Featured on PDR in the collection Agnes Catlow’s Drops of Water (1851)

In the 1850s, the British were mad for microscopes. It was not the first time. Robert Hooke’s Micrographia, published in 1665, had been tremendously popular with readers, including Samuel Pepys, who once stayed up until two in the morning marvelling at the giant fleas and minuscule cells that the book revealed to him. The wealthy Pepys was in the unusual position of being able to afford a microscope of his own. In general, though, these devices remained out of reach for amateurs until the Victorian era, when enthusiasm for nonspecialist study of the natural world made microscopes, like stereoscopes, a regular feature in middle-class parlours. The unseen world first described in the seventeenth century could now be seen.