The Victorian Era
The Victorian Era, named for Queen Victoria’s reign from 1837-1901, was a fascinating period in British history. It’s marked by scientific discoveries, industrial growth, and social changes. It’s famous for its bizarre customs, beliefs, and practices.
The era saw the invention of the steam engine (though invented in the 1700s, it was improved upon in the Victorian era), the telegraph, and photography. Cities became overcrowded, and people became impoverished, leading to child labor and disease. The era is also marked by British imperialism, with colonization spanning worldwide.
Victorian society looked much different than what we can imagine today. There were strict social hierarchies, with some distinct prude practices. The era’s literature, including works by Charles Dickens and the Brontë sisters, reflected some of these difficult social issues. Victorian fashion was elaborate, with fancy dresses, hats, and corsets. Many of which are still admired today.
The Victorian era is perhaps best known for its borderline obsession with death and mourning. There were strict mourning rituals, post-mortem photography, and a macabre fascination with death. That fascination also led to the rise of gothic literature. Despite the era’s stark contradictions, it continues to captivate modern audiences as a period steeped in rich mystery.
50 Shocking Facts about the Victorian Era
- Children’s toys were often made from materials such as lead, posing serious health risks.
- As many as a third of women worked as servants in Victorian England, often under harsh conditions.
- The Victorians had a real fear of being buried alive, a phobia called taphophobia, and used safety coffins as a precaution.
- Grave robbing was a common crime in Victorian times due to the high demand for bodies in medical schools.
- Wealthy Victorians hosted mummy parties, in which they’d bring a mummy back from Egypt and throw a party to unwrap it.
- The Victorian era saw the rise of the workhouse, a form of punitive social welfare where the poor were often treated like criminals.
- Photographing the dead, particularly children, was common practice in the Victorian era.
- During the Victorian era, arsenic was commonly used in wallpapers, which often led to poisoning.
- Taxidermy was a popular hobby.
- They sent strange Christmas cards with images of dead birds, humanized vegetables, and animals killing each other, for example.
- Some Victorian ladies embraced the fad of piercing their nipples.
- Child labor was widespread, with children as young as five years old working in mines, factories, and domestic service.
- In the late Victorian era, asylums were often used as a means of controlling and confining ‘difficult’ individuals, particularly women.
- The consumption of laudanum, a potent opiate, was common and socially acceptable.
- Many Victorians carried mourning rings that contained the hair of deceased loved ones.
- Diseases such as typhoid, cholera, and tuberculosis were rampant in overcrowded Victorian cities.
- Children, called climbing boys, were often forced to clean chimneys, a dangerous and filthy job.
- Opium dens were common, particularly in poorer areas of cities.
- The Victorians had an obsession with death and the afterlife, leading to the popularity of Gothic literature.
- Amelia Dyer, called the “Angel Maker,” was a woman who murdered 400 unwanted children.
- It was common to have jewelry made from your children’s baby teeth (or milk teeth).
- To hide the smell of death and disease, the Victorians would often carry around small bouquets of flowers called nosegays.
- Cemeteries were often overcrowded, leading to the practice of “grave recycling“.
- Due to a limited understanding of mental health, many women were diagnosed with “hysteria” and subjected to horrific treatments.
- Funerals were often held in the home, with the body displayed in the parlor.
- It was common for Victorian families to be large for various reasons. One is that parents relied on their children to care for them as they aged.
- Due to the high demand for cadavers for medical research, body snatching became a lucrative profession.
- Some women (not all) wore restrictive corsets, which could cause fainting and deformity of the ribs.
- Many medicines and cosmetics contained dangerous substances, such as arsenic and lead.
- Poverty was extreme and widespread, with many families living in one-room homes.
- The Victorians were obsessed with mourning, with a strict set of rituals and a specific mourning attire that included veils and jet-black clothing.
- Victorian homes often had separate bedrooms for married couples.
- Victorian doctors believed that mental illness could be caused by reading novels.
- Jack the Ripper, one of the most infamous serial killers, operated in the Victorian era.
- The Victorians believed in phrenology, the pseudoscience that the shape and size of the skull could determine a person’s character.
- Public executions were common and served as a form of entertainment for many Victorians.
- Victorian fashion meant extravagant and wide, flowing dresses. Oscar Wilde’s half-sisters both died after their dresses caught on fire because of a candle at a Halloween party.
- Poor hygiene and sanitation led to “The Great Stink” in London in 1858 when the smell from the River Thames was so bad it led to a cholera epidemic.
- Queen Victoria used chloroform to relieve pain during childbirth.
- Bathing would most often consist of a sponge bath of water and vinegar. Full submersion baths would be taken once every few weeks. (This varied by class and by decade.)
- Many Victorians believed in fairies and other supernatural creatures, with famous hoaxes like the Cottingley Fairies photos.
- In some cases, poverty-stricken families would send their children to work as street vendors, known as “mudlarks“, who sifted through sewage for valuables.
- In the Victorian era, animals were often abused for entertainment, such as in bear-baiting and dog fights.
- There was a superstition that mirrors in a house with a corpse should be covered or the person who saw themselves would be the next to die.
- There was a high rate of alcohol use in the early Victorian Era, even sometimes among children, especially in the working class.
- Many Victorian Era houses had a “death door,” with its only purpose being to remove the coffin of a loved one from the home.
- Ghost stories were popular, particularly at Christmas time.
- Queen Victoria popularized the white wedding dress. It was mainly adopted by the wealthy because white was difficult to clean and could easily be ruined.
- The death rate was higher in cities than in the countryside due to crowded urban living conditions.
- Though the Victorian Era was marked by scientific exploration, many people believed in the supernatural. Including ghosts, mesmerism, and magic.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this list of shocking Victorian era facts and maybe even learned something new. The Victorians were such a complex and fascinating people. This is just a taste of what makes them so unique and compelling to historians.
Thank you for listening, and please feel free to drop a comment of any other intriguing Victorian facts.