Hacker News with Generative AI: Victorian Era

The Cat's Meat Man: Feeding Felines in Victorian London (publicdomainreview.org)
As cats evolved from feral ratters into beloved Victorian companions, a nascent pet-food economy arose on the carts of so-called “cat’s meat men”. Kathryn Hughes explores the life and times of these itinerant offal vendors, their intersection with a victim of Jack the Ripper, and a feast held in the meat men’s honor, chaired by none other than Louis Wain.
The Cat's Meat Man: Feeding Felines in Victorian London (publicdomainreview.org)
On January 10, 1901, twelve days before Queen Victoria did the unthinkable and died, 250 cat’s meat men sat down to a slap-up dinner at a restaurant in Holborn, on the edge of central London.
Infectious diseases in Victorian novels highlight public health fragility now (theconversation.com)
Modern medicine has enabled citizens of wealthy, industrialized nations to forget that children once routinely died in shocking numbers. Teaching 19th-century English literature, I regularly encounter gutting depictions of losing a child, and I am reminded that not knowing the emotional cost of widespread child mortality is a luxury.
Lady Baker and the Source of the Nile (harkness.substack.com)
Among the thousands and thousands of handwritten letters preserved in the British Library from the pen of the Victorian publisher Alexander Macmillan, one in particular piqued my interest: written to the heroic explorer of the sources of the Nile, Sir Samuel Baker, on 4 May 1866:
Victorian Artistic Printing (2009) (sheaff-ephemera.com)
Voice is a garden: Margaret Watts Hughes's Victorian sound visualizations (themarginalian.org)
Behind Victorian Bars (historytoday.com)
Wordsworth Donisthorpe, Blackmail, and the First Motion Pictures (publicdomainreview.org)
Dr. George Merryweather's 1851 Tempest Prognosticator (2000) (victorianweb.org)