The “Victorian London: Clothing: Dress and Social Status” article By Max Schlesinger highly concentrates on the fact that any working class citizen in 1853 Gravesend, could have appeared to be a Gentleman or a Lady. The stereotypical clothing items that were popular amongst the women were “colored silks, black velvets, silk or straw bonnets with botanical ornaments are worn by the Lady’s maids as well as the Lady.” (Schlesinger) The only real difference between the two may have been in the cost of the dress, in that the maid’s dress may have been slightly cheaper, according to Schlesinger. The main point of the article is, one could not tell the difference between those of a higher class, visually and based off of their dress. As far as men’s fashion goes, black, silk hats were a staple and the sole headwear that is accepted amongst the male populous of Gravesend (Schlesinger). A black dress coat, a hat, and a white tie or “Cravat,” as they called it, was the traditional attire of whom could very well be a Gentleman, a tailor, barber, waiter, tailor or shoemaker, according to Schlesinger. The line between rich and peasant is invisible to the naked eye. A man can completely look the part of an upper class man, but truly be a peasant who crafts the suit he wears. A couple in church could fool the average local townsperson, a man wearing the suit he makes, a gold chain, a waistcoat, with his hair done, and a clean-shaven face with his wife by his side, wearing linens passable to a Lady’s, together look like an elite, and important pair, especially if they exuded the tiniest sense of entitlement or superiority. There was emphasis placed on dressing well. Even those without much money make it priority to look worthy, and to represent themselves well.
Fall 2015 Blog
Use this category tag on all blog posts for Fall 2015.
Victorian Era Assigment
In browsing Lee Jackson’s Victorian London Dictionary, I decided to research more about the food of that era, specifically their meal habits. One I found particularly interesting was breakfast. In Victorian London, breakfast was widely served at 9:00am. “So hungry London breakfasts, but not uniformly well, at nine o’clock in the morning.” With the exception of the upper class, who dined at 10:00am.
Their breakfasts mainly consisted of poached eggs, rashed bacon, bread and butter, etc. “I want to know how many thousand eggs are daily chipped, how many of those embryo chickens are poached, and how many fried; how many tons of quartern loaves are cut up to make bread-and-butter, thick and thin; how many porkers have been sacrificed to provide the bacon rashers, fat and streaky…”
Many also had fish with breakfast, being that London had a large fishing industry. Overall, I found all of these discoveries very interesting, as a glimpse into what life was like in Victorian London.
Rotten Victorian Houses
Before I was introduced to the Victorian dictionary, I was under the impression that there was a small problem with youth on the streets and bad working conditions, but the truth of the time period is quite staggering. The poor, and especially poor women of the time, were taken advantage of. Capitalists had figured out that if they used women for the same factory work as men, they could pay them less. During slack times in work the women, according to Lee Jackson, would have to fall back on any work they could get. This led many of them to end up in prostitution.
Having no job security and no family or support in London led to a horrid state of affairs for women. Many articles spoke of women and children getting themselves arrested so as to get out of their situation for a short period of time; preferring prison to the workhouses or the streets. Children could be paid even less than both the sexes and since feeding unwanted children was a burden for poor families many children were either thrown to the streets or forced into child-prostitution by their own parents. The laws had nothing to say about child prostitution at the time and policemen turned a blind eye to “flower-girls” on the streets. If these women happened to get pregnant the cycle got worse and worse leading to an estimate of “no less than 100,000” prostitutes in London. The irony was that other women were told at the time that no “decent lady” even knew of such happenings in their society. This led to a great social problem not even being acknowledged. http://www.victorianlondon.org/index-2012.htm
Unwanted boy children were in the business of thievery and crime. Both sexes could be employed by capitalists for shillings a day but we must remember that a work shift was from dawn to dusk and crime paid the children more. If one could not afford to take care of oneself, then they were put into workhouses where board and rent were exchanged for back breaking labor and which all agreed the streets or prison were preferable to.
Slang in Victorian London
The words “Area-sneak”, “Cracksman”, and “Tuck-up Fair” all, surprisingly, have something in common; they are all part of Victorian slang from London, England. Upon first hearing of such wild and fantastical words and phrases, they sound almost too weird to be real. But in all honesty, some words used today in the 21st century are as nonsensical as theirs. Slang is only a testament of the creative and innovative nature of language throughout time. For example, in Victorian London there were sometimes handfuls of different ways to say the same phrase. So way back when, a man would not “go away” or “withdraw”; he would instead “bolt”, “slope”, “mizzle”, “make himself scarce”, “walk his chalk”, “make tracks”, “cut his stick”, or “cut his lucky”. Why does there need to be so many variations of the same saying? The world may never know, but such variety of language makes for a much more scintillating conversation. There was also slang specific to crime back in Victorian London, much like there is today. The terms “area-sneak”, “Cracksman” and “Tuck-up Fair” are examples of such jargon- their meanings being a thief who sneaks down areas to see what he can steal in kitchens, a burglar, and The Gallows respectively. Some have logical connections to their meanings, while others’ explanations could only make sense in a Victorian Londoner’s mind. Either way, the words and phrases spice up the language to make conversation more unique over time. Who knows what sayings will be created and reshaped over the next 100 years, hopefully the 21st century will have a (s)language as varying and creative as Victorian London’s.
Online Assignment #1: Victorian London’s Bethlehem Royal Hospital
While perusing through Lee Jackson’s “The Victorian Dictionary,” I was attracted to the topic of Health and Hygiene, specifically Mental Health. I chose to focus on The Bethlehem Hospital and I wanted to look at the hospital itself and the stigma surrounding mental illness and patients. Upon reading Peter Cunningham’s entry from the Hand-Book of London, I saw that the hospital’s nickname was “bedlam.” I did some digging on Google and saw that this term was actually coined after the hospital’s conditions! Bedlam means chaos or madness. The hospital itself was reported to be in very bad condition, and it’s patients were seen as chaotic lunatics; which makes the reasoning behind the term “bedlam” understandable. In the entry from The Pictorial Handbook of London there are sickening depictions of the gruesome way patients were treated. The hospital used the patient’s abnormality as a way to gain profits. About 400 pounds were collected annually from displaying the naked patients. They would be chained to the walls of their cells, and pestered so “the most violent manifestations of their maladies” were shown (The Pictorial Handbook of London). Fortunately in 1770, this practice was annulled. Unfortunately, the condition in which patients were kept did not improve until later years. An article depicting a positive reaction of the hospital is Cruchley’s London in 1865: A Handbook for Strangers: The method and regimen adopted are those which have been suggested by the wisdom and humanity of the present school of medicine. Love, and not fear, is the great principle of government, and the unhappy insane are watched over with the tenderest pity. In John Timbs’ Curiosities of London, written in 1867, he describes the hospital as “scrupulously clean” and comments on the “decent attire of the patients” and the “unexpectedly small number of those under restraint.” These accounts show the dramatic change of both the physical state of hospitals chiefly dealing with mental illness and the stigma towards the patients. Over time, the patients were shown more and more humanity, and given more humane living spaces.
Victorian Dictionary: Teacher Training
As was the case nearly everywhere at the time, women in Victorian London were treated as horribly inferior to men. This left them with few employment opportunities and a tendency to remain home, cooking and cleaning for their families. One option available to women was to become an elementary school teacher. Similar to modern times, teachers had to go through extensive training before actually getting in front of a class.
While browsing under the Education category on Lee Jackson’s “Dictionary of Victorian London,” I was able to find some interesting information about teacher training in the Victorian Era. All of the information I found was from the “Etiquette and Household Advice Manuals,” published in the 1880s. According to the unknown author, training could begin at as young as thirteen years old, with an apprenticeship. This was also one of the only jobs for which women were required an education. The author makes a few interesting (and still relevant) points about the field. He says, “A good student is not necessarily a good teacher, and but few people grasp the difference between training and teaching.” He continues to say that Government schools are the only places a girl could go to receive quality training, and that one must have had at least two years of training in order to become a teacher. The main idea of the entire section is clearly that teachers required a great deal of training before entering the classroom. The author even states that it was common for girls in particular to have health breakdowns and to be overworked, which is why he recommends girls do not join the workforce until they have a “stronger physical frame,” around age fifteen or sixteen. Another writer, however, shares a different opinion. This writer, mentioned by the main author, believes that children who were born into the upper or middle class would become great learners even before they could talk, which would allow them to in turn become great educators. Those were the children who would apparently need less time to become quality teachers. According to the writer, they could have started their apprenticeships at age thirteen, and could have been ready to teach within two or three years. While the young age is not surprising for the time period, it is still strange to think about a fifteen year old being ready to teach a class of children just a few years younger.
Children’s work in Victorian London
The Victorian age bright side was the industrial revolution with its great inventions and scientific progress, but this magnificent age had also a dark side to it a social dark side. George R. Sims in his chapter How the Poor Live, exposes one aspect of this dark side: deep poverty, a situation that forced the young members of families, the children, aged between six and ten to “work hard at dangerous trades for their living “. Girls work long hours for pennies in a ‘Bronzing factory’ using dangerous chemicals which caused fatal illnesses without taking any precaution and without getting any protection either from their bosses or families. Another example is of young boys sometimes age six or seven working in sawmills, again no precautions were taken resulting in fingers loss or worse even loss of hands to the machines. Lead poisoning was another fatal condition that those young children died of working in the lead industry and Lemonade bottling factories where bursting bottles maimed children who were doing the job.
The poorer the family the younger the kids who went to work. James Greenwood, in his book The Seven Curses of London from 1869, describes the stages that little boys went through from the age of seven to become a prestigious “errand boy” when they are ten. They worked from early morning till the late hour of the evening winter and summer alike to earn something. ‘Uncle Jonathan’ In his Walks In and Around London, from 1895, described them as the “children of the poor who have to earn their own living”. Not earning any money resulted usually in cruel beating or other cruelties at home. The jobs ‘Uncle Jonathan’ described are not these dangerous jobs that make the reader shiver but more of mundane little independent initiatives that render the kids transparent, unnoticeable. Those kids were to be found in markets, like Covent Garden in Uncle Jonathan’s story, where at about five or six o’clock in morning those kids showed up to buy their merchandise for the day, boys and girls alike: flower girls, Orange-girls, the little match-sellers, telegraph boys etc. Other kids worked as scavengers, collecting horse discharge from the dangerous bustling roads, risking their life for pennies.
How the Times Don’t Change
It is evident that over the course of time fashion preferences change, with each new era, new ‘hip’ hairstyles and clothing are established. The idealistic man and woman is not a modern concept, the ‘perfect’ individual has been sought after for centuries and continues to be. In Victorian London the present day ‘rugged, lumberjack’ facial hair was in fashion. After Albert Smith returned from a trip after visiting the Nile with a full ‘flowing, beastly’ beard. All is well right? Wrong, clean shaved faces were a sign of wealth and class and Albert was a candidate for The Garrick Club, which was exclusive. The present members insisted he shave is beard and be a gentlemen. Upon Alberts refusal the “Beard Movement” was born. Facial hair began to increase in popularity, ‘mutton-chop’ whiskers became ‘de riguer’ or the regular. However not all facial hair was considered fashionable, mustaches were frowned upon. Mustaches were only socially accepted on men of war, dance and or preforming arts, otherwise you were labeled a ‘snob.’ Cartoon illustrations were created to stress why mustaches were troublesome. In one advertisement a man and woman are depicted, both appearing startled because the woman’s face is bleeding due to the sharpness of the gentleman’s ‘unruly’ mustache. The fair lady states “What a tiresome great awkward boy you are! Just see how you have scratched my chin!!” This humorous presentation warns men, if you want to get a lady, a mustache will not do the job. Though society today is no longer against mustaches, the article ‘Beards and Mustaches’ shows that similar tactics are used to portray messages on what is ‘in’ and what is not in the present day. Women did not have to worry about facial hair in the Victorian Era but they did in fact need to stress over their hands. ‘White and delicate’ or otherwise described as ‘lily like’ hands were high fashion and a symbol of femininity. ‘Etiquette and Advice’ a manual, contains an entire article on what and what not to do in order to have perfect hands. The author believed that even the working woman could have delicate hands if she devoted time and effort into caring for her digits. Recommendations on how to attain perfect hands included limiting the use of ones hands, avoiding lifting objects that are too heavy and never clenching ones fist. Also the use of nail brushes, pumice stone, white sand and lemon juice will preserve softness and cleanliness. It is for this reason I blame Victorian woman for all the money I spend at the nail salon. Research has me wondering, how much do the times really change?
Online Assignment #1: Researching Victorian London
As I navigated through the Dictionary of Victorian London I came across the controversial topic at the time of Women in Public and more specifically the rise of “Ladies clubs” as they were suspected and referred to in Victorian London during 1869. This article was from Punch, a newspaper taunting the idea that women could possibly get together and discuss what’s on their minds. “A LADIES’ Club is said to be in process of formation, how the male mind shudders at this most tremendous news!” The very first line of this published article captures the inequality between men and women and the outrageous belief of the narrowness of the women mind. Men quickly became worried that the involvement of their wife in this club would result in the interest of other men, dinner no longer being cooked, and the end to her “maternal duties.” This atrocious thinking by men is still seen in many parts of the world and is actually worse in some places than it was in 19th century London. India for example is a country where being a women means you will most likely be abused. National Crime Records Bureau reveal that a crime against a women is committed every three minutes, a women is raped every 29 minutes, a dowry death occurs every 77 minutes and one case of cruelty committed by either the husband or relative of the victim occurs every nine minutes. Patriarchy and the belief that women aren’t entitled to rights is the main reason for the abuse toward women seen in India. Women currently have very little opportunity to become educated in India, let alone form a club to talk about wha they may please to. Although throughout the years this oppression of women was no longer seen as predominately in London, it is still occurring in many parts of the world today.
Online Assignment #1: Researching Victorian London
Using Lee Jackson’s “Victorian Dictionary”, I read many articles about crime in Victorian London. I was interested in how the burial of suicides was treated during this time. This particular article was part of Yale University Press in 2014. I found the parallels of these times and today’s times immediately. The man in this article (who was never named) is said to have been an unexpected target of suicide, although in hindsight, the signs were there. “It was not uncommon to hear him banging away of a night in his bedroom down below, but as there was nobody down there that he could shoot but himself, amongst several other whimsies of his, was winked at by the people of the house on account of his general good conduct”. No one worried about his use of firearms because he appeared to be a genuine person. The man was found dead in his room, by way of a guillotine that he had meticulously built. The article discussed the sixteen jurymen’s deliberation of his death. The debate began with the question of his sanity. “The last person who conversed with him found him rational and in no way excited. So far from showing symptoms on insanity, he had always appeared a very sensible man indeed.” In defense of the claim on his sanity, the jurymen spoke of his calm and calculated manner in which he had to have constructed the machine that caused his death. Once it is decided that he will be buried, the man in the article is referred to as, “it”. As if to point out the deliberate attempt to dehumanize the man and prepare for the heartless burial. The article does describe the desire of a particular man to follow the law. It is still apparent that the man has no one to care for him when a makeshift coffin is prepared and arrangements for the proper burial are overlooked. Eventually, the man is buried in a hole that was previously dug and his poor excuse for a coffin is only covered just enough to allow another coffin to be buried on top of it.