Victorian Fleas

Lee Jackson from the Victorian Dictionary has been accumulating a whole range of materials from news papers and Punch magazine to letters and journals of the people of the time and categorising this material for his dictionary.

So far his writings have uncovered two flea exhibits:

• The first an exhibit in NewCut, South of the Thames, of insects under the microscope courtesy of Punch, Jul.-Dec. 1843


• And the second from Charles Manby Smith, 1857 reports of the amusements of the moneyless; "there is a flea harnessed to a brass cannon on wheels, which it actually drags along - though this last curiosity is not a gratuitous exhibition, being only shown to those who pay their penny."