Strange Things The Victorians Did That Would Not Be Allowed Today

Limping in pursuit of fashion? That would be crazy, right? Not to Victorian women in Britain! The bizarre fad even had a name: the “Alexandra limp.” It was all about mimicking royalty. In 1863 Princess Alexandra of Denmark married Queen Victoria’s son and heir Albert Edward, later King Edward VII. The unfortunate princess suffered a bout of rheumatic fever resulting in a limping walk. Some of the fashion-conscious citizenry began to copy her gait. Women even wore mismatching shoes to achieve the desired effect. Pretty soon, shoemakers started to make ill-matched footwear specially designed to cause limping. Extraordinary.

When you send a Valentine card, it’s usually to declare your love for someone. This was not always the case in Victorian England. In fact, there was a whole trend of sending “Vinegar Valentines,” which were meant to be rude and offensive! One example, published by Smithsonian magazine, shows a woman dousing a man with a bucket of water. The caption goes, “It says as plain as it can say, Old fellow you’d best stop away.” Hardly Shakespeare, but the message is clear enough! Astonishingly, by the middle of the 1800s, nearly half of all Valentine cards were of the vinegar variety.

It was called “phrenology,” and it’s got to be one of the most crackpot “scientific” theories you’ll ever come across. It involved examining the lumps on someone’s head to reveal certain character traits. A German doctor, Franz Joseph Gall, came up with the theory, and it was immensely popular during the Victorian era. It even spilled into the 20th century before it was comprehensively debunked. The whole thing would be entirely laughable were it not for the fact that people genuinely were classified according to the contours of their skull. Some Victorian men even turned to phrenology to help them choose a wife!

Nowadays, we’re all too familiar with headlines about athletes and performance-enhancing drugs, but it’s actually nothing new. The difference in the Victorian era was that nobody made any effort to hide it! And the range of chemicals and intoxicants used is staggering. The most startling of those treatments must surely be injections of strychnine, more familiar as rat poison. One example came in the 1904 Olympics, when American runner Thomas Hicks won the marathon after two strychnine injections — one of which was actually administered during the race!

In Victorian times, there were a variety of bizarre things that might send you a lunatic asylum. West Virginia Hospital for the Insane’s records include some like “kicked in the head by a horse,” “opium habit,” and simply “laziness.” Sure, laziness can be seen as an undesirable quality, but grounds for being locked up in asylum? We think not. If that was generally accepted, how many American teenagers would be enjoying their freedom? But laziness may not even be the most astonishing of the symptoms listed: novel-reading, bad company, and greediness also appear on the list!

Some women might prize a healthy, tanned complexion today, but in Victorian times it was a case of “the paler, the better.” And women were prepared to go to extraordinary, even dangerous lengths to achieve the look. In her 1874 work The Ugly Girl Papers, Mrs. S.D. Powers recommended a nightly layer of opium on the face and a morning scrub with ammonia. Terrifying. But even scarier was the popularity of arsenic cookies. Unsurprisingly, they could help to achieve that desirable deathly pallor. According to the Business Insider website, these treats were promoted as “perfectly harmless.” Wow.

Because of the legal costs associated with divorce, it was only really for the aristocracy during Victoria’s reign. But, for men at least, there was another way to split from an unwanted spouse: a wife sale. Unbelievably, this was something that actually did happen. Here’s one true incidence of the phenomenon. The year was 1847 and the place Barton, in the English county of Lancashire; the dissatisfied husband was one George Wray. He led his wife to the village marketplace and there sold her to William Harwood by auction. It appears that she was actually quite happy with the sale!

The hats that Victorian ladies wore were often a colorful explosion of bird feathers. In a somewhat morbid turn, though, sometimes they even featured entire stuffed birds. These feathered hats encouraged the wholesale slaughter of wildlife, almost to extinction in the case of some bird species. Hunters stalked, trapped, and killed birds around the world specifically to feed the appetites of fashionable Victorian women. Historians believe that globally as many as 200 million birds were being slaughtered each year for the fashion industry. It had to stop, and thankfully it did. By 1921 campaigners had succeeded in banning the British trade.

The Victorians had a strange predilection for electrocuting themselves. There was a firm belief, it seems, that the practice could cure a wide range of ailments. That archetypal Victorian Charles Dickens was one of those fascinated by self-electrification, according to the BBC. He bought a hydro-electric belt — a belt mounted with multiple batteries that could be fired up to deliver an electric shock. The last letter Dickens ever wrote was to the company thanking them for the device; he died six days after buying it. Was the belt to blame? There’s no eivdence to say it was, but we’ll probably never know.

Modern dentures are mostly made of acrylic resin, but this hadn’t been invented in the 19th century. So the hunt was on for a suitable material. In a gruesome twist, the teeth of dead people were used early on in the century. Sometimes living people even donated their molars! But that decidedly morbid practice didn’t suit everyone, and supply was limited. Thus one alternative was animal teeth: hippos might not immediately spring to mind as the most obvious source of false teeth, but their molars were carved into human shape and used in the early 19th century!

Victorian women had many crosses to bear, including their underwear. The fashion for tiny waists was widespread and one way to achieve the look was to use ludicrously tight corsets. These were laced so tight that you needed a helping hand to get them properly fitted. Just to make sure that the corset stayed properly tight, they were often reinforced with rigid strengtheners made from whalebone. In fact, they were sometimes so tight as to permanently alter the skeleton: some female skeletons from the 18th and 19th centuries show evidence of warped and damaged ribs and spines. Disturbing.

Nowadays, when you flick a light switch, you expect nothing more than light. But when you turned on a light in a Victorian home, there was always the chance you’d trigger an explosion. Fun! That’s because early domestic lighting was powered by gas. and in safety terms, it was far from ideal. Of course, the new-fangled gas lighting was a huge improvement on what came before — basically candles — but it had some unavoidable downsides. Coal gas came with the risk of asphyxiation from carbon monoxide. Worse, in the early days of the technology there was an unfortunate rash of fires and explosions.

The notoriously prim Victorians had a real problem when it came to swimming the sea. While men were allowed to take a quick dip in simple bathing drawers, women were expected to wear giant bathing suits to cover practically their bodies. This excessive modesty resulted in the invention of an entirely new class of vehicle: the bathing machine. A hut on wheels that could be rolled right up to the sea’s edge, it allowed women at the beach to change in privacy and then enter the water hidden from the prying eyes of men.

In a time before the strict regulations governing food additives, it was a total free-for-all in Victorian times. Chalk, alum, and sawdust were all reportedly included in bread. When it came to beer, things were even worse: some brewers added strychnine to their ale. Apparently, this was done to improve the taste and save money. Cost-saving sounds likely enough as a motive, but enhancing the flavor? We’re not sure about that. Other horror stories include selling used tea leaves mixed with a cocktail of chemicals and sheep dung as well as candy spiked with poisonous elements such copper, mercury, and lead. Yum!

The traditional Christmas cards we send in modern times tend to portray a winter wonderland scene, or festive pun. But the Victorians had a very different idea of what a Christmas greeting should look like. They loved cards with a perverse humor or a macabre twist. One card described by the History website included the greeting “May yours be a joyful Christmas” but with a pretty dark image accompanying it of a dead robin... Another card shows a jolly-looking Santa Claus. Only trouble is, he’s trying to stuff a clearly terrified child into a sack.

Homelessness remains a problem in many places today, but in Victorian times it was a positive epidemic. One solution the Victorians came up with would certainly shock our modern sensibilities. The Salvation Army in London introduced what came to be called the four-penny coffin. For that modest sum, you could rent a bed for the night. These were wooden boxes, very similar to coffins without a lid. They were packed together as tightly as possible in huge rooms like a mass burial site. Sure, it gave homeless people a safe place to sleep, but it sounds pretty grim.

Before the Victorian era, London’s sewage was dealt with by night soil collectors. They transported the noxious material out to the countryside where it was used as fertilizer. An unpleasant job perhaps, though at least it was an effective way to deal with human waste. But the city had grown so much by Victorian times that this system was no longer practical. Much of the British capital’s sewage simply discharged straight into the River Thames. Matters came to a head in 1858. That was the year of the “Great Stink,” when the smell in the Thames became beyond bearable. No thank you!

Victorian women, even humble housemaids, wore billowing dresses that used yards of fabric. Unfortunately, this put them at great risk from fire. Homes in those days had open coal fires and many candles. A few sparks escaping from the hearth or a wayward candle flame could easily set a voluminous frock alight. The peril was made all the worse by the fashion for crinolines, the hooped structures under a dress that pushed it outward. These undergarments basically made a woman into a larger target for wayward sparks. Historians estimate that as many as 3,000 women died in fires associated with their dresses between 1855 and 1870.

The Victorians loved street food. Sellers offered everything from hot eels to pea soup and fried fish. But perhaps the strangest delicacy of all was a serving of hot sheep’s trotter. Many of us enjoy a tender lamb chop, especially when it’s garnished with some fresh mint sauce. But sheep’s feet? Not so much. By all accounts, sheep’s trotters were a popular delicacy, especially in Victorian London. The feet were boiled to make them edible, or as edible as they could be. Journalist Henry Mayhew estimated that up to a million sheep’s feet were bought and eaten every year.

Victorian women went through some painful treatments in the name of beauty, but the men did not escape entirely. How about beef marrow and bear’s grease? These were widely used not just for the hair on their heads but also to shape their mustaches. Lard and suet were also common ingredients that men rubbed on their heads. Whether the oil of bergamot and rose water in the mixture made such preparations smell netter is debatable. Hiding grey hair was another perilous pursuit. Favorite remedies included white lead, slaked lime, and nitric acid. It’s a wonder any Victorian gentlemen had a single hair left on their heads!

With the Industrial Revolution came a number of very strange uses for newfound technology. Doctors started using electricity as a form of "shock therapy," basically hoping to zap ailments like gout and arthritis out of patients. Spoiler alert: it didn't work. If electricity wasn't your thing, Victorian doctors had another form of therapy you could try: water! So-called "hydrotherapy" was used to treat everything from baldness in men to "hysteria" in women. Shockingly, hydrotherapy's benefits are murky at best. Still, we can't deny the calming effect a good bubble bath can have on a person.

Toothpaste wasn't invented until later in the 1800s, so Victorian Brits had to improvise when it came to brushing their teeth. They used a homemade solution called "Dentifrices" instead. Some of these included ingredients like chalk and bleach, and one particularly popular solution was made of charcoal and honey! Then there were the skin treatments. A popular Victorian beauty column advertised laying strips of raw beef on your face at night to improve your complexion. Needless to say, don't try this at home. Oh, the smell of the rancid meat in the morning.

Mourning was taken very seriously in Victorian England. Mourners would often wear very morbid accessories, such as bracelets and rings with their loved one's hair stuffed inside. Even more extreme were special bottles that were used to collect tears... They really weren't messing around! We wonder if they compared these tear vials to see how was "saddest." Then there was the fashionable pastime of taxidermy. People in Victorian England loved stuffing dead animals and rearranging them into little "scenes." Some say it's cute; we say it's creepy.

Getting all dressed up in your finery wasn't just for the living in Victorian times. People loved to take photographs of their recently deceased family members! Sometimes, they'd even pose alongside the corpse for a cute family snap. You might as well take a picture for posterity, right? It's what Aunt Harriet would've wanted! Speaking of death, no one wants to be buried alive, not even Victorians. So, they invented "safety coffins," which featured bells and buzzers for you to signal to the surface if you found yourself trapped inside. We shudder to think how often a soft tinkling was heard coming from the cemetery...

Did you know the Victorian era was rife with grave robbers? These unsavory fellows would open fresh caskets and use what was inside to turn a profit. They'd steal all kinds of things — jewelry, personal objects, fine clothing — and in some rare cases, they'd even steal the body and sell its organs. Charming. A different type of body snatching also became popular in the Victorian era. Remember Egyptomania? Well, British explorers would bring mummies back to Europe, and there are even stories of upper-class "unwrapping parties" in which they'd — you guessed it — unwrap a long-dead mummy. Fun!

The Victorian era had plenty of delicacies that were rather... questionable. You heard about the "trotters," but what about turtle soup? Victorian cooks used calf heads — skin, brains, and all — to replicate the texture of turtle meat. Um... is there a vegan option? Things were even worse for the lower class, though. While meat could be pretty expensive, something called broxy was always affordable. Broxy was meat from animals that had died from diseases rather than slaughter. You were pretty much due for some kind of intestinal distress the minute you chowed down on some broxy. No, thank you!

Even if you got sick from eating diseased meat, medical treatment might not automatically cure you. Doctors loved to use leeches during the Victorian era. These creepy crawlies would be attached to a patient's skin and theoretically draw "bad humors" out, bringing the body into "balance." Surgery wasn't widely available in the Victorian Era, either, but when it did occur, it sounds horrifying. Because anesthesia and painkillers weren't around, patients would sometimes have to be awake and fully conscious for surgical procedures. Now that's the stuff of nightmares.

Holy smokes, were Victorian Brits bored or what? A popular parlor game in the Victorian era was "Snapdragon," in which people would try and fish raisins out of a flaming bowl and eat them while they burned. Don't tell any adrenaline junkies about this game; they're still recovering from that anesthesia-less brain surgery. Other weird ideas for fun in Victorian times included bug crafts. Victorian women would kill — and wear — beetles, butterflies, and other insects to enhance their formalwear. We'll never understand Victorian-era fashion. Who would want to attach a dead cockroach to their blouse?!

Makeup may be commonplace now, but a few hundred years ago it was usually considered tacky. Instead, women would pinch their cheeks to encourage a natural blush and apply cold cream to keep their skin pale and smooth. Seems like a lot of work for a little payoff. Women also used arsenic, a dangerous poison, to prevent wrinkles. Men, meanwhile, used it as a sexual stimulant, if you can believe it. Arsenic was also a common ingredient in dresses, wallpaper, and many other things! Can you imagine wearing dresses or papering your baby's nursery with arsenic-infused materials?

If you had to choose between being a Victorian factory worker or maid, you’d probably pick “maid” without question, right? Who would risk their life in a factory — no doubt surrounded by toxic chemicals and dangerous machinery — when you could be folding linens? But it turns out this trade, though extremely common for women, wasn't all that desirable. In fact, factories may have actually been less dangerous places for women to work; houses had a lot of problems of their own, which made being a Victorian maid a pretty scary business.

We know all about the very unhygienic practices in Victorian England, and who was it that had to clean up some of the worst messes? The housemaids! Naturally, maids spent much of their time in the kitchen and the scullery. But these were particularly unpleasant places to be. Despite all the cleaning that went on there, these rooms were actually extremely dirty and ridden with germs. In the maids’ haste to get the meals on the table, scraps of food, mud, and whatever else was on someone’s plate or shirt would literally fall through the cracks. No thank you!

One reason the maids may not have been able to keep up with all the mess caused by cleaning is that they were far too busy attending to one of the other biggest problems of the era: bugs. Where there was a scrap of food, there was almost certainly an insect and its entire creepy crew crawling in to claim it. And the problem was bad; bugs were everywhere. In her book Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England, Judith Flanders describes one house where the “kitchen floor at night palpitate[d] with a living carpet.”

Flanders' book tells of a nasty experience that author Beatrix Potter once had. Apparently, on a visit to her grandparents, she observed that servants “had to sit on the kitchen table, as the floor heaved with cockroaches.” And if cockroach-infested floors weren’t already bad enough, there were bugs were on ceilings, too. In fact, they were so prevalent that they practically cohabitated with the staff. And if there were that many bugs, maids didn’t have time to bother with the other unwelcome creatures scurrying around the home, like rats, which ran free.

But that’s what servants battled the most: time. They couldn’t get rid of the rats because of their strict schedules; they didn’t allow for any deviation from the plan. The working hours for the average maid weren’t just exhausting: they were totally unrelenting. There were even days when housemaids worked from 6:00 a.m. to midnight. And unlike factory workers, they could be on the job seven days a week. Plus, contrary to popular belief, a maid did more than fold linens and wash clothing. Her life was filled with demanding physical labor. We can't even imagine.

The average Victorian servant’s morning would have most likely begun by opening every curtain and window shutter, then cleaning and lighting every fireplace in the house and dusting everything from furniture to staircases to walls. And sometimes, this was all before the sun had even come up. What a way to start the day! The maid would then scatter tea leaves over the carpets, which was said to help gather up the grime and dust. Then she'd sweep the carpets along with the rest of the house. She’d also have to beat all the rugs, which collected crazy amounts of dirt.

Next came the floors. And since a Victorian maid didn’t have a Swiffer, she had to clean them the old-fashioned way. Yes, she was on their hands and knees with a dirty rag and a bucket filled with soapy water, Cinderella-style. But there was no fairytale happy ending. If the maids weren’t embodying Cinderella enough, they'd then have to remove actual cinders from the fireplaces. This could be a sooty business. But there was never any time to change their clothes. By then, it was time to wake up the rest of the house.

Pile on the meals, the laundry, the vermin, the constant visitors tramping muck and who knows what else into the house, and we wonder how maids ever had any time for themselves. But it turns out that was part of the problem. There could be barely any time for a maid to eat, sleep, or clean her own room, as she had to keep the entire household afloat. So, daily life was pretty unbearable. What was worse than an all-nighter or a meal of bread and cold meat, though, was the wrath of an employer. This was not a boss you wanted to have.

Servants could be regarded as dimly as the rats they chased. And some Victorian employers had no problem punishing them harshly if anything was done even a tiny bit incorrectly. On occasion, a maid couldn’t take even a moment to rest or eat without having to answer to her boss. In fact, these servants endured all kinds of violence from their employers. They had no option but to deal with it, either, or otherwise they'd lose their jobs. But over time, something emerged that may have made them rethink their vocation altogether.

While Ebenezer Scrooge may have valued the cold-hearted approach to employees, it became clear to other Victorian-era bosses that taking the hard line wasn’t working. Households were losing servants left and right. And it was all because the factories were promising better hours, better pay — and, most importantly, better treatment. One Victorian employer summed up the small-scale revolution rather sniffily. Judith Flanders’ book quotes them as saying that “it was now necessary...to allow their maids to go to bed at ten o’clock every night and to give them an afternoon out every other Sunday, or no servant would stay.” Such luxury!

Both factory and domestic work were back-breaking jobs for women during England’s Industrial Revolution. But life in the factory offered women something they hardly ever got as servants: dignity. And to many, that made all the difference. But those women on the other side of the divide had things to worry about, too. Granted, the wealthy ladies didn’t need to clean or cook, but they still faced a potentially deadly threat — one they had no idea was lurking...