Changes

3. Bernard Lightman: ''Victorian Science in Context'' – Science was an extremely important part of life in Victorian England. New scientific discoveries were being made almost daily, and due to fewer taxes on publishing, newspapers were affordable to almost everyone.

4. Steven Johnson: ''The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic'' – This book is a super fun, quick read on medical history. Cholera was a huge deal in nineteenth-century London – its spread was primarily due to dismal living conditions that were a product of rapid urbanization and the Industrial Revolution.

6. Alex Owen: ''The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England'' – While this book deals with a specific subject matter, it is a wonderful introduction to the little-explored life of women during the Victorian period. It also examines gender relations in a more general sense.

7. Lytton Strachey: ''Eminent Victorians'' – This work, first published in 1918, was one of the first biographies to not examine great men who did great things. It helped replace a certain reverence that Victorians usually had for famous figures with a healthy skepticism of their actions. Strachey examines his subject’s great deeds alongside their faults, all the while displaying a great wit.

10. Edward Royle: ''Victorian Infidels: The Origins of the British Secularist Movement'' – A little mentioned book among modern British historians, but an important work nonetheless. Royle’s work examines the beginning of secularism in Britain outside the context of class and political boundaries – a method long overdue when this book was published.