How to be a Victorian

by Ruth Goodman

From the early 1860s, a new intermediate style of clothing began to emerge: knickerbockers. At about three to four years old, a boy now left behind the skirts of his toddler days and was dressed in his first pair of short trousers.

In a working-class family, the meal was referred to as ‘dinner’ and, in cases where a man could return home from work at this hour, it was the family’s main meal of the day, consisting mostly of suet pudding or potatoes, gravy and a small portion of meat

Most men and boys found themselves working too far away from home to come back at noon, which meant that their meal usually consisted only of items they could carry with them to work.

Sundays, of course, were the exception. For one day of the week, the whole family could eat together at the traditional, midday dinner time.

She and her sister worked the mangle every evening after they came home from school in the 1890s and delivered the clean laundry in the morning before class began.

Unfortunately, few households had just one batch of laundry to do; most had four or five. It paid to begin with the finest and cleanest load and work towards the coarser and dirtiest. This allowed one to reuse the water rather than having to carry four new tubs for each batch. Women’s caps, doilies and other fanciful or delicate items – if you were fortunate enough to own them – formed the first load, whereas shirts, drawers and nightclothes made up the second.

last came aprons, kitchen cloths, nappies and sanitary towels.

I have used such methods on a range of garments for years, and a good brush, combined with airing the garment outdoors in the sunshine (hung inside out), leaves coats and woollen jackets cleaner and sweeter-smelling than would treatment by most twenty-first-century dry cleaners.

According to the 1861 census, 167,607 people were then employed as professional laundry workers. Of these, 99 per cent were women.

My own historical laundry experiences have led me to see the powered washing machine as one of the great bulwarks of women’s liberation, an invention that can sit alongside contraception and the vote in the direct impact it has had on changing women’s lives.

Measles, diphtheria, whooping cough, tuberculosis, cholera and typhoid were a major and incessant threat in every nineteenth-century household. There were no antibiotics and far fewer forms of pain relief. Hospitals were small and few in number and dealt mostly with the poor; their coverage of the population was sparse at best.

Doctors’ fees could be financially crippling, even for the wealthier families, and most of those who fell sick stayed at home and were nursed by female relatives.

Any bout of serious sickness could easily leave a patient with an addiction, even after they had recovered from the initial illness, due to the fact that both doctors and home nurses made liberal use of opiates.

The handicraft tuition, for example, could often deliver far more practical and lasting results to a child, and their parents, than could literacy. Lace-making schools, straw-plaiting schools and knitting schools all offered a genuine trade that could enable a child to earn a living, both in the short term, and for life. Schools and parents varied considerably in how much emphasis they placed upon the craft and how much on the book work. The nature of the local economy and the finances of the family could tip the balance either way. Of course, the teachers of these schools were also strongly aware of their own needs in terms of keeping the parents happy and paying their fees.

Earlier in the century, around the 1830s, very few people even knew what an exam was, and it was only the tiniest number of students who had any experience of them at all. However, by the end of the century, every child of the working classes, along with most middle-class boys and a smaller group of middle-class girls, knew all about exams.

Parents were also required to be vigilant about a girl’s reading material. Sensationalist or romantic literature, such as Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, was likely to cause emotional turmoil and overstimulation of sexual feelings.

One correspondent to The Times in 1872 asserted that no female could ‘follow a course of higher education without running the risk of becoming sterile’.

But they require astonishing skill to make. The casual language of the patterns belies their young readers’ proficiency in a range of needlework techniques; the instructions do not waste any time in explaining technical phrases, as these are all presumed to be understood.

Mondays, however, were a leisurely workday for the masses, even if on an unofficial basis. Monday mornings saw factory hands, farmers and even office clerks arriving late at the workplace. Once at their job, the average Victorian employee refused to work hard on the first day of the week, preferring to work longer hours on a Thursday or Friday to make up for the more relaxed start. And, as we shall see later, working-class sport was frequently a Monday phenomenon.

In 1837, a 7 a.m. start at the mill had meant an 8 p.m. finish six days a week. From 1874 onwards, a mill worker could begin his shift at 7 a.m., as his father and grandfather had done, but finish at 6 p.m. from Monday to Friday and at 2 p.m. on a Saturday.

Whether it was sport, drinking, gardening or holidaying, a new industry was born – leisure – and an array of activities was available.

If you preferred a less violent form of exercise and a more genteel sport, cricket was a nineteenth-century favourite. By 1860, it was the most popular sport in the country.

In 1845, three senior pupils at Rugby School were asked to write down the rules of the game as it was played at the school. Once published, these rules became a standard that many clubs turned to when settling pre-match disputes with their opponents.

In 1863, a second influential agreement of rules was published – that formulated by the Football Association.

The surge in popularity of playing football can be glimpsed in the rise of Birmingham’s football teams. In 1870, Birmingham was almost football-free. By 1880, over eight hundred clubs had been formed. The same meteoric rise was visible in nearly every industrial town and city in Britain.

By 1895, a grand total of 110,000 people flocked to the Crystal Palace arena. Football had taken on a whole new role in British life. As the Victorian age ended and the Edwardian began, football became less to do with kicking the ball, and more about standing on the terraces with your friends.

The Victorian woman was generally horrified at the idea of any tanning at all. White skin was what a woman aimed for in order to help differentiate her from those who had to work outdoors for a living. And with no such thing as sunblock to protect a person from sunburn, covering up was doubly sensible.

would have offered her family a simple serving of a few slices of bread for the evening meal, which was known as ‘supper’. The family did not always sit down together for the meal, sometimes preferring to eat their bread alone; they each returned home at different times from their long working days.

The bread would have been baked at the local shop from locally grown and ground flour. The mother would not have possessed the facilities to bake her own bread;

Meals improved dramatically as one ascended the social ladder. In the home of a skilled tradesman such as a carpenter or blacksmith in almost any market town of England or lowland Scotland, the main meal of the day would have already been taken at midday. The evening meal, whether it was called ‘tea’ or ‘supper’, was based upon bread and butter, usually with a cold cut of meat, a small amount of pickle and a cup of hot cocoa. Some days there was a piece of cake too.

As one rose again through the social classes, the meals became more extravagant. The fashionable middle and upper classes sat down to dine at five o’clock in the evening. They may have partaken of lunch, or tea and cakes, earlier in the day, but this was their primary mealtime, and they called it ‘dinner’.

The new, whiter flour, and the new, whiter bread that it produced was therefore lacking in vital minerals and vitamins – and in vitamin B most of all. This would not have mattered much to people who were eating a varied and plentiful diet, but to those for whom bread was such a major element, this deficiency could cause serious long-term health problems.

By the end of the reign, the upper classes did not dine until eight o’clock in the evening. This was a shift that would not have been possible without a technological dawn in home lighting – most critically, in illuminating the kitchen.

most young brides felt extremely nervous and under-prepared when it came time for them to take charge in their own homes. Perhaps this was less to do with an inadequate cookery education and more to do with the daunting nature of having such responsibility at the age of twenty or so.

Living in a barely heated Victorian house through a whole winter and engaging in the daily physical routine of Victorian domestic and farming life, I found that my appetite and tastes temporarily changed. Foods that I would simply dismiss in my twenty-first-century lifestyle became delicious. I was able to eat with enthusiasm the bread and dripping, the pig’s trotters and the plain suet pastry with a scrape of jam.

A galvanized tin bath hanging on the back of a door was not a typical Victorian sight. Not until the beginning of the twentieth century did it become common in poorer homes.

The first public baths to be introduced in the Victorian period were just that: baths for the public to use. They were conceived as a way of offering the latest advances in personal hygiene to those who had no access to a bathroom and possibly not even piped water in their home.

Within four years, lobbying had succeeded in passing the Baths and Wash Houses Act through parliament and, from 1846, local authorities were empowered to build such facilities in their own communities, paid for out of taxes.

By seven o’clock, most families were bundled up in their bed sheets, even if they were not asleep.

Warmer summer evenings could tempt people into staying up later, as Jack Wood, the son of a navvy from Oldham, recorded in his early-nineteenth-century diary: ‘If it was a pleasant evening people would be sat on their doorsteps until eleven or twelve o’clock, and then go quietly inside to bed.’

Only at the very end of the period, as fuel prices dropped and it became cheaper to light and heat one’s home, ...

Men were believed to have the fundamental right, as bestowed by the Word of God, to call on their wife at any time; it was a woman’s duty to comply.

Yet there also existed a strong cultural belief that a ‘good’ man should exercise restraint in some instances. Sex with a heavily pregnant woman, or a woman still recovering from childbirth, was not condoned; neither was sex during a woman’s period, when she was ill or on the Lord’s Day.

If a man broke these unspoken rules, he was held to be a ‘brute’ and his behaviour was cast as ‘beastly’ by men and women alike. Sexual appetite coup...

Masturbation was not considered to be a wholesome alternative; Dr Howe noted in 1884 that ‘the occurrence of seminal ejaculations three or four times a week from legitimate sexual congress will not be felt very much by a healthy man, while the same number of losses from masturbation or nocturnal pollutions will soon super induce mental and physical debility.’

women were required to remain strictly chaste, while men could be permitted infidelities.

Such beliefs were held, too, by women, some of whom fretted about the health of their husbands if they were personally unable, or unwilling, to meet his ‘needs’ themselves.

In the last half of the nineteenth century, masturbation, or, rather, a fear of masturbation, became close to a national obsession. Boys were considered to be most at risk from this ‘evil’ and in need of education and protection. Fathers, mothers, doctors, religious leaders and schoolmasters were all pressed into service to teach adolescents the inherent dangers of the vice and to instruct them in how to develop the necessary defences of self-control to resist its temptations.

Accordingly, female self-pleasure was a major subject of discussion during the period, but not on the same scale as male masturbation. Autoeroticism for women was considered to be less common and less damaging to the body than male ‘abuse’, for, while a girl might be degrading herself morally and, as several male commentators pointed out, spoiling her future enjoyment in ‘real’ sexual intercourse, she was not wasting her vital essence in the same way as was a man.

As Victoria’s reign began, many people still held to the ancient belief that a woman’s sexuality was latent in girlhood and only ‘awakened’ on her wedding night by her husband. From that moment onwards, her sexual appetite was thought to be lascivious, and greater than that of men. It was in need of firm male control, and it was up to husbands to ensure the carnal discipline of their wife.