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Keeping children on short rations, especially girls, is a theme that runs throughout Victorian child-rearing practice. The self-control and self-denial induced by hunger were thought to teach enduring habits of self-sacrifice and to aid in fashioning a more moral individual.
The strength and persistence of advice to wealthier parents about suitable diets for children to focus on ‘plain’ food – by which the Victorians meant carbohydrates – tended to put middle- and upper-class children’s diets much closer to that of their poorer compatriots than a consideration of money alone might lead one to think.
Twenty-first-century analysis of workhouse diets estimates that they offered 20 per cent less than the minimum calorific requirement today, and records that they were seriously deficient in a range of minerals and vitamins.
Slow starvation seems to have been the lot of many prisoners too.
The working day, however long or short, was for more and more people during the Victorian period bordered by the business of getting there.
Long and exhausting hours forced most families to live as close as possible to the workplace of the primary breadwinner: overcrowded and unsanitary homes were still preferable to an hour’s walk at the end of a sixteen-hour shift.
upper-class gents attended to business between the hours of ten in the morning and four in the afternoon. This did not mean that the clerks, lawyers and agents they were consulting worked only these hours – 8 a.m until 7 p.m. was considered a normal day for them – but that it was the only available business slot for gentlemen who were expected to travel into town from some distance. The prevalence of this pattern even dictated bank opening hours.
Trains and omnibuses alike were in the business of delivering gentlemen to the City of London and to the business and commercial districts of all of the major towns and cities in time for a ten o’clock start.
If you were looking for a transport thrill, a horse-drawn omnibus might have been just the thing. Even traffic jams were an adventure on the top of such a bus. Horses were prone to bolting and acting unpredictably in a crowd of vehicles; holding on tight was a sensible measure.
‘The first thing which a person should do who is about to travel by rail is to ascertain certainly from the timetable the hour at which the train starts,’ wrote one such advisor in 1854.
By 1900, there were 160 separate railway companies in operation, and the Bradshaw Guide that listed all their timetables ran to over a thousand pages.
In the 1890s, the horses gave way to electric power, and it was from this moment onwards that trams truly became affordable to the working classes. Lines were extended to include the poorer areas of towns, and special workmen’s rates were introduced.
Underground trains, for the first twenty-five years of their operation, therefore provided a service swathed in smoke and steam, relieved only by the numerous ventilation shafts that dotted the city.
By the end of the century, the better-off and employed working classes, as well as middle-class people, were getting used to the joys and sorrows of commuting.
Complaints about severe overcrowding on trains and on platforms, queues at ticket offices, inflated prices, cancelled trains and delays were loud and frequent.
In keeping with this austerity, to begin with, stations were devoid of even the most basic of facilities, such as shelter from the rain, lighting or any indication of where trains were going. It was up to the porters to announce as loudly and lucidly as they could the arrival of each train, its destination and stopping points. They were also to call out the name of the station the train had arrived at, as, for many years, the simple expedient of putting the name of the station on signs on the platform was not considered.
by 1880, Britain had four times as many railway stations as it does today.
During the 1870s and 1880s, fish-tailed gas burners, named because of the shape of the flame they produced, supplied station lighting.
For many people, their first encounter with both the electric light and the WC was at their local railway station,
Victorian Britain suffered from immense air pollution. Millions of domestic coal fires were pumping smoke and smuts into the atmosphere, as were factory chimneys and passing steam trains. A huge number of industries were also expelling a range of other chemicals into the air to join all that smoke, much of it highly toxic.
On bad days, you could hold your hand out in front of you, wave it about and not be able to see it at all. You didn’t see people coming, you heard them – coughing as they approached. Delivery men had to use a boy, who walked along the kerb with one hand on the horse and one foot – invisible to him – knocking against the kerb at each step. When they got to a junction, the pair would slow to a crawl as the boy felt his way across and tried to find the kerb on the other side. Similarly, navigation was practised by counting the junctions or lamp posts.
Street thieves and muggers could operate almost with impunity, disappearing entirely within feet of the crime scene,
Even on a clear day, black smuts could sail through the air like black snow, settling on everything and leaving a sticky, greasy layer upon people’s hair, their clothes, the buildings, the plants and, if they had their windows open, inside their homes too.
The Victorian workplace was renowned neither for its healthy environment nor for its safety record. This held true if you were working out in the fields just as much as if you were bent over a spinning machine in one of Lancashire’s mills or scrubbing floors in a stately home. Open fires and unguarded machinery were common, and the air was filled with smoke, fumes and dusts of various degrees of harmfulness. Horses bolted, sending carts, carriages and machinery flying; poisons were in use everywhere; heavy and debilitating lifting was the norm; and protective hard hats were yet to be
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Many of those who wrote about their lives mention such injury almost casually; it was lamented perhaps, but thought inevitable.
Eyesight was ruined for many women by long hours of badly lit sewing and other small-scale work.
For those who tended machines, deafness was also a likely outcome. Weavers working the powered looms in the mills were almost invariably partially deaf by their mid-thirties. In towns where such work was common, a form of silent speech arose which exaggerated mouth movements, making it easier to lip-read.
Accidents happened everywhere: dung carts turned over and trapped people beneath, axes slipped, loads shifted, and threshing machines used to separate grain from stalks and husks maimed and killed. Power hammers, kilns and foundries crushed, asphyxiated and burnt in the centres of industry. Men drowned entangled in fishing nets or cast overboard when boats foundered, while, underground, rockfalls and explosions killed. Victorian machinery was large and heavy, and its blades, intakes and hoppers were without guards. It tended to jam easily and usually needed close attention to operate,
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By 1850, the average working week was around 60–65 hours, then, in the 1870s, factory owner after factory owner agreed to cut hours. Unions and other labour organizations had long been arguing for a ten-hour day but, in the early 1870s, full employment strengthened their bargaining power and the 54–6-hour week became standard across a range of different industries.
Even at the end of the century, when education was both compulsory and free for all, most Victorian children spent far more of their childhood in work than in education. They worked in every branch of agriculture, mining, manufacture and domestic service, with very few sectors of the professions closed to them.
The sons of many families that called themselves middle class might well be in full-time work shortly after their twelfth birthday, even if it was usually in an office of some sort rather than outdoor work.
In 1891, the minimum age rose to eleven years of age.
However, these were still the regulated industries, and there were plenty of children working in others to whom the legislation did not apply.
From about eleven years of age, most lads could be bringing home more than their mothers could earn; by sixteen or seventeen, many were out-earning their fathers.
Even in jobs that were identical to those of men, women received around a half to two thirds of that which was paid to their fathers, husbands and brothers.
In putting food on the table and easing the hardship of life for their mothers and siblings, boys became respected figures within the family, and their own diet improved as they were treated to a taste of the preferential treatment their fathers got at meal times.
Most women and girls in Victorian Britain began their day’s work cleaning chamber pots and slop pails from the night before.
Red had, for centuries, been the colour of the blanket (or bearing cloth) a swaddled baby would be wrapped in.
In the 1880s and 1890s, a mother could go along to one of the ready-made-boyswear shops, or peruse their catalogues, and choose something for her son from the following: a sailor suit (white canvas with blue tapes sewn on to mimic naval uniforms), a Highland kilt suit, a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit (inspired by a popular book character, it was a velvet knickerbocker suit with an elaborate, large, lace collar), a Tyrolean suit (mimicking lederhosen and complete with a small hat with a feather in it), a Norfolk suit (a tweed jacket and knickerbockers, such as country gentlemen wore when
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Town milk could be more than 50 per cent water and was often lower in fat in the first place, due to the poor living conditions and fodder of the town-kept herds. Such second-rate milk and water mixes often took on a bluish tinge which those who sold it sought to counteract by colouring the milk with anything from chalk to alum to make it appear more like the healthy country equivalent.
Drug abuse was widespread among Victorian babies.
many mothers, on account of needing to work, were in the habit of feeding opiates to their babies, such as Godfrey’s Cordial (a well-respected medicine of long standing based on pure opium), as well as doses of straight laudanum (a potent mixture of alcohol and morphine), so that their infants would sleep while they were at work during the day (see Plate 17
Atkinson’s Infants Preservative was another very popular brand, along with Dalby’s Calmative, Mrs Winslow’s Soothing Syrup and Street’s Infant Quietness.
In addition to opiates, most babies were also subject to a bewildering array of laxatives.
Any slight sickness was generally treated in the first instance with a laxative of some sort – even diarrhoea.
Patented laxative medicines were likely to be based upon calomel, a mercury preparation, and one with a much more violent action than any of the others above.
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