


Diagram of a slave ship

Shopping for fabric

Wordsworth, 'Daffodils'

Textiles from India

Beethoven's sketches

Exhibition of a rhino and zebra

Deciphering the Rosetta Stone

Battle of Waterloo letter

Jane Austen, Persuasion

Peterloo Massacre

Cartoon of a street accident

Shampooing Surgeon

Description of London

Execution of a 12 year old boy

Diary entry on 'The Pillory'

Invention of photography

1832 Reform Act

Tolpuddle Martyrs

Early Chartist meeting notes

Dickens, Oliver Twist

The People's Charter

Dickens: Nicholas Nickleby

Poster for Living Mermaid

The Railways

First postage stamp

Coal mining

Popular entertainments

Engels: factory conditions

Freak show: What is it?

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

The Communist Manifesto

Chartist William Cuffay

The Great Exhibition

Sketch for the Crystal Palace

Woman's magazine

Poverty and the workhouse

London Zoo

Cookery for the poor
Human Exhibition

Mary Seacole

Ship building

Britain's Indian empire

Nightingale, Notes on Nursing

Victorian fashion

Florence Nightingale letter

Coal mining

Mrs Beeton - Lady's maid

Mrs Beeton

Mrs Beeton's Turkey

A Hulk (prison ship)

Underground trains

Alice in Wonderland

Letter from Charles Darwin

City slums

Opening of the Suez Canal

Music Hall

Street sellers

Freakshow posters

Invention of the telephone

Illusionists and conjurers

The textile industry

Victorian farming

Magic show

Circus poster

Victoria's Indian servant

Match Girls Strike

Jack the Ripper murders

Daily shopping

An Asian MP in Parliament

Gladstone: Irish Home Rule

Oscar Wilde on trial

Nightingale Nurse diary

Factory accidents

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
The meanings behind Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics were a mystery to scholars in the West - until the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone, that is. Egyptologists were able to decode the writing on the stone because, uniquely, its inscription is written in three parallel languages: everyday script; the official language, Greek; and those mysterious hieroglyphs. The stone was discovered by Napoleon's army in 1799 in Rashid (Rosetta) in Egypt, and has been displayed in the British Museum since 1802.
This page shows English scholar Thomas Young's deciphering work-in-progress in the late 1810s. He identified groups of glyphs that spelt out the name 'Ptolemy' phonetically, and so worked out their sound-values. Through the subsequent work of Jean-François Champollion in France, the hieroglyphic puzzle was finally solved.
Shelfmark: Add. MS 27281, f. 41