Strange Things The Victorians Did That Would Not Be Allowed Today

Possibly the majority of us have had a temporary limp resulting from a minor accident; of course, some always limp because of a long-term condition. But limping in pursuit of fashion? That’s just crazy! Except Victorian women in Britain did just that. The bizarre fad even had a name, the “Alexandra limp.” And 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 to declare your love for someone, right? It turns out that this was most definitely not always the case when the Victorians mailed a message to mark St. Valentine’s Day. In fact, there was a whole genre of insulting cards. Some of these cards, known as Vinegar Valentines, were downright offensive.

In a 2017 article about these Vinegar Valentines the Smithsonian magazine gave a few choice examples. One card 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, according to author Ruth Webb Lee, 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 a person’s head. And from that, phrenologists claimed to be able to pin down someone’s character. 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. And the so-called science seeped into the penal system, amid claims that the bumps on the heads of felons were a precise indication of their criminality.

Nowadays, we’re all too familiar with headlines exposing top athletes as users of performance-enhancing drugs. But it’s nothing new. The difference in the Victorian era was that nobody made any effort to hide their abuse of substances designed to improve sporting results. 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 1904 – just three years after Queen Victoria’s death. In that year’s Olympics American runner Thomas Hicks won the marathon after two strychnine injections – one administered during the race. It’s worth pointing out that Hicks only took gold because the man who crossed the winning line ahead of him, Fred Lorz, was disqualified. He’d negotiated part of the course by automobile. So strychnine was okay: cars were not.

In Victorian times there were a variety of frankly bizarre reasons that might lead to a stay in a lunatic asylum. West Virginia Hospital for the Insane’s records from the Victorian era list an outlandish list of symptoms leading to committal to the institution’s tender mercies. These include some reasonable propositions such as “kicked in the head by a horse” and “opium habit.”

But one of the symptoms cited is simply “laziness.” Well fair enough, laziness can be seen as an undesirable quality. But grounds for being locked up in asylum? If that was generally accepted, how many American teenagers would be enjoying their freedom? Actually laziness may not even be the most astonishing of the symptoms listed. Novel-reading, bad company and greediness also appear.

White 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 lethally dangerous lengths to achieve that alabaster 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 a beauty preparation from Sears & Roebuck, Dr. Rose’s Arsenic Complexion Wafers. Yes, that’s right, 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.” So that’s alright then. But as a public service to our readers we would like to categorically state that it’s never alright to chow down on arsenic.

Because of the legal costs associated with it, divorce 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, which seems to have actually been pre-arranged. Whatever the truth of that particular transaction, the practice ended after divorce laws were reformed in 1857.

The hats that Victorian ladies wore were often a colorful explosion of bird feathers. In a somewhat morbid turn, sometimes they even featured entire stuffed birds. But whatever your opinion on the look of those feathered hats they did have a sinister consequence. We’re talking about the wholesale slaughter of wildlife, almost to extinction in the case of some bird species.

Feathers for the headgear were not just those that living birds had shed. Hunters stalked, trapped and killed birds around the world specifically to feed the appetites of fashionable Victorian women. The HistoryExtra website cited an estimate 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 gadget for the purpose, one that had been revealed in 1851 at the Great Exhibition in London.

This was the hydro-electric belt invented by one Isaac Pulvermacher. Basically it was a belt mounted with multiple batteries which could be fired up to deliver an electric shock. Indeed the last letter Dickens ever wrote was to Pulvermacher & Co. thanking them for the device. But did he use it? In truth, we don’t know – since he bought the belt on June 3, 1870, and died six days later. We have no evidence that the belt was to blame.

Modern dentures are mostly made of acrylic resin, a plastic composite well-suited to the purpose. But it hadn’t been invented in the 19th century. So the hunt was on for a suitable material. In a gruesome twist, the teeth of the deceased had been used early in the century. Sometimes living people even donated their molars.

But that decidedly morbid practice didn’t suit everyone. In any case, the supply was limited. So one alternative was the teeth of mammals other than humans. The hippopotamus might not immediately spring to mind as the most obvious source of false teeth. But their molars were carved into human shape and used. According to a 2017 article on England’s Bristol Live website, a local dentist advertised dentures using hippo teeth in the early 19th century.

Victorian women had many crosses to bear, including their underwear. Specifically we’re talking about corsets. 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, often made from whalebone. In fact Victorian corsetry was sometimes so tight as to permanently alter the skeleton. In 2015 Forbes magazine cited a study by Rebecca Gibson, an anthropologist at the American University. She examined ten female skeletons from the 18th and 19th centuries. All of them had warped and damaged ribs and spines. Disturbing.

Nowadays, when you flick the switch, you expect nothing more than a flood of light. But when you turned on the illumination in a Victorian home, there was always the chance that you’d trigger an explosion. That’s because early domestic lighting, like its street cousin, was powered not by electricity but 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 the carbon monoxide it discharged when burning. Worse, in the early days of the technology there was an unfortunate rash of fires and explosions. So count your lucky stars that electricity replaced gas for lighting in the 20th century.

The notoriously prim Victorians had a real problem when it came to a swim in the sea. The trouble arose because of what we would regard as their obsessive prudishness, especially for women. While men were allowed to take a quick dip in simple bathing drawers, women were compelled to wear voluminous bathing suits. These were not far removed from normal everyday wear.

And excessive modesty resulted in the invention of an entirely new class of vehicle, the bathing machine. A kind of hut on wheels that could be rolled right up to the sea’s edge, it allowed women to get changed in complete privacy. They could then enter the water hidden as far as possible from the prying eyes of curious men. Aren’t you glad that now you can just strip down to your swimwear and simply dive into the water?

In a time before the strict regulations governing food additives that we now take for granted, it seems to have been a total free-for-all in Victorian times. According to Britain’s Royal Society of Chemists chalk, alum and sawdust were all sometimes included in bread. What you actually took home after a visit to the bakery seems to have been a matter of pot luck.

When it came to beer, things were even worse. Incredibly, some brewers added strychnine to their ale. The Royal Society of Chemists said they did this “…to ‘improve’ the taste of the beer and save on the cost of hops.” Cost-saving sounds likely enough as a motive. But enhancing the flavor? We very much doubt it. Other horror stories include selling used tea leaves mixed with a cocktail of chemicals and sheep dung and candy spiked with metallic compounds including poisonous elements such copper, mercury and lead.

The traditional Christmas cards we tend to send in modern times usually portray a winter wonderland scene, or a religious theme referencing the birth of Jesus. But the Victorians had a very different idea of what a Christmas greeting should look like. They reveled in cards with a distinctly perverse humor or a macabre twist.

One card described by the History website included the greeting ““May yours be a joyful Christmas.” But the anodyne message is rather contradicted by the image accompanying it. 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. Other cards were just plain weird. How about a mouse riding a lobster or a frog dancing with a beetle?

Homelessness remains a problem in many places today, but in Victorian times it was a positive epidemic. And just as now, some people puzzled over how to try and help those who had nowhere to call home. But one solution the Victorians came up with would certainly shock our modern sensibilities.

It was the Salvation Army in London that 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. It’s easy to sneer now at the Salvation Army’s attempt to alleviate homelessness. But it seems that vagrants themselves were glad to at least have a roof over their heads.

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 thought perhaps, but 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 ordure in the Thames was beyond bearable. Conditions were especially noxious in the Houses of Parliament, which stands on the river’s bank. This prompted a huge construction program of underground sewers which diverted waste away from the Thames as it flowed through London. Unfortunately it still went into the river, but mercifully for Londoners far downstream.

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 a few sparks escaping from the hearth could result in tragic consequences. Then of course there were candles everywhere and they too 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. The History Extra website cites one estimate that as many as 3,000 women died in fires associated with their extended dresses in the period 1855-1870.

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. As part of his monumental 1851 work London Labour and the London Poor Henry Mayhew made a detailed study of the sheep’s trotter trade. By his estimate, up to 1 million sheep’s feet were bought and eaten every year.

Victorian women went through some painful-sounding treatments in the name of beauty, but the men did not escape entirely scot-free. Their unpleasant grooming experiences came in the shape of hair preparations. How about beef marrow and bear’s grease? These were widely used not just for the hair on your head but also to shape your luxuriant moustaches.

Lard and suet were also common ingredients for strange concoctions that men rubbed on to their heads. Whether the oil of bergamot and rose water in the mixture made such preparations smell sweet is surely 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.

If you had to choose between being a factory worker or a maid, you’d probably choose “maid” without question. Who would risk their life in a factory, no doubt surrounded by toxic chemicals and dangerous machinery, when you can fold linens? Well, you might want to re-think that choice.

“In 1851, one in three women between the ages of 15 and 24 in London worked as a domestic servant,” according to Judith Flanders’ book Inside The Victorian Home. As it turns out, factories weren’t actually the most dangerous place for a woman to work: Houses were. 

You’ve heard of the unhygienic practices of Victorian England, but it was the housemaid who had to clean up the worst messes. Kitchens and sculleries (a room attached to the kitchen where you washed clothes and dishes) were the worst offenders.

Despite being rooms where so much cleaning went on, kitchens and sculleries were particularly disgusting. In the maids’ haste to get meals on the table, scraps of food and mud and whatever else was on someone’s plate or shirt would literally fall through the cracks. 

The reason maids couldn’t keep up with the messes caused by cleaning is because they were too busy attending to one of the biggest problems of the era: bugs. Where there was a scrap of food, there was an insect and his entire creepy crew crawling in to claim it.

The Victorian bug problem was so bad, it’s legendary. Apparently the “kitchen floor at night palpitate[d] with a living carpet” of bugs, mainly cockroaches. Just when the maids thought they’d cleared all the roaches off the floor, though, they’d look up at the ceiling.

Just as common as roaches on the floor were beetles on the ceiling. Bugs were so prevalent that they practically cohabitated with the servants. Author Beatrix Potter once observed that servants “had to sit on the kitchen table, as the floor heaved with cockroaches.”

There were so many bugs that maids didn’t have time to bother with the other unwelcome creatures scurrying around the home. Rats may be notorious carriers of disease and other unsavory things, but at least they knew how to stay out of the way.

And that’s what servants battled the most: Time. They couldn’t get rid of the rats because their strict schedules didn’t allow for any deviation from the plan. The working hours for the average maid weren’t only exhausting — they were unrelenting.

There were days when housemaids worked from 6 AM to midnight, and unlike factory workers, they worked 7 days a week. Contrary to popular belief, a maid did more than fold linens and wash clothing. Her life was filled with demanding physical labor...

The average servant’s morning always began the same way: by opening every curtain and window shutter, cleaning and lighting every fireplace in the house, and dusting everything from furniture to staircases to walls, all before the sun came up.

She’d then scatter tea leaves over the carpets (a method of concealing odors) before sweeping them up while she swept the rest of the house. She’d beat the rugs, which collected crazy amounts of dirt in just one or two days time.

Next came the floors, and since maids in 1851 didn’t have Swiffers, they had to clean them the old-fashioned way: on their hands and knees, with a dirty rag and a bucket filled with soapy water, Cinderella-style.

As if the maids weren’t embodying Cinderella enough, they'd have to empty the fireplaces of cinders, which usually ended with them covered in soot. 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...which was part of the problem.

There was barely any time for the maids to eat, sleep, or clean their own rooms because they had to keep the entire household afloat. What was worse than an all-nighter or a meal of bread and cold meat, though, was the wrath of the employer.

Since servants were largely relegated to the status of the rats they chased, Victorian employers had no problem punishing them harshly if anything was done incorrectly. A maid couldn’t take a moment to rest or eat, or she’d have to answer to her employer.

Servants endured all kinds of violence from their employers, and had no choice but to deal with it or they'd lose their jobs. But over time, servants started to hear a compelling rumor, one that made them rethink their vocation altogether.

Ebenezer Scrooge may have valued cruelty, but it soon became clear to other Victorian-era employers that this strategy wasn’t working. Households were losing servants left and right, and all because the factories were promising better hours, better pay, and most importantly, better treatment.

One Victorian employer summed up the small-scale revolution when he commented 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.”

Both factory and domestic work was back-breaking for women during England’s Industrial Revolution. But factory work sometimes offered women something they hardly ever got as servants: dignity. And to many women, that made all the difference.

Unfortunately, it wasn't just servants and maids who faced disgusting realities during the Victorian era. Before the world was filled with nifty time-saving gadgets, the average Victorian Brit relied on some truly weird practices in their day to day lives...

Victorian athletes were known to drink strychnine and chew on coca leaves for a performance-enhancing boost. While it's not clear if they were technically cheating, their bodies probably didn't appreciate the habit!

During the Victorian era, women wanted to make sure they looked their best. While there's nothing wrong with that, their makeup could literally kill them! Cosmetics of the day were made with things like lead, mercury, and arsenic.

Even men were able to get their daily dose of arsenic, albeit for a different purpose. If a gentleman was having trouble in the bedroom or contracted syphilis, arsenic was the "answer" to his problems.

Brushing your teeth sounds simple enough, right? Victorians still managed to make that gross, too. As you might imagine, "toothpaste" made of charcoal and honey often led to more dental problems than it prevented.

As if those cosmetics weren't bad enough, Victorian women also used corsets to cinch their waists into impossibly tiny sizes! Unsurprisingly, these body crushing garments could result in breathing issues and displaced organs.

That tiny waist was often complimented by a crinoline, a series of hoops worn to give a woman's skirt the perfect shape. This size, however, could be a hazard. Beyond the obvious movement problems — you try fitting through a door wearing a crinoline! — women also ran into trouble with candles. It was all too easy to brush against an open flame and find things getting a bit toasty!

Feathered hats were also all the rage during Victorian times; they caused problems, too — though not for the wearer. Countless species of birds went extinct as hunters sought out the perfect accessories.

Birds weren't the only creatures who died for the sake of style. Victorian women would also kill — and wear — beetles, butterflies, and other insects to enhance their formalwear.

Some beauty techniques were simply gross rather than deadly. Victorian women were known to sleep with raw meat on their face in order to improve their complexion. Steak tartare anyone?

Victorians frequently wore black — and that wasn't just because it was fashionable. In those days, cities were filled with coal dust and all sorts of dirt: white clothes would have become soiled in the blink of an eye!

Getting all dressed up in your finery wasn't only for the living, either. Victorians would take photographs of their recently deceased family members; sometimes, they'd pose alongside the body, too!

Speaking of death, no one wants to be buried alive, right? The Victorians had the perfect solution. "Safety coffins" featured bells, buzzers, and other ways for you to signal to the surface if you found yourself trapped inside.

Mortsafes, however, served the opposite purpose. These devices, which could range from iron coffins to above-ground cages, were designed to keep the dearly departed safe inside. Safe from what, though?

Well, while Victorians followed a pretty strict code of etiquette, the era was also rife with grave robbers! These unsavory fellows would steal freshly buried bodies and use them to turn a profit.

A different type of body snatching also became popular in the Victorian era. British explorers brought plenty of mummies back to Europe — there are even stories of upper-class "unwrapping parties," though it's not clear if those actually happened.

Even if there weren't any ancient bodies on display, Victorian celebrations could still get pretty weird. One party game, called snap dragon, challenged guests to grab flaming raisins from a dish of alcohol and eat them!

If flaming raisins weren't your speed, the Victorian era also had plenty of other delicacies that were also rather... questionable. Mock turtle soup, for example, sometimes replaced the reptile with calf heads, skin, brains, and all.

Things were even worse for the lower class, though. While meat could be pretty expensive, broxy was always affordable. There was a catch, though: broxy was meat from animals that died from diseases rather than slaughter.

If you got sick from eating old meat, medical treatment might not automatically cure you. Electrotherapy was thought to solve a variety of problems, though the practice usually caused more discomfort and scarring than anything else.

There were also plenty of leeches used during the Victorian era, which wasn't fun for anyone involved. These creepy-crawlies would attach to a patient's skin and theoretically draw "bad humors" out, bringing the body into balance.