Dr Bob Nicholson

A funeral invitation from April, 1688. It has an ornate black border with various memento mori iconography around it - like skeletons, winged hourglasses, and scythes.

Funeral Invitation, 1688.

Funeral invitations first appeared in the 17th century, and acted as an admission ticket to both the church and the funeral feast. Pallbearers were often assigned a number on the ticket to signify their position in carrying the coffin.

Well don't I feel stupid

An advertisement for the polio vaccine which reads: "they all got vaccine except dad...don't take a chance...take your polio shots!" It depicts a photo of a family gathered around a father who is in an iron lung.

With science falling under increasing attack, this medical historian is here to remind people of the power of #vaccines. THREAD🧵

Hard-hitting polio advert from 1958. In the first half of the 20th century, polio was the leading cause of death in children and young adults. 1/7

So @digivictorian.bsky.social encouraged me to do this

I did record quite a bit about the first murder on the railway but, alas, that segment is on the cutting room floor!

the quaint world of Victorian porn advertisements

Britain’s Railway Empire returns at 8pm tonight on Channel Four. The story moves into the 20th century, but I might pop up a few more times!

We don’t all share the same internet. The personalised algorithm has siloed us into parallel worlds

A while back I was looking through the papers of the journalist W. T. Stead, who died on the Titanic. His wife received a series of telegrams from friends congratulating her on his survival, before the horrible truth emerged…

It gets a nice write-up in the Radio Times!

Rather surprised to see a picture of myself on the TV listing! I’m not presenting it — just one of several talking heads.

I’m on TV tonight! Check out the first episode of Britain’s Railway Empire at 8pm on Channel 4.

It’s a new, two part series about the history of the railways, starting with the Victorian Era. It’s not just a story about tech and engineering, but covers the social and cultural impact too.

Lela Harris’s portrait of Miss Lambe, charcoal on found writing paper. Miss Lambe is seated, holding a book and looking up and out at us.

Artist Lela Harris standing next to her portrait of Miss Lambe.

It was such a joy this morning to see Lela Harris’s extraordinary portrait of Miss Lambe, Jane Austen’s only character explicitly of African heritage, from the last novel she worked on. She died at age 41 without being able to finish Miss Lambe’s story. 1/

Sign the Petition Stop Mass Redundancies at Lancaster University – Hold Senior Management Accountable

Hello UK friends - please, please could you sign this petition against the job cuts at my place of work - 1 in 4 us will be out of a job by August next year if we don't stop the cuts. And once you've signed it, please share. We need your help! www.change.org/p/stop-mass-...

does anyone know of any research on the history of the 'family newspaper' - by which I mean a 'newspaper' produced usually by children, about daily goings-on in the household? think Gad's Hill Gazette, Hyde Park Gate News, etc...

Talk about The Wire, Sopranos, Game of Thrones all you want, but the greatest US television program ever made is Sesame Street. It's not even close. 50+ years of treating kids across class, ethnicity, religion not as mini-consumers...but as citizens with a stake in this world.

Of use to those working on 1852-1879, it includes a chronological index of open-access copies of the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, a widely read (affordable) secular early women’s monthly miscellany. jmsw.github.io/edm-index/

Now updated with a searchable spreadsheet of contents by category!

Speaking of the Illustrated London News, a paper whose pages I never tire of turning, here's an account of its (mainly 19th-c.) history I put together some years back for the publisher Gale, which has made the essay free to access. It was fun to write. www.gale.com/intl/essays/... #C19th

The job advert highlights 20thC political and/or military history as an area we’d like to cover, but we’re very open minded about how candidates address this brief. We’re also open to international applications!

IT'S ALIVE!!!!! I had the best time working with Annemarie to edit our fabulous contributions - huge thanks to our authors for sharing their research, and for being polite when I suggested revisions. Huge thanks also to VPR ed Kathy Malone for her patience and making the editorial process so smooth.

Lecturer or Senior Lecturer in American History at Edge Hill University Start your UK & international job search for academic jobs, research jobs, science jobs and managerial jobs in leading universities and top...

Job alert! We're advertising for a full-time, permanent Lecturer or Senior Lecturer in 20thC American History at Edge Hill. www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DNX206/l...

This is terrifying, and happening right now. My university is about to reduce the curriculum from 6 20-credit modules per year to 4 30-credit ones, one assessment per module. Explicitly designed to reduce subject richness in favour of skills (and save on teacher numbers). Students will hate it.

In fact, you can stream all three episodes on NOW right away!

I'm on the TV! 'Jack the Ripper: Written in Blood' is a new docudrama about the journalists who reported on the killings and helped to mythologise the figure of the Ripper. I'm one of the talking-head historians. Part one premiers tonight at 9pm on Sky History & NOW TV. #WritteninBlood

Cool! Thanks very much for sharing one of my podcasts. Hope it made for some useful discussion.

Vic is a woman with glasses and purple hair, smiling and holding her copy of the Routledge Companion to Working-Class Literature.

Vic is holding her copy of the book upside down trying to read it.

Vic holds open the first page of her chapter, 'Working-Class Writing in Victorian Britain'

Got weekend plans? Cancel them to read my chapter, 'Working-Class Writing in Victorian Britain' in the absolutely stellar Routledge Companion to Working-Class Literature!

Whoa! Excellent news — congratulations Matthew! Definitely a moment to celebrate.

Image of front cover of Mitchell’s Newspaper Press Directory for 1898, accompanied by text that says MATTHEW STEPHENS, The Long and Short of It: Rethinking the Longevity of Nineteenth-Century Periodicals, Victorian Periodicals Review, Volume 57, Numbers 1-2, Summer/Spring 2024.

Matthew Stephens @c19thnewshound.bsky.social argues that short-lived newspapers, often overlooked as the expected casualties of a developing industry, were actually a significant proportion of the 19th century’s press. Read it in VPR 57.1-2: muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl... @rs4vp.bsky.social

🚀📈 Making Victorian visual culture searchable: Introducing an open-access and AI-powered dataset of 72,000 illustrations from the Illustrated London News (1842-1890). (w. Bethany Warner, @pfyfe.bsky.social and @bcgl.bsky.social)

openhumanitiesdata.metajnl.com/articles/10....