Any information really including anything you know about specific people, inventions.

But particularly related to medicine, fairgrounds, wages, religion and travel.

Or anything about them that you find odd or disturbing e.g. the 'death mask' photos.

Thanks.

First, could you be more specific about the location and time? 1840 Scotland was very different from 1890 America, or 1850 India, or... you get the point. The character's situation also matters-- class, gender, race, etc. I think it will be a lot easier to find answers if
Second, I would recommend Google Scholar. Historians LOVE the Victorian era, and Google Scholar is an excellent resource (as is Google Books, Wikipedia, and your local library). You will probably be able to answer your major questions in quite a bit of depth.
Third, if you have any specific questions, you can PM me. I've written some scholarly papers on the era (specifically about the British Navy, and gender relations in Scotland, respectively), and my adviser for those projects has written papers on health care and child welfare in that period.
Hope that helps!

Most of what I know about Victorians is from reading novels set then (A Great and Terrible Beauty and the rest of the series is a good one), and from someone I know writing a steampunk novel for the last NaNo.
They say that just doing Internet searches, you can get a lot of information. There's lots of stuff out there, if you look for it.

Reading novels & stories written during the period you're writing about can be very helpful! Like watching movies/TV in another language help you get a feel for everyday use and slang.

If you can handle some light romance, The Winter Rose by Jennifer Donnelly (http://www.amazon.com/Winter-Rose-Jennifer-Donnelly/dp/1401307469/ref=pd...) was VERY informative about late 19th Century London with a great story to boot!

Just a fact I found interesting while reenacting...Around the late 1800s in America, some people were buried alive due to comas or sickness, or for other reasons that made them unable to move for a couple of days. Somehow, the victorians found this out, and started attatching bells to the outsides of the coffins, with the string hanging down on the inside, so that if someone woke up and found themselves six feet under, they could ring the bell in hopes that someone outside would hear them.

I'm not sure what time period this was in, but way out west, a cowboy was buried without a coffin in really loamy, light soil, and when he woke up from his coma, (or whatever it was) he dug himself out and scared most of his friends half to death until he could convince them he was alive.

for anyone looking for info on the Victorian age here's a good website.

http://www.victorianweb.org/

@JoyfulNoise

Yeah I've heard about that! My Dad told me several years ago (the coffin thing) He said after a while they got tired of that (people needing to be dug out again I guess) so they attached spikes to the top of the coffins on the insides....and well that solved the problem!

Kinda sickening if you think about it...but also kinda funny