Goldfish in the Parlour

"For the first time, fish became our companions and a corner of many a Victorian parlour was given over to housing tiny fragments of their world enclosed in glass."

The experience of seeing a fish swimming in a glass tank is one we take for granted now but in Victorian England this was a remarkable sight. People had simply not been able to see fish as they now could with the invention of the aquarium and everything that went with it.

Goldfish in the Parlour looks at the boom in the building o...