When Housewives Were Seduced by Seaweed
By Hunter Oatman-Stanford
— Among quaint fads of the 19th century, like riding bicycles or playing board games, one sticks out like a sore thumb—the Victorian-era obsession with seaweed. That's right: Affluent Victorians often spent hours painstakingly collecting, drying, and mounting these underwater plants into decorative scrapbooks. Why seaweed?
"Part of the appeal was what a seaweed collection said about the collector."
In Western Europe and the Americas, the 18th and 19th centuries were a time of major...
