How to be a Victorian

by Ruth Goodman

A coloured powder was therefore a way in which those looking for rosy cheeks could achieve them without admitting to themselves that they were ‘painting’.

Almost any ‘moisturizer’ that comes in a pot rather than as a liquid can be called a cold cream;

As for eye make-up, no Victorian wore eyeshadow – that would have to wait for the early silent films – but eyebrows could be darkened with charcoal, elderberries or burnt cloves. A solution of green vitriol was also recommended, and was applied by means of a brush after the eyebrows had been washed by a decoction of oak galls (the small, round growths that appear on oak trees in the areas where oak-gall wasps feed). They could also be plucked to shape without anyone shouting ‘paint’, and eyelashes were sometimes trimmed regularly with tiny scissors in the mistaken belief that it would make them grow more luxuriously.

Much of the make-up on the market still contained red and white lead as the main colouring ingredient; some used mercury, just as they had done back during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. These were very dangerous substances and could be absorbed through the skin – or worse, if used in lip colour, ingested by the wearer.

If you preferred a coloured pomade – something, in texture, like modern lipstick – the carefully ground beetles could be mixed with animal fat and plenty of white wax.

When Victoria ascended the throne, the dominant scent, or at least the one most advertised, was eau de cologne. Mr Rimmel’s Book of Perfumes has as the base of eau de cologne the distilled flowers of the orange tree: a careful mixture of both the sweet and bitter varieties of orange blossom blended with the expressed oils of their rinds.

A sharp, clean scent that cut through other smells, it could be applied to handkerchiefs and gloves as well as the body.

Eau de cologne was also cheaper by volume than a true perfume.

Eau de cologne, on the other hand, was diluted with distilled water. For this reason it was known as a toilet water (meaning scente...

Even a working-class home, as long as the adult male was in full-time employment, could boast a pot of lemon and bergamot in some form.

By 1880, bergamot and lemon had started to lose their appeal. They seemed old-fashioned and crude compared to the heavier, more complex scents of the fashionable world. These were full of musk and ambergris, patchouli and spice oils, all of which were expensive. By the 1890s, high-fashion perfumes were never single scents, and were made not from one or two ingredients but from eight or twelve different extracts. Sold in tiny amounts in long, slim, beautifully decorative glass vials, they were a total expression of wealth.

Meanwhile, in the mass market, lavender oil came to dominate the cheaper products.

‘Costly perfumes, formerly employed as a mask to want of cleanliness, are less required now that soap has become a type of civilisation.’

Coal tar and its various fractal derivatives were throwing up an amazing array of odours. Oil of pear, apple, almond and pineapple could all be produced from coal tar, as could the phenomenally popular lemon oil.

The new chemicals democratized perfume, spreading it further and further down the social scale until, by the 1870s, even servant girls were buying scented soap.

Fashion turned to those smells that no one had been able to synthesize, distancing them from the servant girl once again.

Long hair was never fashionable for Victorian men, at least not at the back of the neck. Throughout the period, men’s hair stopped at the collar; however, there was still a great amount of variety in grooming the hair, from smooth and oiled to thick and unruly. Style of facial hair, equally, could range from clean-shaven to full, bushy beard.

The eighteenth-century dandy had been a clean-shaven man. Facial hair was a visible sign of the Victorian rejection of effeminate frivolity associated with the past. Moustaches, too, began to make an appearance after many decades of absence.

Towards the end of the century, the fiery appearance of Darwin and others like him was reined in. Many a man still had a full beard, but now it was likely to be short and elegantly trimmed in the style of Prince Edward (the future Edward VII). Indeed, the strongest of all styles was now a cleanly shaven face with a small, carefully shaped moustache. Hair, too, was now noticeably shorter than it had been all century, and much straighter. The luxurious curls and waves had faded. Edwardian man was to have far less hair in general than his generations of Victorian forebears.

‘Pomade against baldness. Beef marrow, soaked in several waters, melted and strained, half a pound; tincture of cantharides (made by soaking for a week one drachm of powdered cantharides in one ounce of proof spirit), one ounce; oil of bergamot, twelve drops.’

Otherwise called ‘Spanish fly’, the cantharide is an emerald-green beetle that was widely used medicinally to remove warts, counter irritation and as an aphrodisiac.

This recipe for one such hair-styling product existed at the more exotic end of the market: ‘Mix two ounces of bear’s grease, half an ounce of honey, one drachm of laudanum, three drachms of the powder of southernwood, three drachms of the balsam of Peru, one and a half drachms of the ashes of the roots of bulrushes, and a small quantity of the oil of sweet almonds.’

Mascara was the other name given to these coloured moustache waxes.

By the middle of the century, gymnastics had become a regular part of many men’s morning routine. Knee bends, stretches, arm waving, shadow-boxing and running on the spot for ten to twenty minutes every morning was considered a good way to start the day, promoting as it did a good and vigorous circulation of the blood around the body and the brain.

Most were aimed at wealthy young men but, as the century progressed, gymnastic facilities became increasingly available to those with less to spend.

Exercise for girls was a much more worrying subject. A girl’s developing body was thought to be easily upset and at risk of permanent damage if involved in even the lightest of energetic pursuits. It was feared she could be left unable to fulfil her primary function in life: the bearing of children.

Boys were required to be vigorous if they were to grow up to be strong and manly, but girls ran the danger of unsexing themselves if they did the same.

Many people observing the population were horrified by how many weak and feeble women they saw;

What was needed was the right sort of exercise: one that would maximize health, muscular development and vigour without endangering reproductive systems or spoiling feminine silhouettes.

In the 1860s, Dr Pye Chevasse, along with most mainstream members of the medical profession, recommended walking. Lots of walking. Not athletic hill-walking or anything else too strenuous, but daily, hour-long walks, especially to be taken in the morning, when the body was fresh.

Callisthenics was to be the girl’s equivalent of gymnastics. Swedish-style, systematic and scientific exercise for men, with its swinging on bars and leaping over vaulting horses, was considered particularly unsuitable for girls.

Callisthenics concentrated particularly upon moving the arms and shoulders, and generally left the torso immobile.

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).

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.

Most domestic ranges had a single oven at one side of the firebox and a water-boiling tank at the other. On top of everything sat an iron cooking surface.

In remote rural districts, coal was not always the cheapest and most available fuel. In areas of Devon and Cornwall, wood remained in wide use.

Porridge and oatcakes, for example, were both cooked over the low, smouldering heat produced by peat fires, thereby gaining a smoky, peaty flavour.

in 1900, breakfast for a Yorkshire labourer’s family of five children over the course of a week consisted of bread, bacon (just enough for the man of the house to have a slice each day) and coffee, with butter available as a treat once a week and dripping rationed over three days, due to its cost. Cocoa also occasionally joined the spread, and was widely, and rightly, held to be a healthy and energy-giving drink. If it was made with milk, it added significantly to the nutritional value of one’s daily intake. For

women and children of the house ate a smaller selection of food than the wage-earning man.

breakfast menu. Ribs of beef, pickled oysters, shrimps, radishes, plovers, oeufs cocottes, a piece of salmon au bleu, a Bayonne ham, Russian caviar, croquettes of fish, grilled sheep’s kidneys, patties of chicken, mayonnaise of turbot, raised pie of pigeon, blanquette of lamb and broiled fillets of mackerel were all on one suggested menu for a party of ten to twelve people in 1865. A menu like this certainly required a later dining hour. Even if the servants woke at 5 a.m. to clean and light the ranges, the kitchen staff would have needed to work incredibly hard to produce such a spread by 10 a.m.

the most common Victorian experience relating to food was hunger.

Absolute starvation was rare, with some notable exceptions, but long-term...

Large numbers of people woke up famished and spent their working days – and much of their working lives – in a state ...

the diet of labourers from northern manufacturing towns in England. ‘We find [their] animal food reduced to a small bit of bacon cut up with the potatoes; lower still, even this disappears, and there remain only bread, cheese, porridge, and potatoes.’

As Britain continued to industrialize, people were willing to endure almost anything, including sickness and early death, in order to eat more.

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.

Scurvy (caused by a lack of vitamin C) and rickets (a vitamin D deficiency that leads to soft and deformed bones) were evident across the country.

Cod liver oil quickly became the new cure-all, administered in schools, hospitals, workhouses and families to improve the health of children. It became the very first food supplement.