Welcome to the Victorian Underground Project

You may remember us mentioning ‘insect hatting’ in earlier posts; an unusual sport whereby gentlemen make a hat to the theme of insects. The makers then annually compete in a painstaking point scoring system to see who has the greatest hat.

Today we aren’t concerned with insect hatting. Rather we want to share a somewhat controversial photograph of what looks to be Franz Kafka, one of the greatest writers in history, somewhere in England. We know it is England because insect hatting never travelled further than the mainland of Britain.

So why is this photograph so controversial? Until now there has been much debate as to whether the Czech writer ever visited England or if he stayed well clear. There has been no real evidence prior to this photograph. Predictably, the experts who have independently studied this image still can’t reach a consensus on its authenticity and for now at least it seems like we’ll never know.

The Fellowship of the Victorian Underground remains impartial. However, we believe that this image is still of historical significance as it’s either a convincing but accidental lookalike or a truly remarkable artefact.

Best wishes for the coming week.

TVUP