Discussion Post: Odds and Ends
Aug. 6th, 2017 08:01 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
scfrankles.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
sherlock60For the last discussion post, here are a few odds and ends: articles and sites that I found interesting and kept a note of, but which didn’t quite fit any of the previous topics.
Reynold’s Shilling Map of London 1895 Part of Lee Jackson’s Dictionary of Victorian London.
Victorian London in Incredible Detail On Mapping London.
The Victorian Society has compiled a list of the less well known Victorian buildings London should never have lost…
London's Lost Victorian Buildings: Mapped By Joe O’Donnell, on Londonist.
The first stop for any visitor to London - Holmes fan or not - must be the Sherlock Holmes Museum, an evocation of No. 221-B, even to the 17 steps to the first-floor rooms that were reputably occupied between 1881-1904 by the Great Detective and his faithful friend Doctor Watson. Everything in the three-story museum is presented in an agreeably understated manner, without the hyper-appeal of lasers and holograms found at so many new London attractions. Nothing is displayed that is not mentioned in the stories, and the crowded and ornate Victorian spell is so expertly cast that you feel Holmes and Watson may walk in at any moment...
The London of Sherlock Holmes On the Sherlock Holmes Museum.
In the 19th century, London was the capital of the largest empire the world had ever known — and it was infamously filthy. It had choking, sooty fogs; the Thames River was thick with human sewage; and the streets were covered with mud.
But according to Lee Jackson, author of Dirty Old London: The Victorian Fight Against Filth, mud was actually a euphemism. "It was essentially composed of horse dung," he tells Fresh Air's Sam Briger. "There were tens of thousands of working horses in London [with] inevitable consequences for the streets. And the Victorians never really found an effective way of removing that, unfortunately..."
'Dirty Old London': A History Of The Victorians' Infamous Filth On the NPR website.
This multi-part series will examine middle-class houses during Fin-de-Siècle Britain, specifically looking at general tendencies in architecture, architectural features, façades, floor plans, as well as interior design in the homes of this period.
Houses in Fin-de-Siècle Britain On History Rhymes.
By creating the conditions for healthy competition, the Victorians believed it should be possible, in theory, for any man to succeed in the world through his own efforts no matter how humble his origins. Author Samuel Smiles coined the term ‘self-help’ which he used as the title for his best-selling book. Self-Help (1859) had chapters such as ‘Application and Perseverance’ and contained scores of inspirational case histories about men who had risen from humble beginnings to become captains of industry… This sounds exhilarating, but the price of failure was very high. People who didn’t rise in the world were assumed to be at fault. They were seen to be lazy, extravagant or proud and therefore responsible for their own poverty. Only those who were too old to work or held back by disability deserved help; for everyone else there was the dreaded workhouse, which was created by the New Poor Law of 1834…
The middle classes: etiquette and upward mobility By Kathryn Hughes, on the British Library website.
...unlike the relative closeness of modern economic and social classes, which form a spectrum, large gaps separated those in Victorian England so that moving from one class (or really set of classes) to another required a kind of quantum leap. Thus, as M. W. Flynn has pointed out, doubling a worker's wages would not, as it would now, markedly improve his or her lifestyle, particularly in regard to sanitation and healthiness, because such enormous gaps existed between the costs of housing for the working and middle classes that one would have had to raise the wages enormously to affect the kind of available housing.
Wages, the Cost of Living, Contemporary Equivalents to Victorian Money By George P. Landow, on the Victorian Web.
...the lower classes, particularly mothers, found themselves in acutely oppressive and challenging situations. While the women of the upper class busied themselves with following the proper protocol in selecting a suitor, the working-class mother found herself scrounging to make ends meet. Oftentimes, a working class mother would not be able to keep her family afloat, which would subsequently result in the issuing of several new laws prohibiting violence towards children. The desperate times that lower class women found themselves in periodically made them stoop to desperate measures, such as prostitution; in addition, there was an increase in abuse and neglect, ranging from infanticide, to abortion, to baby farming, which brought the nature of motherhood in Victorian England into question…
Hardships of Working-Class Mothers In Victorian England By Nicole Lemieux, on Pace University Webspace.
William [Fletcher] kept a diary, or, at least, he kept one for two years from June 1858 to March 1860. Jane Killick has transcribed and annotated the manuscript, which is held in the Special Collections at the University of Birmingham.
The reader might wish that William had been a lion tamer, or a soldier in the Foreign Legion, or a master criminal. But, no, William was a banker, living not in a busy metropolis, but in the little town of Bridgnorth. The bank he worked at, on the corner of Listley Street and High Street, just down from the Market Hall, is still there, though now part of the mighty HSBC. William was a young man – just 18 years old when he began his diary – but he was a young man with prospects…
The life and thoughts of a Victorian bank clerk By Chris Upton, on the Birmingham Post website.
Increasing industrialisation and growth of spending power for consumers meant that by the late 19th century, there was a real demand for women workers, as shops needed to expand quickly.
Cox explains that these new opportunities for shopgirls proved to be a chance to gain real independence.
“She actually becomes a sort of cultural icon in her own right, she’s a new kind of woman doing a new kind of work. People haven’t really seen her like before – she’s moving away from home and she’s earning an independent wage, however small.”
Working conditions were poor though and pay was a troubling concern for shopgirls – it was half of what their male equivalents were earning. Some women were forced to resort to prostitution to supplement their income, with a few areas of cities and towns becoming notorious for sex work...
The series makes clear that there was potential for both empowerment and exploitation of the shopgirl towards the end of the 19th century. Cox suggests that “it’s always the case of two steps forward and one step back with this kind of work...”
The rise of the British shopgirl By Rebecca Smith, on the Telegraph website.
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a trend emerged in English slang for bestowing mock “titles” on people employed or engaged in various jobs or pursuits. So an "admiral of the blue" was a publican, so-called because of the color of his apron. A "queen of the dripping pan" was a cook. A "lord of the foresheet" was a ship’s cook. And a "knight of the cue" was a billiard-player, a "knight of the thimble" was a tailor, a "knight of the lapstone" a cobbler, and a "knight of the brush" an artist…
17 Job Titles in Victorian Slang By Paul Anthony Jones, on Mental Floss.
1. Afternoonified
A society word meaning “smart.” Forrester demonstrates the usage: "The goods are not 'afternoonified' enough for me.”
2. Arfarfan'arf
A figure of speech used to describe drunken men. “He’s very arf’arf’an’arf," Forrester writes, "meaning he has had many ‘arfs,’” or half-pints of booze…
56 Delightful Victorian Slang Terms You Should Be Using By Erin McCarthy, on Mental Floss.
...Victorian information technology that reduced the size of the world and affected business, economics, politics, and daily life — the Penny Post of 1840. The Penny Post mandated a uniform, affordable rate for postage: a letter weighing up to ounce could travel anywhere in the UK for only a penny. A point of origin for computer-mediated communication (CMC), the Penny Post — empowered by Ralph Allen’s organized system of cross posts (1720), John Palmer’s mail coaches (1784), and nationwide railway service (c. 1847) — initiated the first communications “network...”
The Penny Post...transformed the mail from an expensive tax for revenue to a civic service affordable to all social classes.
The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing By Catherine J. Golden, on the Victorian Web.
In Victorian London, though service wasn’t 24/7, it was close to 12/6. Home delivery routes would go by every house 12 times a day — yes, 12. In 1889, for example, the first delivery began about 7:30 a.m. and the last one at about 7:30 p.m. In major cities like Birmingham by the end of the century, home routes were run six times a day.
“In London, people complained if a letter didn’t arrive in a couple of hours,” said Catherine J. Golden, a professor of English at Skidmore College and author of “Posting It: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing” (2009)...
The Birth of Cheap Communication (and Junk Mail) By Randall Stross, on the New York Times website.
Who has not heard with pleasure the sharp, loud, firm 'rat-tat' of the postman? What a stir it causes in the house! Charlie flies up the stairs two at a time, hoping to get the letters. Ah! but somebody's before you this time, Charlie. Miss PolIy heard that knock, and has run downstairs from her room, and, being a bit of a romp, does not mind jumping the last half-dozen stairs, so that she may get to the door first and receive the letters. But, hark! I can hear other footsteps and other sounds. Yes, here is little Tommy Toddles, who has managed to scramble up three stairs, crying, ' Me hab em.' Well, PoIly does not mind, and so little Tommy marches into the room quite delighted to be the bearer of, perhaps, good news.
But I wonder whether my readers ever think of the care and trouble taken to deliver their letters as quickly as possible. We can write to our cousins in the country one afternoon, and the next morning the letters will be waiting for them to read at the breakfast-table. How different it was when our grandfathers and their grandfathers were young! Before railways were started, when the roads were wretchedly bad, the post was very slow. What would my young friends in Glasgow say, if their letters from Edinburgh were more than a week on the journey; or our boys and girls in Cornwall, if they had to wait nine or ten days before they could possibly get an answer from London?
Postal System On the Dictionary of Victorian London.
Victorian Advertising By Jennifer Carnell, on Sensation Press. A collection of adverts published in the United Kingdom during the Victorian era.
It’s more or less a given these days that cameras are everywhere and privacy is a quaint notion from the past. But it turns out that people were already starting to feel that way in the 1880s, when advancing technology allowed the production of cameras small and fast enough to be hidden by the user and produce shots of unprecedented candidness.
Called “detective cameras” at the time, as chronicled by the National Media Museum, these models utilized relatively speedy gelatine dry plates and ranged from basic handheld box cameras — remarkable at the time for their modest size and lack of tripod — to more elaborate models that disguised the camera inside a book or hat…
Victorian Era Detective Cameras and the Birth of Privacy Concerns By David Becker, on PetaPixel.
...touching up photos was common back in the day. Photographers made permanent edits on the plates themselves so that all prints would look brighter and more appealing. This British photography journal from 1875 instructed photographers to use a sharp, fine-pointed pencil to add highlights to a picture, then brighten up things like cheeks that might print darker than desired by “cross-hatching with a rather blunted pencil.”
The result is a touched-up negative that looks more crackled and grotesque than beautiful — before it’s printed, that is...
Here’s How Victorians “Photoshopped” Photos By Erin Blakemore, on the Smithsonian.
As part of their “toilet” in the morning, ladies of leisure would ensure well plucked eyebrows, perhaps trim their eyelashes, and daub castor oil onto their eyelids and lashes. To hide freckles, blotches, or redness, they could dust on rice powder, zinc oxide or, the most expensive option, pearl powder, which was a mixture of chloride of bismuth and French chalk (talc) and provided a silky white and lustrous cosmetic powder. On their lips they might apply a clear pomade (like beeswax) for a shine and to provide protection from the elements, and some contained dye to discreetly accentuate the lip colour, crushed flowers and carmine (made from the female cochineal insect) being favoured… Eye paint (eyeshadow) was popular, red and black, used excessively by “fallen women” but very subtly by respectable ladies (more like eyeliner), who would deny wearing it and be insulted if anyone ever dared to ask. Eye paint was made of mixed lead tetroxide, mercuric sulphide, antimony, cinnabar, vermilion, and secret ingredients. Another choice was to put beeswax on their lashes, then apply any number of black powders, from soot to crushed precious stones.
Early Victorian Era Make-up By RS Fleming, on Kate Tattersall Adventures.
Victorian Make-up Recipes By RS Fleming, on Kate Tattersall Adventures.
Victorian Feminine Ideal: about the perfect silhouette, hygiene, grooming, & body sculpting By RS Fleming, on Kate Tattersall Adventures.
In the 1840s Victorian drawers were plain and reached well below the knees. In the 1850s they became more embellished so that by 1868 decoration on knickers was usual. Often the lower leg edges of Victorian knickers were trimmed with lace and had 5 or 6 tucks above it.
Left - French cambric and broderie anglaise lace Victorian drawers of 1867 and still open legged.By 1876 the drawer legs of knickers merged to become closed. That is, the open nature of the crotch was closed and an opening of about four inches closed by a few buttons existed instead at the side hip.A revolution had occurred - Victorian drawer legs were no longer separate - they were now fashionable knickers. Fabrics used were changing too and silk, as well as flannel was popular choice for knickers...
Undergarments History: Pants, Drawers, Briefs and Knickers Fashion By Pauline Weston Thomas, on Fashion-Era.
Dressing the Late 19th Century Woman On Vintage Fashion 1840-1940. 12 photographs showing the different layers to a woman’s outfit.
Factoid: n. Something that becomes accepted as a fact, although it is not (or may not be) true; spec. an assumption or speculation reported and repeated so often that it is popularly considered true; a simulated or imagined fact… (Oxford English Dictionary)
Victorian sex factoids On Lesley Hall's Web Pages.
Between 1892 and 1920 the survey was completed by 45 women – mostly middle-class college and university graduates – providing modern historians with a unique insight into the secret romantic appetites of a generation raised with Victorian values.
The results show that most women knew little about sex before marriage, with some admitting that they only picked up the facts of life by observing the habits of farm animals.
But once married, most women said that their sex lives were active and enjoyable. Of the sample, 35 said that they desired intercourse and 24 said that mutual pleasure was a reason for making love. Three-quarters of the women said they made love once a week.
Another of the anonymous women, whose questionnaire gives her birth year as 1867, professed the very modern view that a fulfilling sex life was the key to a long and secure marriage…
Victorian-era women enjoyed making love, according to earliest sex survey By Matthew Moore, on the Telegraph website.
Historian Jeff Evans, from Manchester Metropolitan University, has painstakingly sifted through more than 280,000 criminal cases at the National Archive at Kew which suggest that the supposedly prudish Victorians had a far more relaxed attitude to sex between men than their 1960s counterparts.
The records – which now form the biggest database of its kind – are believed to represent 64% of all indictable court cases relating to sex between men held in the Lancashire Assize and Quarter Sessions.
They show that outside of London, The Criminal Justice System in regions such as Lancashire simply weren’t interested in prosecuting gay men for their activities.
Jeff said: “Between 1850 and the start of World War One, prosecutions of consensual sex between men in Lancashire are negligible – less than four or five cases per year. This suggests it was not a priority for police.
“Furthermore, when these cases actually got to court, more than half were thrown out. The Grand Jury apparently thought it was just none of their business.”
...even actions such as the Labouchere Amendment to the Criminal Amendment Act 1885, which criminalised all types of sexual activity between two men, didn’t make an appreciable difference to the number of prosecutions.
The surprising truth about the lives of gay men in Victorian England Victorians more liberal than their Sixties counterparts, study suggests. On Manchester Metropolitan University website.
It is often argued that the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed a significant change in gender roles, which led to the emergence of “separate spheres” in the nineteenth century…
Recently historians have begun to question some aspects of this story, pointing out that these ideas of gender difference were for the most part very old, and that women were not excluded from work and public life in the nineteenth century. Women were excluded from some occupations and activities, but they entered new ones, for example authorship, teaching, and charity work. Working-class women still had to work to support themselves and their families, though the range of occupations available to them may have narrowed and some work, such as “sweated labour” in the textile trades, took place in the home. Towards the end of the century new jobs outside the home became available, and many women became clerks, typists, and shop assistants.
It is true that the concept of the respectable male “breadwinner”, who had the responsibility for providing financially for his entire family, was increasingly influential in this period. Consequently, women were frequently expected to give up their jobs when they got married. With the development of empire and a new wave of prosecutions of homosexuals in the 1890s, men were increasingly expected to demonstrate the masculine traits of muscle, might, and sexual attraction to women, combined with chivalrous concern for the weaker sex.
While gender differences may thus have been accentuated, the spheres of male and female activity were by no means totally “separate”, even at the end of the nineteenth century. As the Proceedings indicate, both men and women were present in many aspects of public and private life.
Gender in the Proceedings Men's and women's experiences of crime, justice and punishment On The Proceedings of the Old Bailey.
Any discussion of prostitution in the 19th century must begin by saying we have no idea of the numbers involved. In 1791, a police magistrate estimated (and he used the words ‘estimate’ and ‘conjecture’) that there were 50,000 prostitutes in London. Yet the word ‘prostitute’ was not used entirely the way we would use it today, i.e. to refer only to women sold their bodies for sex. In the 19th century, many people used it more widely, to refer to women who were living with men outside marriage, or women who had had illegitimate children, or women who perhaps had relations with men, but for pleasure rather than money…
Prostitution By Judith Flanders, on the British Library website.
Until 1868, the sale of drugs was practically unrestricted, and they could be bought like any other commodity. (Mitchell 228) During the Industrial Revolution drug use in England grew rampant, particularly among the working classes. (Meier 138) Drugs were brought to Britain from every corner of the expanding British Empire and the amount of opium sale was particularly staggering. (Parssinen 49) Dangerous drugs were commonly used for making home remedies and less frequently as a recreation for the bored and alienated people. The recreational use of opiates was popular particularly with pre-Victorian and Victorian artists and writers.
There was no moral condemnation of the use of opiates and their use was not regarded as addiction but rather as a habit in the Victorian period. However, when in the 1860s, “Dark England” with its opium dens in London's East End was described in popular press and books, various individuals and religious organisations began to campaign against unrestricted opium trafficking. In 1868, the Pharmacy Act recognised dangerous drugs and limited their sale to registered chemists and pharmacists, but until the end of the nineteenth century few doctors and scientists warned about the dangers of drug addiction.
Victorian Drug Use By Dr Andrzej Diniejko, on the Victorian Web.
Opium and other narcotic drugs played an important part in Victorian life. Shocking though it might be to us in the 21st century, in Victorian times it was possible to walk into a chemist and buy, without prescription, laudanum, cocaine and even arsenic. Opium preparations were sold freely in towns and country markets, indeed the consumption of opium was just as popular in the country as it was in urban areas.
Opium in Victorian Britain By Ellen Castelow, on Historic UK.
Gorgeous Vintage Advertisements for Heroin, Cannabis and Cocaine By Vincze Miklós, on io9.
Although there is no definitive evidence that Queen Victoria personally partook of either the medicinal or pleasurable benefits of marijuana, the extensive prescription of the drug by the royal physician suggests a general belief of the time in its propriety and effectiveness… The truth is that many, if not most, Victorian women used psychoactive drugs at some point in their life, and their widespread prescription was not viewed as unusual…
Victorian Women on Drugs, Part 1: Queen Victoria By Kristina Aikens, on Points: The Blog of the Alcohol & Drugs History Society.
During the 19th century, more than 25% of society operated at or below the proper nourishment level, 15-20% earned barely enough to survive, and 10% were unable to sustain themselves with the essential requirement of healthy, wholesome food. Translation: while Queen Victoria routinely feasted upon suet puddings, savory roast beef, and delicious ice cream, the less fortunate contented themselves with eating scraps, rotten vegetables, and potato peelings. Such was the dietary divide between the rich and poor in the Victorian era…
The Dietary Divide Between the Rich and Poor in the Victorian Era By Alyssa Ahle, on Reframing the Victorians.
Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the well-to-do sat down to dinners of alarming richness. The modern vegetarian movement was a reaction to this…
By the 1880s vegetarian restaurants were popular in London, offering cheap and nutritious meals in respectable settings, and vegetarian cookbooks abounded. Found in every quarter of the town, the names were cheerful, such as the Apple Tree, within the City precincts, The Orange Grove in St Martin’s Lane, The Porridge Bowl in Holborn, The Rose, Finsbury Way, The Waverley in the Borough, and not far from Oxford Street, the Wheatleaf. Porridge was one of the mainstays of the vegetarian regime and the choices afforded included maize-mash and wheaten porridge; but the piece de resistance was, naturally, the Scotch oatmeal. Other recipes available included: vegetable goose, stuffing minus the bird; lentil cutlet with tomato sauce; steak-pie in a vegetable form; rump-steak from pot herbs; and macaroni, in various forms, was always in favor. With desserts, there were few things which could not be made on vegetarian principles–though suet was not allowed, plum pudding could be made without it–plum porridge, made of boiled wheat, sweetened and spiced, and with raisins. By the standards set by the Vegetarian Society, all food was cooked with all vegetable salts retained, and with no salt, soda or other substances added…
Vegetarianism By Evangeline Holland, on Edwardian Promenade.
In her Book of Household Management, Mrs. Beeton recommended the following picnic menu ideas for a gathering of twenty persons:
5 lbs.of Cold Salmon
Mayonnaise Sauce
1 Quarter of Lamb
Mint Sauce
1 Large Galantine of Veal
3 Boiled Chickens
1 Ham
2 Pigeon Pies
Salad with Dressing
2 Cucumbers
2 Fruit Tarts
Pastry Sandwiches
2 Jellies. 2 Creams
Custard
1 Gallon of Strawberries
3 lbs. of Grapes
1 lb of Cheese
½ lb. of Butter
4 Loaves of Bread, or Rolls
Picnic Ideas: How to Have a Victorian Style Picnic On Victoriana Magazine.
In the 1880s there was an amazing thirst for “things Japanese” as the land of the rising sun represented an exciting and mysterious destination at the far frontiers of European knowledge and imagination. Recreating a Japanese village in fashionable Knightsbridge was just one way to satisfy the intense Japan-mania of the day and it also helps explain why in the same year Gilbert and Sullivan’s popular comic opera The Mikado was launched on the London stage for its first performances.
The village attracted large crowds and a massive amount of press attention with its replica Japanese houses populated by genuine Japanese men, women and children as well as its “magnificently decorated and illuminated Buddhist temple.” One of the projects most striking and crowd-pulling features was the presence of a considerable number of Japanese artisans and their families, which greatly enhanced the experience for the Victorian visitor…
Japan in Late Victorian London: The Japanese Native Village in Knightsbridge and The Mikado, 1885 Review by Sean Curtin of the book by Sir Hugh Cortazzi, on The Japan Society.
This is the story of a Theatre that was constructed but never completed, an entrepreneur with a passion for Opera, archeological finds from London's past, bankruptcy, a Murder Mystery - still unsolved, a new home for Scotland Yard, and secret passages to the Houses of Parliament from a now Grade I Listed historic London building…
The National Opera House, Thames Embankment, London The Theatre That Never Was On the Arthur Lloyd website.
Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1981 musical Cats was not the first production to feature a cast of dancers dressed in cat costumes. Nearly one hundred years earlier, a ballet called Katrina made its debut at the Empire Theatre in London. Arranged by choreographer Kattie Lanner and set to music by composer Leopold Wenzel, it featured two intertwined stories. The first concerned the love affairs of a young student. The second—and far more interesting—took place in the Kingdom of Cats...
Katrina: A Victorian Ballet of Cats By Mimi Matthews, on her own website.
Terrifying Transformations: An Anthology of Victorian Werewolf Fiction, 1838-1896. Edited by Alexis Easley & Shannon Scott On Valancourt Books. This is simply a review but it lists the stories the book contains along with their authors, so I think it might be useful information.
This is a guide to over 300 leading figures in Victorian cinema, defined as filmmaking in its broadest sense from the first glimmerings in the 1870s to the death of Queen Victoria in January 1901.
The site has a range of resources designed to assist and stimulate further research in the field.
Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema
Reynold’s Shilling Map of London 1895 Part of Lee Jackson’s Dictionary of Victorian London.
Victorian London in Incredible Detail On Mapping London.
The Victorian Society has compiled a list of the less well known Victorian buildings London should never have lost…
London's Lost Victorian Buildings: Mapped By Joe O’Donnell, on Londonist.
The first stop for any visitor to London - Holmes fan or not - must be the Sherlock Holmes Museum, an evocation of No. 221-B, even to the 17 steps to the first-floor rooms that were reputably occupied between 1881-1904 by the Great Detective and his faithful friend Doctor Watson. Everything in the three-story museum is presented in an agreeably understated manner, without the hyper-appeal of lasers and holograms found at so many new London attractions. Nothing is displayed that is not mentioned in the stories, and the crowded and ornate Victorian spell is so expertly cast that you feel Holmes and Watson may walk in at any moment...
The London of Sherlock Holmes On the Sherlock Holmes Museum.
In the 19th century, London was the capital of the largest empire the world had ever known — and it was infamously filthy. It had choking, sooty fogs; the Thames River was thick with human sewage; and the streets were covered with mud.
But according to Lee Jackson, author of Dirty Old London: The Victorian Fight Against Filth, mud was actually a euphemism. "It was essentially composed of horse dung," he tells Fresh Air's Sam Briger. "There were tens of thousands of working horses in London [with] inevitable consequences for the streets. And the Victorians never really found an effective way of removing that, unfortunately..."
'Dirty Old London': A History Of The Victorians' Infamous Filth On the NPR website.
This multi-part series will examine middle-class houses during Fin-de-Siècle Britain, specifically looking at general tendencies in architecture, architectural features, façades, floor plans, as well as interior design in the homes of this period.
Houses in Fin-de-Siècle Britain On History Rhymes.
By creating the conditions for healthy competition, the Victorians believed it should be possible, in theory, for any man to succeed in the world through his own efforts no matter how humble his origins. Author Samuel Smiles coined the term ‘self-help’ which he used as the title for his best-selling book. Self-Help (1859) had chapters such as ‘Application and Perseverance’ and contained scores of inspirational case histories about men who had risen from humble beginnings to become captains of industry… This sounds exhilarating, but the price of failure was very high. People who didn’t rise in the world were assumed to be at fault. They were seen to be lazy, extravagant or proud and therefore responsible for their own poverty. Only those who were too old to work or held back by disability deserved help; for everyone else there was the dreaded workhouse, which was created by the New Poor Law of 1834…
The middle classes: etiquette and upward mobility By Kathryn Hughes, on the British Library website.
...unlike the relative closeness of modern economic and social classes, which form a spectrum, large gaps separated those in Victorian England so that moving from one class (or really set of classes) to another required a kind of quantum leap. Thus, as M. W. Flynn has pointed out, doubling a worker's wages would not, as it would now, markedly improve his or her lifestyle, particularly in regard to sanitation and healthiness, because such enormous gaps existed between the costs of housing for the working and middle classes that one would have had to raise the wages enormously to affect the kind of available housing.
Wages, the Cost of Living, Contemporary Equivalents to Victorian Money By George P. Landow, on the Victorian Web.
...the lower classes, particularly mothers, found themselves in acutely oppressive and challenging situations. While the women of the upper class busied themselves with following the proper protocol in selecting a suitor, the working-class mother found herself scrounging to make ends meet. Oftentimes, a working class mother would not be able to keep her family afloat, which would subsequently result in the issuing of several new laws prohibiting violence towards children. The desperate times that lower class women found themselves in periodically made them stoop to desperate measures, such as prostitution; in addition, there was an increase in abuse and neglect, ranging from infanticide, to abortion, to baby farming, which brought the nature of motherhood in Victorian England into question…
Hardships of Working-Class Mothers In Victorian England By Nicole Lemieux, on Pace University Webspace.
William [Fletcher] kept a diary, or, at least, he kept one for two years from June 1858 to March 1860. Jane Killick has transcribed and annotated the manuscript, which is held in the Special Collections at the University of Birmingham.
The reader might wish that William had been a lion tamer, or a soldier in the Foreign Legion, or a master criminal. But, no, William was a banker, living not in a busy metropolis, but in the little town of Bridgnorth. The bank he worked at, on the corner of Listley Street and High Street, just down from the Market Hall, is still there, though now part of the mighty HSBC. William was a young man – just 18 years old when he began his diary – but he was a young man with prospects…
The life and thoughts of a Victorian bank clerk By Chris Upton, on the Birmingham Post website.
Increasing industrialisation and growth of spending power for consumers meant that by the late 19th century, there was a real demand for women workers, as shops needed to expand quickly.
Cox explains that these new opportunities for shopgirls proved to be a chance to gain real independence.
“She actually becomes a sort of cultural icon in her own right, she’s a new kind of woman doing a new kind of work. People haven’t really seen her like before – she’s moving away from home and she’s earning an independent wage, however small.”
Working conditions were poor though and pay was a troubling concern for shopgirls – it was half of what their male equivalents were earning. Some women were forced to resort to prostitution to supplement their income, with a few areas of cities and towns becoming notorious for sex work...
The series makes clear that there was potential for both empowerment and exploitation of the shopgirl towards the end of the 19th century. Cox suggests that “it’s always the case of two steps forward and one step back with this kind of work...”
The rise of the British shopgirl By Rebecca Smith, on the Telegraph website.
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a trend emerged in English slang for bestowing mock “titles” on people employed or engaged in various jobs or pursuits. So an "admiral of the blue" was a publican, so-called because of the color of his apron. A "queen of the dripping pan" was a cook. A "lord of the foresheet" was a ship’s cook. And a "knight of the cue" was a billiard-player, a "knight of the thimble" was a tailor, a "knight of the lapstone" a cobbler, and a "knight of the brush" an artist…
17 Job Titles in Victorian Slang By Paul Anthony Jones, on Mental Floss.
1. Afternoonified
A society word meaning “smart.” Forrester demonstrates the usage: "The goods are not 'afternoonified' enough for me.”
2. Arfarfan'arf
A figure of speech used to describe drunken men. “He’s very arf’arf’an’arf," Forrester writes, "meaning he has had many ‘arfs,’” or half-pints of booze…
56 Delightful Victorian Slang Terms You Should Be Using By Erin McCarthy, on Mental Floss.
...Victorian information technology that reduced the size of the world and affected business, economics, politics, and daily life — the Penny Post of 1840. The Penny Post mandated a uniform, affordable rate for postage: a letter weighing up to ounce could travel anywhere in the UK for only a penny. A point of origin for computer-mediated communication (CMC), the Penny Post — empowered by Ralph Allen’s organized system of cross posts (1720), John Palmer’s mail coaches (1784), and nationwide railway service (c. 1847) — initiated the first communications “network...”
The Penny Post...transformed the mail from an expensive tax for revenue to a civic service affordable to all social classes.
The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing By Catherine J. Golden, on the Victorian Web.
In Victorian London, though service wasn’t 24/7, it was close to 12/6. Home delivery routes would go by every house 12 times a day — yes, 12. In 1889, for example, the first delivery began about 7:30 a.m. and the last one at about 7:30 p.m. In major cities like Birmingham by the end of the century, home routes were run six times a day.
“In London, people complained if a letter didn’t arrive in a couple of hours,” said Catherine J. Golden, a professor of English at Skidmore College and author of “Posting It: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing” (2009)...
The Birth of Cheap Communication (and Junk Mail) By Randall Stross, on the New York Times website.
Who has not heard with pleasure the sharp, loud, firm 'rat-tat' of the postman? What a stir it causes in the house! Charlie flies up the stairs two at a time, hoping to get the letters. Ah! but somebody's before you this time, Charlie. Miss PolIy heard that knock, and has run downstairs from her room, and, being a bit of a romp, does not mind jumping the last half-dozen stairs, so that she may get to the door first and receive the letters. But, hark! I can hear other footsteps and other sounds. Yes, here is little Tommy Toddles, who has managed to scramble up three stairs, crying, ' Me hab em.' Well, PoIly does not mind, and so little Tommy marches into the room quite delighted to be the bearer of, perhaps, good news.
But I wonder whether my readers ever think of the care and trouble taken to deliver their letters as quickly as possible. We can write to our cousins in the country one afternoon, and the next morning the letters will be waiting for them to read at the breakfast-table. How different it was when our grandfathers and their grandfathers were young! Before railways were started, when the roads were wretchedly bad, the post was very slow. What would my young friends in Glasgow say, if their letters from Edinburgh were more than a week on the journey; or our boys and girls in Cornwall, if they had to wait nine or ten days before they could possibly get an answer from London?
Postal System On the Dictionary of Victorian London.
Victorian Advertising By Jennifer Carnell, on Sensation Press. A collection of adverts published in the United Kingdom during the Victorian era.
It’s more or less a given these days that cameras are everywhere and privacy is a quaint notion from the past. But it turns out that people were already starting to feel that way in the 1880s, when advancing technology allowed the production of cameras small and fast enough to be hidden by the user and produce shots of unprecedented candidness.
Called “detective cameras” at the time, as chronicled by the National Media Museum, these models utilized relatively speedy gelatine dry plates and ranged from basic handheld box cameras — remarkable at the time for their modest size and lack of tripod — to more elaborate models that disguised the camera inside a book or hat…
Victorian Era Detective Cameras and the Birth of Privacy Concerns By David Becker, on PetaPixel.
...touching up photos was common back in the day. Photographers made permanent edits on the plates themselves so that all prints would look brighter and more appealing. This British photography journal from 1875 instructed photographers to use a sharp, fine-pointed pencil to add highlights to a picture, then brighten up things like cheeks that might print darker than desired by “cross-hatching with a rather blunted pencil.”
The result is a touched-up negative that looks more crackled and grotesque than beautiful — before it’s printed, that is...
Here’s How Victorians “Photoshopped” Photos By Erin Blakemore, on the Smithsonian.
As part of their “toilet” in the morning, ladies of leisure would ensure well plucked eyebrows, perhaps trim their eyelashes, and daub castor oil onto their eyelids and lashes. To hide freckles, blotches, or redness, they could dust on rice powder, zinc oxide or, the most expensive option, pearl powder, which was a mixture of chloride of bismuth and French chalk (talc) and provided a silky white and lustrous cosmetic powder. On their lips they might apply a clear pomade (like beeswax) for a shine and to provide protection from the elements, and some contained dye to discreetly accentuate the lip colour, crushed flowers and carmine (made from the female cochineal insect) being favoured… Eye paint (eyeshadow) was popular, red and black, used excessively by “fallen women” but very subtly by respectable ladies (more like eyeliner), who would deny wearing it and be insulted if anyone ever dared to ask. Eye paint was made of mixed lead tetroxide, mercuric sulphide, antimony, cinnabar, vermilion, and secret ingredients. Another choice was to put beeswax on their lashes, then apply any number of black powders, from soot to crushed precious stones.
Early Victorian Era Make-up By RS Fleming, on Kate Tattersall Adventures.
Victorian Make-up Recipes By RS Fleming, on Kate Tattersall Adventures.
Victorian Feminine Ideal: about the perfect silhouette, hygiene, grooming, & body sculpting By RS Fleming, on Kate Tattersall Adventures.
In the 1840s Victorian drawers were plain and reached well below the knees. In the 1850s they became more embellished so that by 1868 decoration on knickers was usual. Often the lower leg edges of Victorian knickers were trimmed with lace and had 5 or 6 tucks above it.
Left - French cambric and broderie anglaise lace Victorian drawers of 1867 and still open legged.By 1876 the drawer legs of knickers merged to become closed. That is, the open nature of the crotch was closed and an opening of about four inches closed by a few buttons existed instead at the side hip.A revolution had occurred - Victorian drawer legs were no longer separate - they were now fashionable knickers. Fabrics used were changing too and silk, as well as flannel was popular choice for knickers...
Undergarments History: Pants, Drawers, Briefs and Knickers Fashion By Pauline Weston Thomas, on Fashion-Era.
Dressing the Late 19th Century Woman On Vintage Fashion 1840-1940. 12 photographs showing the different layers to a woman’s outfit.
Factoid: n. Something that becomes accepted as a fact, although it is not (or may not be) true; spec. an assumption or speculation reported and repeated so often that it is popularly considered true; a simulated or imagined fact… (Oxford English Dictionary)
Victorian sex factoids On Lesley Hall's Web Pages.
Between 1892 and 1920 the survey was completed by 45 women – mostly middle-class college and university graduates – providing modern historians with a unique insight into the secret romantic appetites of a generation raised with Victorian values.
The results show that most women knew little about sex before marriage, with some admitting that they only picked up the facts of life by observing the habits of farm animals.
But once married, most women said that their sex lives were active and enjoyable. Of the sample, 35 said that they desired intercourse and 24 said that mutual pleasure was a reason for making love. Three-quarters of the women said they made love once a week.
Another of the anonymous women, whose questionnaire gives her birth year as 1867, professed the very modern view that a fulfilling sex life was the key to a long and secure marriage…
Victorian-era women enjoyed making love, according to earliest sex survey By Matthew Moore, on the Telegraph website.
Historian Jeff Evans, from Manchester Metropolitan University, has painstakingly sifted through more than 280,000 criminal cases at the National Archive at Kew which suggest that the supposedly prudish Victorians had a far more relaxed attitude to sex between men than their 1960s counterparts.
The records – which now form the biggest database of its kind – are believed to represent 64% of all indictable court cases relating to sex between men held in the Lancashire Assize and Quarter Sessions.
They show that outside of London, The Criminal Justice System in regions such as Lancashire simply weren’t interested in prosecuting gay men for their activities.
Jeff said: “Between 1850 and the start of World War One, prosecutions of consensual sex between men in Lancashire are negligible – less than four or five cases per year. This suggests it was not a priority for police.
“Furthermore, when these cases actually got to court, more than half were thrown out. The Grand Jury apparently thought it was just none of their business.”
...even actions such as the Labouchere Amendment to the Criminal Amendment Act 1885, which criminalised all types of sexual activity between two men, didn’t make an appreciable difference to the number of prosecutions.
The surprising truth about the lives of gay men in Victorian England Victorians more liberal than their Sixties counterparts, study suggests. On Manchester Metropolitan University website.
It is often argued that the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed a significant change in gender roles, which led to the emergence of “separate spheres” in the nineteenth century…
Recently historians have begun to question some aspects of this story, pointing out that these ideas of gender difference were for the most part very old, and that women were not excluded from work and public life in the nineteenth century. Women were excluded from some occupations and activities, but they entered new ones, for example authorship, teaching, and charity work. Working-class women still had to work to support themselves and their families, though the range of occupations available to them may have narrowed and some work, such as “sweated labour” in the textile trades, took place in the home. Towards the end of the century new jobs outside the home became available, and many women became clerks, typists, and shop assistants.
It is true that the concept of the respectable male “breadwinner”, who had the responsibility for providing financially for his entire family, was increasingly influential in this period. Consequently, women were frequently expected to give up their jobs when they got married. With the development of empire and a new wave of prosecutions of homosexuals in the 1890s, men were increasingly expected to demonstrate the masculine traits of muscle, might, and sexual attraction to women, combined with chivalrous concern for the weaker sex.
While gender differences may thus have been accentuated, the spheres of male and female activity were by no means totally “separate”, even at the end of the nineteenth century. As the Proceedings indicate, both men and women were present in many aspects of public and private life.
Gender in the Proceedings Men's and women's experiences of crime, justice and punishment On The Proceedings of the Old Bailey.
Any discussion of prostitution in the 19th century must begin by saying we have no idea of the numbers involved. In 1791, a police magistrate estimated (and he used the words ‘estimate’ and ‘conjecture’) that there were 50,000 prostitutes in London. Yet the word ‘prostitute’ was not used entirely the way we would use it today, i.e. to refer only to women sold their bodies for sex. In the 19th century, many people used it more widely, to refer to women who were living with men outside marriage, or women who had had illegitimate children, or women who perhaps had relations with men, but for pleasure rather than money…
Prostitution By Judith Flanders, on the British Library website.
Until 1868, the sale of drugs was practically unrestricted, and they could be bought like any other commodity. (Mitchell 228) During the Industrial Revolution drug use in England grew rampant, particularly among the working classes. (Meier 138) Drugs were brought to Britain from every corner of the expanding British Empire and the amount of opium sale was particularly staggering. (Parssinen 49) Dangerous drugs were commonly used for making home remedies and less frequently as a recreation for the bored and alienated people. The recreational use of opiates was popular particularly with pre-Victorian and Victorian artists and writers.
There was no moral condemnation of the use of opiates and their use was not regarded as addiction but rather as a habit in the Victorian period. However, when in the 1860s, “Dark England” with its opium dens in London's East End was described in popular press and books, various individuals and religious organisations began to campaign against unrestricted opium trafficking. In 1868, the Pharmacy Act recognised dangerous drugs and limited their sale to registered chemists and pharmacists, but until the end of the nineteenth century few doctors and scientists warned about the dangers of drug addiction.
Victorian Drug Use By Dr Andrzej Diniejko, on the Victorian Web.
Opium and other narcotic drugs played an important part in Victorian life. Shocking though it might be to us in the 21st century, in Victorian times it was possible to walk into a chemist and buy, without prescription, laudanum, cocaine and even arsenic. Opium preparations were sold freely in towns and country markets, indeed the consumption of opium was just as popular in the country as it was in urban areas.
Opium in Victorian Britain By Ellen Castelow, on Historic UK.
Gorgeous Vintage Advertisements for Heroin, Cannabis and Cocaine By Vincze Miklós, on io9.
Although there is no definitive evidence that Queen Victoria personally partook of either the medicinal or pleasurable benefits of marijuana, the extensive prescription of the drug by the royal physician suggests a general belief of the time in its propriety and effectiveness… The truth is that many, if not most, Victorian women used psychoactive drugs at some point in their life, and their widespread prescription was not viewed as unusual…
Victorian Women on Drugs, Part 1: Queen Victoria By Kristina Aikens, on Points: The Blog of the Alcohol & Drugs History Society.
During the 19th century, more than 25% of society operated at or below the proper nourishment level, 15-20% earned barely enough to survive, and 10% were unable to sustain themselves with the essential requirement of healthy, wholesome food. Translation: while Queen Victoria routinely feasted upon suet puddings, savory roast beef, and delicious ice cream, the less fortunate contented themselves with eating scraps, rotten vegetables, and potato peelings. Such was the dietary divide between the rich and poor in the Victorian era…
The Dietary Divide Between the Rich and Poor in the Victorian Era By Alyssa Ahle, on Reframing the Victorians.
Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the well-to-do sat down to dinners of alarming richness. The modern vegetarian movement was a reaction to this…
By the 1880s vegetarian restaurants were popular in London, offering cheap and nutritious meals in respectable settings, and vegetarian cookbooks abounded. Found in every quarter of the town, the names were cheerful, such as the Apple Tree, within the City precincts, The Orange Grove in St Martin’s Lane, The Porridge Bowl in Holborn, The Rose, Finsbury Way, The Waverley in the Borough, and not far from Oxford Street, the Wheatleaf. Porridge was one of the mainstays of the vegetarian regime and the choices afforded included maize-mash and wheaten porridge; but the piece de resistance was, naturally, the Scotch oatmeal. Other recipes available included: vegetable goose, stuffing minus the bird; lentil cutlet with tomato sauce; steak-pie in a vegetable form; rump-steak from pot herbs; and macaroni, in various forms, was always in favor. With desserts, there were few things which could not be made on vegetarian principles–though suet was not allowed, plum pudding could be made without it–plum porridge, made of boiled wheat, sweetened and spiced, and with raisins. By the standards set by the Vegetarian Society, all food was cooked with all vegetable salts retained, and with no salt, soda or other substances added…
Vegetarianism By Evangeline Holland, on Edwardian Promenade.
In her Book of Household Management, Mrs. Beeton recommended the following picnic menu ideas for a gathering of twenty persons:
5 lbs.of Cold Salmon
Mayonnaise Sauce
1 Quarter of Lamb
Mint Sauce
1 Large Galantine of Veal
3 Boiled Chickens
1 Ham
2 Pigeon Pies
Salad with Dressing
2 Cucumbers
2 Fruit Tarts
Pastry Sandwiches
2 Jellies. 2 Creams
Custard
1 Gallon of Strawberries
3 lbs. of Grapes
1 lb of Cheese
½ lb. of Butter
4 Loaves of Bread, or Rolls
Picnic Ideas: How to Have a Victorian Style Picnic On Victoriana Magazine.
In the 1880s there was an amazing thirst for “things Japanese” as the land of the rising sun represented an exciting and mysterious destination at the far frontiers of European knowledge and imagination. Recreating a Japanese village in fashionable Knightsbridge was just one way to satisfy the intense Japan-mania of the day and it also helps explain why in the same year Gilbert and Sullivan’s popular comic opera The Mikado was launched on the London stage for its first performances.
The village attracted large crowds and a massive amount of press attention with its replica Japanese houses populated by genuine Japanese men, women and children as well as its “magnificently decorated and illuminated Buddhist temple.” One of the projects most striking and crowd-pulling features was the presence of a considerable number of Japanese artisans and their families, which greatly enhanced the experience for the Victorian visitor…
Japan in Late Victorian London: The Japanese Native Village in Knightsbridge and The Mikado, 1885 Review by Sean Curtin of the book by Sir Hugh Cortazzi, on The Japan Society.
This is the story of a Theatre that was constructed but never completed, an entrepreneur with a passion for Opera, archeological finds from London's past, bankruptcy, a Murder Mystery - still unsolved, a new home for Scotland Yard, and secret passages to the Houses of Parliament from a now Grade I Listed historic London building…
The National Opera House, Thames Embankment, London The Theatre That Never Was On the Arthur Lloyd website.
Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1981 musical Cats was not the first production to feature a cast of dancers dressed in cat costumes. Nearly one hundred years earlier, a ballet called Katrina made its debut at the Empire Theatre in London. Arranged by choreographer Kattie Lanner and set to music by composer Leopold Wenzel, it featured two intertwined stories. The first concerned the love affairs of a young student. The second—and far more interesting—took place in the Kingdom of Cats...
Katrina: A Victorian Ballet of Cats By Mimi Matthews, on her own website.
Terrifying Transformations: An Anthology of Victorian Werewolf Fiction, 1838-1896. Edited by Alexis Easley & Shannon Scott On Valancourt Books. This is simply a review but it lists the stories the book contains along with their authors, so I think it might be useful information.
This is a guide to over 300 leading figures in Victorian cinema, defined as filmmaking in its broadest sense from the first glimmerings in the 1870s to the death of Queen Victoria in January 1901.
The site has a range of resources designed to assist and stimulate further research in the field.
Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2017-08-06 12:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-08-06 01:06 pm (UTC)And I'm really glad that you've found the discussion pages useful ^___^
no subject
Date: 2017-08-06 07:54 pm (UTC)Any chance of doing an index of the linkspam topics? (Or would it be acceptable if I made one?) Because I've already been turning back to them for reference on this and that, but I don't always remember clearly which canon story went with which topic.
no subject
Date: 2017-08-06 09:45 pm (UTC)