How to Be a Victorian by Ruth Goodman

How to Be a Victorian by Ruth Man Goodman is a comprehensive dawn to dusk look at everyday life in England during the reign of Victoria.

I am the kind of person who thinks that if the temperature is set to 62 in our house, I might die from hypothermia. I hate doing laundry because there are so many steps and it's constantly up and down from one floor to the next. I work from home using a computer and the internet and worry about money and retirement. I quickly began to reevaluate all my complaints as I learned about how if I had been born in Victorian England, I would be cold, hungry, breathing foul air, and probably have rickets and/or scurvy. Yay for modern conveniences and I will try really hard to never complain about how our dryer doesn't dry things very well ever again.

Goodman is someone who specializes in the Victorian era and has gone so far as to live like a Victorian in a Victorian era house, complete with clothing, food, work, and other "amenities" of the time. I rather like the structure of this book, starting with how horrible it is to wake up because the floor would be cold and only the really wealthy had a rug by their bed all the way through the day until to going to bed at night.  I thought sometimes it was a bit awkward because she would switch back and forth from "this is what it would be like if you were working-class and this is how the rich did it," but overall I liked the structure.  

I do wish Goodman had talked a bit more about the sources she used, but maybe that's just me being the social scientist I am, rather than a straight historian. She used things like a diary from a maid and lots of clippings from newspapers and governmental reports and I think using those primary sources is super important, but I kind of wanted her to tell me a bit more about how representative these sources were. I mean, is the diary of the maid typical for all maids or just maids of a certain class? Was it similar in London and in the country?  I guess the book would be five times the length if she answered all my questions, but I would honestly have accepted some hand waving at the topic.

So, I think the best thing for me to do now is dive into the million or so quotes I pulled from the book. It's not as gruesome as Birth, but it's not very pretty, either.

Lines of note:

Today, while it is relatively easy to see surviving fashionable Victorian clothing in museums, it is much harder to find the clothes that would have been worn by those at the bottom of Victorian society; they rarely endure the rigours of time. (page 51) 

This made me think a lot about fast fashion of today.  What will be left of our clothing in the future will be plastic outlines and the rare metal button, I guess.  It was also fascinating because Goodman was talking about how poor people would sometimes use newspaper or paperboard/cardboard to layer under their clothing as an insulating layer. I mean, it would be crazy if something like that actually survived and was understood to be used as clothing!

The beautiful, hand-coloured fashion plates of the 1839 magazine The Ladies' Cabinet would have reached the eyes of several thousand women at best, but those included in the Beetons' publication, The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, of 1862 were seen by ten times that number. The first full-size paper patterns had been available in Britain in the 1830s. By 1858, there were at least ten different pattern shops in London, selling both over the counter and by mail order. (page 81)

As someone who dabbles in sewing clothing, it's crazy to think about life before patterns were widely available. 

By 1862, between 130 and 150 tons of steel were being consumed each week by the crinoline trade. (page 84)

Could you imagine?! Man, when WWI and WWII rolled around, people in the UK were probably ruing crinolines.  

Rich or poor, 1839 or 1901, Victorian women wore a vast number of individual items of clothes. And most of these layers were cotton-based. (page 93)

Cotton is great and versatile and easy to work with if you're making your own clothes, but it's not always the warmest. I'm shivering just thinking about our drafty old house just wearing cotton clothing in the winter.

A girl's developing body was thought to be easily upset and at risk of permanent damage if involved in even the lightest of energetic pursuits. It was feared she could be left unable to fulfil her primary function in life: the bearing of children. This was a long-standing, traditional belief fuelled by the Ancient Greek theory that the womb was mobile within the torso. (page 150)

The womb is mobile!!  I love old-timey medical mistakes. (I do not, actually, especially when it leads to contemporary misunderstandings of how women's bodies work AND I also dislike that it took so long for some of these ideas to be proven false because doing research on women is so rare.)

Once out of toddlerhood, young girls were traditionally encouraged to sit still and play nicely, to be absorbed by needlework, books, and other physically non-strenuous activities. (page 150)

I found myself wondering if this was a description of the Victorian era or 2022.

...the most common Victorian experience relating to food was hunger. It was never very far away. Absolute starvation was rare, with some notable exceptions, but long-term malnutrition was rife. (page 163)

I think this was pretty astounding to me. Maybe I'm just used to the Great British Bake-Off's Victorian-themed challenges, but I was under the impression this was a time of plenty and there were heaping piles of pies and marzipan everywhere. This book quickly took away that impression.

...Victorian Britain suffered from immense air pollution. Millions of domestic coal fires were pumping smoke and smuts into the atmosphere, as were factory chimneys and passing steam trains. A huge number of industries were also expelling a range of other chemicals into the air to join all that smoke, much of it highly toxic. (page 185)

I think of this as modern day China and India - it's an industrial revolution that brings many great advances in technology, but also terrible suffering.

From 1835 up to 1850, half of all the workers in Britain's textile mills were under the age of eighteen. (page 199)

Ugh. This is one of the reasons we have such stringent labor laws today.

Children as young as five were known to be left alone in the dark for twelve hours at a time [in mines], merely to open and close trapdoors for ventilation and access. (page 204)

I read this to my husband and asked if he could imagine even the most responsible of our nieces or nephews doing this at age five. Of course we couldn't because they are children who would have taken a nap or gotten distracted by drawing in the coal dust or something. The creation of the concept of childhood has really accelerated in the last one hundred years.

A boy could earn serious money. From about eleven years of age, most lads could be bringing home more than their mothers could earn; many were out-earning their fathers. Women's work was consistently badly paid throughout the whole Victorian era. (page 206)

Goodman went into some detail about the wage gap and it was interesting to hear that boys out earned their fathers because their fathers were beaten down and exhausted because they started working when they were mere boys, too. Vicious cycle, that. 

Many people felt that the machine-made seams were too rough and lumpy for babies, which was a real testament to the average Victorian mother's sewing skills; her hand-sewn seams were smaller, smoother and neater than the machine-made alternative. (page 218)

Crazy!  Hand-sewn better than machine-sewn! Not in today's world, that's for sure. It's definitely evidence that both sewing machines have improved and the every day person's sewing skills have deteriorated massively.

Drug abuse was widespread among Victorian babies. A day's feed would often be accompanied by a dose of medicine, a while rural babies, far from pharmacies, were much less likely to become 'users,' in towns and cities, where supply was much better, large numbers of newborns and toddlers were fed copious amounts of drugs purchased by their parents. (page 242)

Imagine giving your baby opiates for just regular reasons like crying or a stuffy nose!  I really liked this section of the book because Goodman spent a lot of time talking about raising babies in different classes and I liked how nuanced she approached the topic.

Drugged babies slept more and cried less, but the opiates also suppressed their appetites, and it was the children eating less that most often led to their premature deaths. (page 242)

So sad.

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. (page 270)

Let's all stop complaining about our washers and dryers, shall we?  It's just as important as the pill, albeit without a great Loretta Lynn song to celebrate it. 

Any bout of serious sickness could easily leave a patient with addiction, even after they had recovered from the initial illness due to the fact that both doctors and home nurses made liberal use of opiates. (page 283)

Again, I found myself wondering if this was a description of the Victorian era or 2022.

Corporal punishment was universal throughout the Victorian educational experience...(page 292)
School was meant to be a training ground for life; a rigid hierarchy with strict rules and regulations. (page 293)

Yet again again, I found myself wondering if this was a description of the Victorian era or 2022.

Sewing was almost like breathing; one of the most ubiquitous and necessary of skills. (page 308)

Oh, the ubiquity of ready to wear clothes. It's convenient and all, but look at all the things we've lost because we can't make our own clothing. I think it's a shame.

The onset of the Boer War was finally to provide an impetus to the provision of physical education in schools with working-class pupils. The nation was shocked by the appalling levels of unfitness in the young men who volunteered in 1899, with only two out of every nine being judged fit for combat. (page 335)

This is actually a crisis in the current U.S. military.  Too many young people are obese or disabled and our fighting force isn't what it once was. 

Pubs had a number of social functions beyond pure drinking: they served as club houses for debating societies, meeting rooms for floral societies; and many ran savings schemes of one sort or another. (page 351)

I live in Wisconsin, so I think I have a skewed view of this, but isn't this all pubs still?  I mean, maybe no saving schemes, but our local pub hosts board meeting for various organizations, runs a dog rescue in conjunction with shelters in other states, and has regular trivia and karaoke nights. 

Landlords and brewers were notorious for adulterating the drink with a huge range of substances, from plain water to foxglove, henbane, nux vomica (all poisonous in quite small doses, and used to increase the intoxicating effects of watered beer) and Indian berry, a kidney-shaped berry from the Malabar region of the subcontinent - the most common adulterant and used alongside molasses and water. (page 352)

You know I don't drink alcohol and I would definitely have been quite supportive of the temperance movement and this would definitely have been another arrow in my quiver as to why alcohol should be banned!

The railways democratized the holiday market reducing the cost of travel. First, it was the middle-class families who were to join the wealthy, taking a house for a few weeks in the summer. Then, as train-ticket prices fell even further, the working classes began to enjoy their first daytrips to the beach. (page 361)

Pros and cons of technology here.

Prior to the 1820s, condoms had enjoyed a long history, not so much as contraceptive devices, but as a means to improved male health. Wearing a condom during sex could prevent the transmission of sexual diseases and, in particular, syphilis, the disease that most men feared. (page 418)

Pros and cons of technology yet again. I mean, I guess it protected women, too, so yay?

In 1857, police figures [for numbers of prostituted women] for the whole of the Metropolitan Police District were declared as 8,600...This gives a ratio of somewhere in the region of one woman in fifty. It is still an astonishingly high number, which goes some way towards explaining why prostitution was a perennial talking point during the period. (page 425)

1/50!!  Life for women, particularly poor women, was absolutely terrible in the Victorian period. Let's all be grateful our choices weren't debtor's prison or prostitution.

...garrison town of Aldershot, due to the large number of unmarried servicemen. Here he recorded a relatively small number of women: 243 recognized prostitutes, alongside 12,000 troops in the town. In his estimation, the women were accepting eight to ten clients each night. (page 428)

Eight to ten clients a night!!! Can you even imagine? Frankly, I can not. I'm exhausted just thinking about it and I'm seriously stressed about the risks of disease and pregnancy (i.e., possible death).

The search has also taken me down harrowing avenues of hunger, disease, overwork and abuse. The Victorian era was a catastrophic time to be poor. People's skeletal remains provide the most graphic and incontrovertible evidence of lifelong hardship, with effects upon the body as bad as at any other point in our national history. (page 439)

I find myself struggling to figure out why Goodman is so obsessed with this time period when the end results are so dismal, but everyone's got their thing, so who am I to judge?


Things I looked up:
Filbert (page 108): This is another word for hazelnut. I'm just as annoyed with this as I am by people who call chickpeas garbanzo beans. No. They are chickpeas. 

Purdah (page 113): The practice of certain Muslim and Hindu societies of living in separate rooms or behind a curtain, or of dressing in all-enveloping clothing, in order to stay out of sight of men or strangers.

Catarrh (page 117): Excessive discharge or buildup of mucus in the nose or throat, associated with the inflammation of the mucus membrane. 

Pomatum (page 118): A scented ointment or oil applied to the hair; pomade.

Rumbustious (page 317): Boisterous or unruly.

Toxophilite (page 341): A student or lover of archery. Who knew?

Navvy (page 405): A laborer employed in the excavation and construction of a road, railroad, or canal.  
Louche (page 436): Disreputable or sordid in a rakish or appealing way. My Kindle suggests I've looked this up multiple times and I presume I have done so while reading historical romance novels, but maybe by typing it out this time, I'll remember what it means!

This was a really good book with interesting and interesting premise and research. It did a great job of hammering home how lucky I am and how I shouldn't take modern life for granted.  4.5/5 stars