Cover of My Love Letter Time Machine - Victorian History

My Love Letter Time Machine - Victorian History

My Love Letter Time Machine - Victorian History

By: Ingrid Birchell Hughes
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Shortlisted for the International Women's Podcast Awards 2024, 2023 + 2022, and the Independent Podcast Awards 2023. "Ingrid Birchell Hughes presents a charming take on family history via the love letters of her great-great-grandparents Fred and Jane, who exchanged 200 of them between their meeting and their marriage in Victorian Yorkshire. It’s a terrific insight into the lives of two witty working-class people and the times they lived in." — The Times. This is a true story, a love story, a family drama, all contained within Victorian social history. Ingrid has both sides (extremely rare) of a correspondence spanning 1878 to 1882 that her great great grandparents sent one another. They were ordinary folk, trying to make their way in the world, first in the city of Sheffield and later in the town of Middlesbrough. There is a whole 'cast' of characters too from Fred's industrial innovator of a boss who advanced the steel making process - and took Fred with him, to Jane's sister Emma, who had her life splashed across the newspapers through no fault of her own. Against the background of the dramas going around them, Fred and Jane overcame family objection to their match and through their own will and determination, made a new life together.

© 2026 My Love Letter Time Machine - Victorian History Social Sciences
Episodes
  • Q&A Bonus Episode (Season 5, + Janie's story returning eventually - I promise!)

    Q&A Bonus Episode (Season 5, + Janie's story returning eventually - I promise!)
    9 Dec 2023

    Season 5, bonus episode. Ingrid answers listeners' questions, talks about the future of My Love Letter Time Machine, and introduces her Grandfather Owen's memoirs, (who was a nurse in the Royal Navy during WW2). Ingrid will come back with Janie’s story in the Spring in a new season of the podcast, and then lead into story of her family getting through the first world war, the depression, the second world war and out the other side, as well as taking a look at history through the eyes of a very ordinary working class family in Sheffield.

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    28 min
  • ...till death do us part.

    ...till death do us part.
    2 Dec 2023

    Season 5, episode 12. 1893 to 1894. I’m so sorry to break your hearts, but mine is broken too. In 1894, after a protracted chest infection, Fred started coughing up blood + with horror, he + Janie would have realised that they were staring tuberculosis in the face.

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    25 min
  • Happily Ever After...

    Happily Ever After...
    25 Nov 2023

    Season 5, episode 11. 1890 to 1893. Janie and Fred move to the seaside in Redcar, North Yorkshire, we get to have rather a lovely snapshot of their life together with financial security, social mobility and even some balls and banquets. However back in Sheffield, Tuberculosis rears its ugly head.

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    29 min
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