How to Be a Victorian Quotes

“sealing the pores were undertaken, famously with a horse. The poor animal was carefully varnished all over with several layers of shellac (the same solution that is used to varnish furniture) to ensure a complete seal, and died within hours. It was assumed that it had asphyxiated, thus ‘proving’ that the skin played an important role in respiration as well as perspiration.”
― Ruth Goodman, How to Be a Victorian: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Victorian Life

“My own historical laundry experiences have led me to see the powered washing machine as one of the great bulwarks of women’s liberation, an invention that can sit alongside contraception and the vote in the direct impact it has had on changing women’s lives.”
― Ruth Goodman, How to Be a Victorian: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Victorian Life

“The level of skill considered 'normal' and wholly unremarkable was higher than that of many twenty-first-century textile professionals.”
― Ruth Goodman, How to Be a Victorian

“Countrymen wore heavy, hard-wearing cotton fabrics that were mostly pale and undyed. Townsmen wore dark-coloured wool.”
― Ruth Goodman, How to Be a Victorian: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Victorian Life

“Children’s leisure had to fit around work and school. Visit any playground in Britain today, and you will witness Victorian games in action. Various forms of Tag, British Bulldog, Grandma’s Footsteps and What’s the Time, Mr Wolf? still form much of the charging about when children gather. Games of marbles can be found in quieter corners, Five Stones and Jacks are still popular, and many girls are still highly skilled with a skipping rope.”
― Ruth Goodman, How to Be a Victorian: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Victorian Life

“Birkenhead Park was built to be large and to facilitate myriad strands of park life. There were wide, open spaces for sport, including a cricket ground; wilder areas of foliage and shrubbery for those who wanted a memory of their countryside childhoods; formal planting and bedding for flower lovers; a rockery; lakes with bridges and summerhouses; wide boulevards for promenading and narrow, winding paths for private walks and quiet moments of reflection. Birkenhead inspired the creation of a number of new parks across the country and beyond (it was a model for Central Park”
― Ruth Goodman, How to Be a Victorian: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Victorian Life

“West Ham was founded at the A. F. Hills shipyard and went by the name of Thames Ironworks; and of course Arsenal was a club set up by the workers at the Woolwich Arsenal factory complex. The surprising thing was that none of these clubs had in common the rules of the game. Could you pick up the ball and run with it? How big was the goal? How many players should there be to a side? These were all questions that had to be settled, or argued about, before the start of a game.”
― Ruth Goodman, How to Be a Victorian: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Victorian Life

“Manchester United was once called Oldham Road and was based at the Three Crowns pub, with its players recruited from the men who regularly drank there. Everton began life at the Queen’s Head pub in the village of Everton in much the same way. But Queens Park Rangers started not as a pub team but a school team”
― Ruth Goodman, How to Be a Victorian: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Victorian Life

“In 1837, a 7 a.m. start at the mill had meant an 8 p.m. finish six days a week. From 1874 onwards, a mill worker could begin his shift at 7 a.m., as his father and grandfather had done, but finish at 6 p.m. from Monday to Friday and at 2 p.m. on a Saturday.”
― Ruth Goodman, How to Be a Victorian: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Victorian Life

“Anatomical studies notwithstanding, Victorian medicine maintained that there was a link between a woman’s reproductive functions and her mental balance (remnants of this belief survive today in popular thought with the vestigial bias about ‘hormonal’ women).”
― Ruth Goodman, How to Be a Victorian: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Victorian Life

“Neither train nor bus, at this point in time, was interested in carrying working-class passengers; theirs was a service for the wealthy or middle-class person; the timetables and routes were tailored to their specific needs. 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.”
― Ruth Goodman, How to Be a Victorian: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Victorian Life

“For some Victorians, feminine beauty and purity could rightfully stem only from natural remedies such as pure water, healthy living and inner contentment. Mrs Jaimeson was strongly of that opinion. In a letter of hers that was published in The Girls’ Own Paper she wrote that ‘in the morning [they must]use pure water as an ablution; after which they must abstain from all sudden gusts of passion, particularly envy, as that gives the skin a sallow paleness.’ She also believed that pimples could be prevented by a light diet, that a daily walk provided all the colour cheeks needed, that getting up at dawn made the lips bright and red and that ‘a desire of pleasing will add fire to [a woman’s] eyes.’ Meanwhile, there was a list of behaviours that could destroy a girl’s looks, such as staying up late, playing cards, reading novels by candlelight and any outward display of surliness.”
― Ruth Goodman, How to Be a Victorian: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Victorian Life

“If you want to know what it truly felt like to wear Victorian clothes, you have to commit yourself fully, and that means sourcing the right fabrics, cutting out the pieces using the right pattern-cutting techniques for the date (they changed a lot), using the right sewing thread, the right tools for the job, the right techniques (ways of doing things also changed regularly). It also means wearing all the layers, not just the few that show. It is difficult, but the experience is quite different and very revealing.”
― Ruth Goodman, How to Be a Victorian: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Victorian Life

“Throughout the period, indoor and outdoor temperatures in Victorian Britain were not so far apart. Most people, including the wealthy, lived in much colder rooms than we do now. The weight and fineness of a twentieth-century wool suit, which is lighter and less substantial, would have been considered suitable only for colonial service in the Victorian mind – something to be worn in the tropics. Which, when you consider that most of us now spend our days in offices and buildings heated to around 18–24ºC, is what we essentially use them for: we now have tropical temperatures in our daily lives. The Victorian office, however, was likely to be around 10ºC, if heated at all, in winter.”
― Ruth Goodman, How to Be a Victorian: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Victorian Life

“great change in climate, he had”
― Ruth Goodman, How to Be a Victorian: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Victorian Life

“Mr Rimmel’s Book of Perfumes”
― Ruth Goodman, How to Be a Victorian: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Victorian Life

“still recalled the bath of his aristocratic childhood in the late 1860s and early 1870s as less than satisfactory: A call on the hot water supply … did not meet with an effusive or even a warm response. A succession of sepulchral rumblings was succeeded by the appearance of a small geyser of rust coloured water, heavily charged with dead earwigs and bluebottles. This continued for a couple of minutes or so and then entirely ceased. The only perceptible difference between the hot water and the cold lay in its colour and the cargo of defunct life which the former bore on its bosom. Both were stone cold.”
― Ruth Goodman, How to Be a Victorian: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Victorian Life

“Powdered cuttlefish was made from the hard plate inside the fish’s body, sometimes found washed up on beaches. It is perhaps best known in Britain today as a dietary additive for budgerigars.”
― Ruth Goodman, How to Be a Victorian: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Victorian Life

“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.”
― Ruth Goodman, How to Be a Victorian: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Victorian Life