How to be a Victorian

by Ruth Goodman

All a person needed was a bowl, a slop pail, a flannel, some soap and a single jugful of hot water brought up from the kitchen

Even at the end of the era, after a series of major technological advances had reduced the price several times, sufficient soap to wash the bodies and clothes of a working-class family still required 5 per cent of the weekly budget.

Like jackets, hats were rarely removed in public. Britain was a hat-wearing society and, among men, hats were taken off only momentarily, in order to show deference or respect.

Up until the 1880s, working men of both town and country would have been much more likely to wear a felt hat.

By 1901, however, the urban working-class man had moved over, en masse, to the flat cap. While his country cousin had a range of options, the flat cap became the townsman’s most iconic garment.

The drawers, or knickers, we wear today are largely a Victorian innovation: there is only occasional evidence of their existence in Britain prior to the Victorian era, but by the end of the reign they had become de rigueur.

Corsets were worn throughout Victoria’s reign by women of all classes (see Plate 9). Even records from prisons, asylums and workhouses contain corset provisions for female inmates. They offered fashion, naturally, but to the Victorian mind they also offered self-respect, sexual attractiveness, social conformity and a range of health benefits.

Twenty-first-century underwear can leave me sore in the areas where shoulder straps and other bits of elastic press. The corset caused the same problems as the elastic, but all over my upper body. It was worst when I had been hot and then cooled down, as the sweat left salt on my skin, which then rubbed. This could be agony. After an eighteen-hour day working hard in my corsets, my skin would be an angry red mass and the itchiness almost unbearable.

When I think now of a Victorian woman lacing up her corset, tying her garters and buttoning her dress, I think of a woman dressing sensibly for the hard day of work ahead.

The real problems occurred when people started living in more densely populated areas, without access to long gardens that kept the privies away from homes and water supplies.

From the 1870s onwards, the water closet was on the march. Once the initial problems were overcome, in towns, they became the must-have convenience of the day.

For the poor and destitute, selling your hair was an option. It could fetch a good price, particularly if it was of a fashionable shade.

Again and again, the warning echoed that a woman should not ‘let herself go’. If she was to fulfil her God-given role as a homemaker, a woman must use physical attractiveness to encourage her husband to stay within the circle of home, family and fidelity. Paying attention to her own appearance ensured not only that her husband would not stray into immorality, it also raised the spirits and gladdened the hearts of all the men she came into contact with.

In the 1870s, men could let themselves become hairier. From 1874 to 1875, there was a peak of the wild style, with a shaggy full beard, an enormous, untrimmed moustache and a plentiful, curly and slightly unkempt head of hair. Not everyone opted for this particular look; this was the era of the greatest hair variety. Moustaches, rim beards, sideburns and clean-shaven styles were all present at once. But the decade belonged to the big and the bushy, which was a new trend.

While the rim beard was evidence that its bearer had clung on to the discipline of shaving, this fuller beard aimed for a completely grizzled expression of masculinity. It was popular among intellectuals as well as some manual labourers, each of whom had their own, very different, reasons for wishing to project an aura of machismo.

Men in 1816 didn’t wash their hair with water. ‘Cleanliness is requisite, with respect to the hair as to any part of the body,’ Rawlinson affirmed.

By the 1840s, occasional washing of men’s hair with water was creeping in, led by women, who had adopted the process first.

Most parents firmly believed that allowing their daughters to jump out of trees or to cartwheel in the street was unforgivable and irresponsible parenting; they would be failing to secure their daughter’s long-term health. This was of the utmost importance when a girl was approaching and in puberty, when the reproductive organs were settling into an adult pattern and form.

Once out of toddlerhood, young girls were traditionally encouraged to sit still and play nicely, to be absorbed by needlework, books and other physically non-strenuous activities.

The wealthy middle-class girl could be taken out daily by her governess for a walk, and the few girls’ schools that were in existence for the middle classes often made a point of advertising their afternoon walks to potential parents in their prospectus. Sunday-school teachers, enlightened employers and a host of other people who saw themselves as supporting girls from poorer backgrounds were equally vocal in advocating walking to the girls who came under their sway. Even workhouses and prisons advocated outdoor walking exercise for girls and women, albeit round and round a grim yard.

Most factory workers would begin their day’s labour at seven or eight o’clock, eating a hasty meal before they left the house. If they worked within an easy walking distance, it was possible for the whole family to sit down to enjoy a shared hot breakfast together.

The cooking range, which sat in the fireplace, was small and built into the chimney, with an oven on one side (but no water boiler on the other, unlike some more expensive models).

A hunk of bread or a bowl of porridge accompanied by a cup of tea was by far the most common Victorian breakfast for those in working households.

Porridge was more likely to be eaten in the north of England, where oats were a major crop, while bread was more commonplace in the south.

Porridge or bread would, for many, have been served with a glass of beer. Beer was the traditional drink of Britain and, in a world of marginal survival, provided not only valuable calories but a range of minerals and vitamins that were otherwise lacking in most people’s diets. However, tea gradually became the dominant morning drink as the Temperance Movement persuaded more and more p...

The advantage of a bread and beer breakfast was the lack of preparation required. Fires did not have to be lit, so one did not...

If you wanted to cook for breakfast, then it would have been best to choose dishes that could be produced on the direct heat of the fire, so as not to have to wait for the whole range to come up to temperature. This may well have been a factor in the rise of the fried breakfast.

There was absolutely no point in trying to bake anything in the morning. Baking was an afternoon activity – a tradition that survives in many families – because, by then, the oven would be hot enough.

A kettle would be boiled and the adult members of the household would take a cup of tea and a biscuit back to bed for a few minutes. Only later in the morning, when the men had gone to work and the children had been packed off to school would Mrs Widger clean out the grate and brush out the flues.

However, despite these instances of plenty and routine, the most common Victorian experience relating to food was hunger. It was never very far away. Absolute starvation was rare, with some notable exceptions, but long-term malnutrition was rife. Large numbers of people woke up famished and spent their working days – and much of their working lives – in a state of semi-permanent wanting of food.

Poor Law model diet for able-bodied men (on four days of the week) of one and a half pints of gruel, nineteen ounces of bread and three and a half ounces of cheese

Edward Smith, in 1864, recorded this improved state of affairs when he noted that most farm labourers enjoyed a relief from the diet of pure bread with one hot meal a week.

By the 1890s, those families with an adult man in work could expect to eat regularly. Yet whenever a family had trouble with health, unemployment or bereavement, survival could still be marginal at best.

One survey undertaken in 1892 in Bethnal Green, one of the poorest parishes in Britain, found that children were still living on a diet that consisted almost exclusively of bread. For over 80 per cent of these children, bread formed seventeen out of twenty-one meals in the week.

Several newspaper and magazine articles point to a four-inch height difference between a twelve-year-old Etonian and a twelve-year-old lad from the East End of London. It takes a lot of hunger to do that to people.

Today, these preserved railways offer us, for the most part, an experience of steam travel that has benefited from over a hundred years of improvement and technological advance. The early-Victorian traveller, on the other hand, had a very different experience. The carriages in which they sat were short-wheel-based and fitted without suspension, which meant that they often bounced and jerked around violently. There was no corridor running the length of the carriage, so whichever door or compartment you boarded, you were trapped in it for the duration of the trip. If you wanted anything to eat or drink, or to use the toilet facilities, you had to get off the train at the next station, along with everyone else, in a frantic rush.

Underground trains, for the first twenty-five years of their operation, therefore provided a service swathed in smoke and steam, relieved only by the numerous ventilation shafts that dotted the city.

by 1880, Britain had four times as many railway stations as it does today. A myriad small urban and suburban stations delivered workers to every major employment concentration, both serving and promoting vast new areas of housing.

Mining was a particularly treacherous vocation, and this was reflected in the average wage. The standard of living in mining communities, such as those in the valleys of South Wales, the coalfields of Nottinghamshire or in the villages of County Durham was noticeably higher than that of agricultural or factory-working communities – as long as there was work to be done.

Eyesight was ruined for many women by long hours of badly lit sewing and other small-scale work. Punching the eyes of needles was notorious for straining eyesight: each prepared length of wire had to be accurately lined up by hand; the punch had to strike in the exact centre of each length.

Weavers working the powered looms in the mills were almost invariably partially deaf by their mid-thirties.

In towns where such work was common, a form of silent speech arose which exaggerated mouth movements, making it easier to lip-read. Foundries, forges, iron- and steelworks were other workplaces that deafened their workforces. A reputation for being loud in speech betokened the general level of impaired hearing.

Legal limitations on the length of the working day had initially covered only children’s hours of employment in specific industries, but, gradually, as the century progressed, new groups of workers were to be included. By 1850, the average working week was around 60–65 hours, then, in the 1870s, factory owner after factory owner agreed to cut hours. Unions and other labour organizations had long been arguing for a ten-hour day but, in the early 1870s, full employment strengthened their bargaining power and the 54–6-hour week became standard across a range of different industries.

London dressmaking businesses notoriously demanded twenty-hour days for weeks on end from their employees during the social ‘season’, when fashionable wealthy women required a quick succession of new clothes in the very latest mode for an annual flurry of balls and social occasions.

Safety regulation would gradually spread out from the coal mines and textile mills to embrace more and more workplaces, and legislation slowly came to cover more and more hazards.

For many rural lads, the part-time and piecemeal nature of their early work gave way to more regular employment at around twelve years of age, when they moved away from their family homes into the farmhouses of their masters for a year’s agricultural labour.

As the century progressed, minimum ages in regulated industries very slowly crept up. By 1872, ten was the minimum age for boys to work underground, and, until they were twelve, they were only permitted to work part-time, with compulsory schooling forming the other half of their day.

Women’s work was consistently badly paid throughout the whole Victorian era. Even in jobs that were identical to those of men, women received around a half to two thirds of that which was paid to their fathers, husbands and brothers.

Nappies were among the first garments to be boil-washed, as, even before germ theory, the link between faeces and disease became clear. Mrs Beeton, along with many other authorities, recommended a half-hour rolling boil.

Getting a whole family of children up, washed and dressed could be a major daily chore. There were no zip fastenings and no Velcro (invented in 1948) to ease or speed the operation. Buttons had to be fastened and tapes tied into bows; all tasks that were much too fiddly for small fingers to manage by themselves. A two-year-old boy faced with a twenty-first-century wardrobe of elastic, pull-on clothes would probably make a reasonable attempt at dressing himself without too much assistance and be fully dressed in five minutes. A two-year-old of today faced with a Victorian wardrobe would be stumped. Even with adult help, the process was more likely to take fifteen minutes.