We tend to think we know the Victorians: sombre, sanctimonious and easily scandalised, constrained by tight corsets and stiff upper-lips; their Britain one of smog, slums and dark Satanic mills, reigned over by a mournful sovereign. It’s how we see them in Charles Dickens novels, Sunday-night dramas and sepia-tinted photographs of our stern, unsmiling ancestors.
But a fascinating new exhibition opening at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum this autumn, , wants us to think again – to see the Victorians not in the monochrome misery of our imagining, but in the vivid multi-colour of their reality. “We’ve got bright purple shoes, bright pink and orange striped socks for men…and this beautiful lady’s day dress that, when you
