Do these photos show laughing Victorian couple?

According to a popular saying, laughter is the best medicine. Sometimes even witnessing another person's happiness from afar can help lift a person's mood.

That's the effect of four photographs (archived) that spread across social media in late 2025. The sequential sepia-toned frames show a man and a woman initially posing with their heads together but soon failing to keep a straight face, with two frames showing the pair laughing as the woman buries her head in the man's shoulder.

One X user that posted the photo series captioned it, "A Victorian couple trying not to laugh while getting their portraits done, 1890s."

The photos also spread on Facebook (archived), Instagram (archived) and Reddit (archived), where social media users shared in the couple's moment of levity. Postings of the photos online dated back to at least 2013 (archived).

Snopes could not trace the four photographs to their source, although we found no evidence that they were the product of artificial intelligence or other digital manipulation. Early reports on Flickr, a site for hosting photos, said the collection came from a since-deleted user named "Stevechasmar" (Steven Charles Martin) who was also a prominent collector of opium-smoking paraphernalia and died in 2015. It was unclear where Martin got the photos from, or why he appeared to have deleted his Flickr account sometime after 2009.

Snopes reached out to Joe Cummings, a travel writer who said on Reddit (archived) he was a friend of Martin's and wrote a profile about him in 2012, to ask if he knew anything about the photo and await a reply.

Based on the available evidence we could not rate the authenticity of the photos.

Dress historian estimates photos from mid-late 1890s

Snopes reached out to the professional dress historian and portrait consultant Jayne Shrimpton, who has written several books about fashion, including that of the Victorian era, for her assessment of the photos. (The Victorian era, spanning much of the 19th century and the very beginning of the 20th, is named after the British Queen Victoria, who reigned from 1837 to 1901.)

Shrimpton wrote in an email to Snopes that she had seen the photos online before but did not know where they originated. She added that she would date the photographs from the "mid-late 1890s" and called the images "unusual" but said they appeared "genuine."

The author also offered her insight into why photos like the viral four were uncommon, writing:

When visiting the photographer clients often had several shots taken in the studio, usually only having the best/their favourite view printed up to purchase and keep: the formal, sober portrait that we usually see. In this case, the couple evidently also wanted to keep the other photograph too, where they were messing around and collapsing into giggles. It's fun! I have seen one or two similar examples in private collections.

Though Snopes could not trace these particular photos to their source, a Flickr group titled "The Smiling Victorian" featured thousands of similar images that group members said came from Victorian and Edwardian times.