kodak Folding Camera, which used roll film, and with a shutter speed that was perfectly capable of capturing movement. His photographs were published in 1903 in his book ‘The People of the Abyss,’ a photojournalistic narrative of poverty in London’s East End.
London disguised himself as a runaway American sailor, rented a small room, bought some used clothes, and walked the streets.
This disguise enabled him to capture a unique record of candid images such as drunken women fighting, children dancing to a street organ, and men sleeping under the arches of bridges in the raw cold