How to be a Victorian

by Ruth Goodman

At the outset of the Victorian period, a four-ounce bar of soap (roughly the same size as those currently sold in Britain) cost the same as a good joint of beef.

Until the 1860s, most working-class Victorians had looked extensively to the second-hand markets for their clothing.

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.

When I left school at seventeen, my waist measured only thirteen inches, it formerly having been twenty-three inches in circumference.’ That this is no exaggeration is proved by the survival of a few of these tiny-waisted corsets. To put this into perspective, the waist measurement of the average toddler is about twenty inches.

Nineteen to twenty-four inches is the common range for fashionable young women’s clothing, with clothing for older women usually rising by several inches. By twenty-first-century standards, these are still very small waists. A size ten dress is currently averaging twenty-seven inches at the waist.

The Venus de Medici was much discussed as a model for women to emulate, for here was an avowed beauty, life-size and with a twenty-six-inch waist.