Why is the sky blue? Why does bread rise? Robert Kemp Philp’s The Reason Why answered hundreds of such questions for the Victorian household, numbering each ‘reason’ like scripture and ranging across kitchen, weather, body and field — popular science as a book of answers.
Some reasons have aged better than others, which is half the pleasure: it is a portrait of what the nineteenth century thought it knew. Download the free EPUB and quiz the Victorians about the world.