How to be a Victorian

by Ruth Goodman

The style of an individual’s hat varied, depending on fashion and their social position, as well as their profession or chosen activity. There were top hats and straw hats, bowlers and flat caps, deerstalkers and trilbies, sports caps and berets.

A basic one could be bought by a factory worker for around two weeks’ wages. At the other end of the scale, the very best silk topper, with its own special leather box for storage and transportation, would cost a factory worker the equivalent of three months’ wages.

Straw hats were another option for men, but were not suitable for town wear; agricultural labourers used them to cover their heads and shade their necks when working out in the fields and the upper classes wore them for holiday, leisure and sporting pursuits along the river, at the seaside or when attending a cricket match.

Small pillbox hats graced the heads of those partaking in athletics or gymnastics, and early cycling clubs also adopted the pillbox as part of their uniform.

the 1880s, working men of both town and country would have been much more likely to wear a felt hat. Round-crowned and round-brimmed, such hats quickly became softened and shapeless in the rain, although their floppy appearance didn’t stop them being effective in keeping sun, wind and rain off a man’s head. By 1901, however, the urban working-class man had moved over, en masse, to the flat cap.

from the 1850s onwards brightly dyed and patterned stockings were being worn by the young and daring.

From the 1880s, women began to use suspenders to keep their stockings up, initially held by a separate suspender belt and later from suspenders sewn on to the bottom of the corset.

Corsets were worn throughout Victoria’s reign by women of all classes

The belief that a woman’s internal organs required support was a strong and persistent one.

With a corset to perform many of the supportive functions of the back and stomach muscles, these muscles went largely unused and therefore became, to some degree, weak and atrophied.

‘women who wear very tight stays complain that they cannot sit upright without them, nay are compelled to wear night stays when in bed.’

The good-looking, the successful, the fashionable and the strong were those who stood or sat erect.

it was thought that a corset provided the warmth a woman’s vulnerable insides required, and that allowing the kidneys and other organs to become chilled was foolish and dangerous and could lead to a range of illnesses and disorders.

Doctors, in general, were very supportive of female corset-wearing. Their only reservations concerned not the corsets themselves but the practice of ‘tight lacing’ – of using corsets to change the shape of the female body dramatically.

prevent the straining of the ligaments supporting the womb. It was also good for a healthy bladder, averted back injuries, helped in the recovery from childbirth, facilitated healthy digestion and generally assisted a woman in leading an active life.

An uncorseted woman was thought to lack self-control and would have faced public disapproval and crude assumptions about her lifestyle. Only those who were prepared to be social outcasts went without.

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 basic set consisted of one flannel petticoat and one cotton petticoat, although more could be added.

Later in the century, when fashionable skirts were slim at the front and sides but enormous at the rear, bustle pads (like feather-filled cushions) and steel and cotton crinolettes (frameworks worn under the rear of the skirt) took over.

In about 1885, the fashionable woman had to relearn how to walk as well as sit, because petticoats and skirts became narrower and narrower. The difficulty in walking was in part the point: it prevented such fashions being easily emulated by women who had to work.

a simple chest preserver was a welcome help. These were flat pieces of flannel, leather or hare skin that could be laid across the chest and held in place, rather like a baby’s bib, with a tape around the neck, and another at the waist to prevent it from riding up.

The fashion plate that allowed a competent seamstress or dressmaker to keep up to date with the latest trends was becoming much more widespread, and was a great help if you were based well away from London but still wished to stay in sartorial touch.

A photograph of St Pancras workhouse in London taken at dinner time in 1900 shows hundreds of forlorn women sitting in rows dressed in a baggy version of 1850s dress.

The most noticeable and universal point to make about Victorian women’s clothes is the layering. Rich or poor, 1839 or 1901, Victorian women wore a vast number of individual items of clothes. And most of these layers were cotton-based.

Each parish in the city had its own street scavengers and official jakesmen to clean out the public facilities; their carts trundled the streets at night, when they would cause the least nuisance. Local laws required that private householders hire these men regularly to clean out their own homes and carry the waste away. Sadly, not everyone was as conscientious as they should have been, and prosecutions for overflowing privies causing offence to the neighbours were frequent.

Pools and puddles of filth from overflowing and inadequate privies became increasingly common in the poorer districts, where people could ill afford to have them cleaned.

it was only the more solid waste that was hauled away by the night-soil men; the rest would leach into the soil. Basement dwellers were known to find it oozing in through their walls.

In the largest cities, and London in particular, the subsoil was becoming saturated with human detritus, and it began seeping through the earth to pollute the groundwater that fed the wells.

The new water closets were therefore thought to be much less hygienic than the old privy at the bottom of the garden, which, however foul and overflowing, was at least situated outside in the fresh air, and not in the home, exhaling its dangerous fumes day and night.

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.

Piped water, for country dwellers, was a luxury, and one that most of them would have to wait until well into the twentieth century to experience.

Urban schemes in Manchester, Rochdale, Burnley and a host of Midlands towns adopted this technology for their ‘pail closets’,

For most of the Victorian era, it was indeed newspaper that provided most people with the means of cleaning themselves. Advertisements, paper bags and old envelopes were also pressed into service.

as news of germs began to spread, it seemed sensible that the material you used to wipe away disease-carrying faeces from your body should be impregnated with some germ-killing agent. The earliest commercially produced toilet paper was thus ‘medicated’,

The British Perforated Paper Company began production in England in 1880; its products could be bought in packs of one hundred or five hundred sheets. Emphasizing the medical nature of the product, rather than its comfort or convenience, the manufacturers sought to make it a necessity of healthy life.

The medicating process left the paper hard and shiny, much like tracing paper. Indeed, the medicated toilet paper that was still the norm in schools of the 1970s and even 1980s was often pressed into service as tracing paper in the classroom – as long as it was a new, clean pack, of course.

Blacking ranges, scrubbing privies and hand-washing mountains of laundry left calluses, chipped nails and deep stains ground into the skin. The continual use of cold water reddened the complexion, and arthritis would often set in, swelling joints and deforming fingers.

Most people’s hands were filthy, elbow deep, as they were, in dirt or messy tasks for much of the day.

soft, pale skin and slim fingers free of all blemishes and scars could mark you as a lady. However, in order to be able to function as outward signs of wealth, the hands needed to be scrupulously clean, free of any dryness or eczema, and the nails unbitten.

Rather like the famous statue of the Egyptian Queen Nefertiti, the long, exposed neck was to be emphasized by the huge profusion of hair balanced at the back of the head.

Working-class women were therefore shut out from this style, which may well have been part of the point. It also required a good head of hair.

Bonnets were so last year; hats were hot.

Popping the bun on top of the head gave a much greater stability to the style, and in the late 1880s and 1890s you begin to see much more active women partaking in the fashion.

Hairpieces of all colours, sizes and shapes were available for those whose hair was too thin, too fine or even of normal thickness.

For the poor and destitute, selling your hair was an option.

Five full minutes of brushing morning and night was recommended in order to stimulate the natural production of oils and to move those oils along the strands of hair to ‘furnish vigour and nourishment’.

regard to the hair too frequent washing should be avoided; and daily washing of hair is too frequent, rendering it dry and brittle. Probably once a week is sufficient,’

Bandoline was the name of such fixatives, and is the substance from which modern hairspray derives.

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.

Rural working-class girls, in particular, were often held up as patterns of pure beauty in popular novels and stories. Engravings of young dairymaids or shepherdesses are dotted through many popular publications. The non-wearing of cosmetics was a very democratic strand in popular opinion.