How to be a Victorian

by Ruth Goodman

For the vast majority, unheated rooms with open windows made for a bracing start to the day. On leaving bed, people would perch precariously upon whatever the household could conjure up in the way of a rug.

For most of the Victorian period, the stand-up wash was the main form of personal hygiene and the start of most people’s daily routine.

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

In the few working-class homes that employed a tin bath in front of the fire, men and children were its usual occupants. Even within a family setting, few women were willing to be naked in the kitchen, and even men preferred to bathe wearing a thin pair of cotton drawers in such semi-public surroundings.

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.

It is hardly surprising then that the working classes had such a different smell to that of the wealthier.

By 1884, the bacterias responsible for typhoid, leprosy, diphtheria, tuberculosis, cholera, dysentery, gonorrhoea, malaria, pneumonia and tetanus had been isolated.

Housework was valuable in preserving health whichever theory you ascribed to.

maidservant who smelt of carbolic soap came to be one whom mistresses had faith in, one whom they were much more likely to employ.

Toothbrushes looked, in shape, much like those we are accustomed to today, although their handles were made of bone or wood and the bristles generally of horse- or pony-hair. The usual word for what we would call toothpaste was ‘dentifrice’.

Many such pastes were prepared at home, the simplest no more than a little soot or salt.

Most dentifrices, whether home-made or bought at the chemist’s or pharmacist’s, were simply flavoured and often coloure...

Myrrh dentifrice. Powdered cuttlefish, one pound; powdered myrrh, two ounces.

American tooth powder. Coral, cuttlefish bone, dragons blood, of each eight drachms; burnt alum and red sanders, of each four drachms; orris root eight drachms; cloves and cinnamon of each half a drachm; rose pink, eight drachms. All to be powdered and mixed.

The presence of so many pink and red colouring agents is perhaps the most surprising element of the recipes, when the modern preference is for white toothpastes. Victorian taste required toothpaste to mimic the colour of healthy gums rather than the desired colour of teeth.

Dr Mary Allan. She suggested that a sanitary napkin should be suspended from the shoulders with a pair of braces.

The knickers of 1900 were a large pair of loosely fitting bloomers. They were not elasticated and had to be large and loose to permit movement,

Standing in his cold bedroom, Victorian man would have pulled off his nightclothes and quickly donned a vest and a pair of drawers.

Victorian man would have been disgusted by the idea of wearing nothing between his legs and his trousers;

A bad darn was a torment to wear; hard and lumpy, it could lead to blisters as surely as a badly fitting shoe.

Shirts, which went over the vest, were both ‘under-’ and ‘outer-’ wear in some senses, as the social etiquette of the time dictated that waistcoats and jackets were to be worn at all times.

Collars and cuffs were visible – but often entirely separate garments to the shirt, to which they were fastened in place with buttons and studs.

Checked, striped and spotted shirts were common in the early years among the wealthy elite, but over time, at the more moneyed end of society, they began to be replaced by white. Crisp, perfect whites became the mark of a gentleman. Meanwhile, the working man moved in the opposite direction.

The mere presence of a collar carried clues to one’s class, while its exact form, state of cleanliness and the quantity of starch used to whiten and stiffen it spoke of a man’s position within the social hierarchy.

Labourers, both agricultural and industrial, generally wore collarless shirts, with a cloth tied loosely around the neck in place of a tie.

The height of the collar then subsided for several decades, before becoming taller and taller in the final few years of the 1890s. The amount of starch it had become customary to use was staggering. The resultant collars were rigid and sharp enough even to use as a pastry cutter.

Whether he was navigating the upper reaches of the Orinoco River or ice-climbing in Tibet, a man was advised to wear plenty of wool next to his skin.

Sudden chills were a general Victorian fear, and it was widely accepted that neither great heat nor great cold was as dangerous to health as the rapid change from one to the other.

Dr Jaeger established his Sanitary Clothing Company, which expanded the perceived advantages of woolly-underwear wearing to include a detoxification and slimming function. He believed that wool-clad skin would be stimulated in its natural functions, exhaling more toxins and watery fats than skin that was merely covered in cotton:

Guernsey jumper. The jumper represented the closest thing there was to a uniform among fishermen, and marked out the members of his profession as a distinctive social group within Victorian society.

Countrymen wore heavy, hard-wearing cotton fabrics that were mostly pale and undyed. Townsmen wore dark-coloured wool.

Out in the countryside, over the top of their waistcoats and trousers (clothes worn by men of all classes), men sometimes wore not a coat but a smock.

Heavy canvas-style fabrics provided good-value trousers for working men in the countryside.

British workers wanted more warmth from their cotton trousers. For this reason, moleskin became the most popular choice by the end of the nineteenth century.

It was significantly more insulating than jean, being windproof because of the raised nap, and was just as long-lasting. And, although all cotton fabrics got wet easily, they also dried quickly.

Victorian trousers, despite many fashion variations over the years, always carried on up towards the ribcage, keeping the lower back covered and warm, no matter how much digging or stooping one had to do in the course of physical labour outside.

To protect his legs and trousers, the countryman added a pair of gaiters to his outfit. In their simplest form, gaiters were a rectangle of sacking wrapped around the lower leg. They were tied with one piece of string just below the knee and another around the ankle.

A fine suit made by a tailor would last for a very long time, and long after it had gone out of fashion. Such suits formed the usual clothes of the working townsman.

If you have ever felt a Second World War greatcoat, you will have a good idea of the Victorian coat.

Throughout the period, indoor and outdoor temperatures in Victorian Britain were not so far apart.

The riot of colour and decoration was unending. Nothing was too bright or too garish for a waistcoat, nor too feminine.

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

Alongside these new, cheaper clothes came innovative and aggressive marketing. ‘Ikey cords, cut up slap with the artful dodge and fakement down the sides, 10 bob’ were the words emblazoned on the façade of one East End London establishment. This, roughly translated, meant a pair of fashionably cut corduroy trousers with a stripe down the side for about 40 per cent of the price you would pay if you went to a tailor for the same garment.

The new chemical dyes of the 1860s were stronger and more light-resistant than any that had gone before. While women’s clothes would become almost dayglo, for men, this meant black.

1884 was a time of baggy trousers and loose-fit coats for mature men while the modern lounge suit was emerging as the fashion of the young.

By 1890, as Hardy had bemoaned, the countryside had also turned black.

Gaiters, for example, were worn throughout the century by men in the countryside keen to keep the mud off their trousers; townsmen had far less need of them. Scarves were rarely seen on countrymen, even in the depths of winter, but townsmen liked to be well guarded around the neck for much of the year.

The wealthy man of the 1890s was approaching a look we would all recognize today as the formal suit of our own era.

The clothes on display are worn in layers and show wear and the worst of fit: everything appears either three sizes too big or three sizes too small. Shirt, waistcoat and jacket are usually visible; vests often show at the neck, and in many of the pictures there is more than one waistcoat or jacket being worn on top of another, some done up and some left open. Rather than wearing high-quality, warm fabrics, these people were simply layering up with whatever extra garments they could find. All the garments have rips, repairs and patches, and they mostly look filthy.

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.