The Curious Origin of the Word ‘Trilby’

How did the famous trilby hat get its name?

Here’s a question for you: what was the biggest-selling novel of the Victorian era? And who wrote it – Dickens perhaps? George Eliot? Robert Louis Stevenson? It was none of these, though they all enjoyed huge sales. Instead, the accolade arguably goes to a man who was principally known, not as a novelist at all, but as a cartoonist. (We say ‘arguably’ because reliable sales figures for nineteenth-century books are not always easy to find.)

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