- 4 months ago
Dr. Bob Nicholson joins WIRED to answer the internet's most intriguing queries about Victorian England. How did people entertain themselves in England in the 1800's? Why was openly showing feelings frowned upon in the Victorian Era? How many assassination attempts did Queen Victoria survive? Was it very difficult to wear a bustle? How did Victorian style become associated with “spooky” things? Answers to these questions and plenty more await on Victorian England Support.Director: Lauren ZeitounDirector of Photography: James FoxEditor: Alex MechanikExpert: Dr. Bob NicholsonLine Producer: Jamie RasmussenAssociate Producer: Paul GulyasProduction Manager: Jonathan RinkermanCasting Producer: Nick SawyerCamera Operator: Neill FrancisSound Mixer: Oliver BeardProduction Assistant: Andrea RattiPost Production Supervisor: Christian OlguinPost Production Coordinator: Stella ShortinoSupervising Editor: Eduardo AraujoAdditional Editor: Sam DiVitoAssistant Editor: Andy Morell
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00:00Hi I'm Dr Bob Nicholson and I'm a historian. I'm here to answer your questions from the internet.
00:04This is Victorian England Support.
00:11Wayward Witch asks, so I looked up if people actually ate mummies and not only did they eat
00:16them, they had the unwrapping parties and also just did cannibalism. What was happening in the
00:22Victorian era? It is true that mummies were eaten, consumed as a form of medicine and that had been
00:28going on for a millennia. So it's not something that Victorians just invent out of thin air. And
00:33it is true that the Victorians had mummy unwrapping parties. So mummies would be, you know, shipped over
00:38from Egypt and then unwrapped sometimes in front of an audience that was a bit like a sort of a
00:43sort of scientific lecture. But in some instances rich people would do it as a form of dinner party
00:48entertainment and you would unwrap the bandages. But I don't want to give you the impression that
00:51people were then kind of rocking up with a plate like they were at a buffet and just taking a big
00:55bite out of a mummy. So in part it is driven by a genuine fascination for ancient Egyptian history
01:00and culture, but also I think a real lack of reverence for respecting that culture by, you know,
01:04leaving it where it belonged. Sometimes they were grinding them up and using them in paint. There is
01:08a particular pigment called mummy brown that was used by several artists in their work at the time.
01:13Kolaromi Bad asks, you think when a man saw a woman's bare legs back in Victorian times,
01:18that was considered porn? Well, yeah, kind of. So legs, feet and ankles were really heavily
01:24eroticised during the 19th century. And it kind of makes sense because at this point women didn't
01:29wear trousers so even the kind of outline or shape of their legs is something that you wouldn't
01:34ordinarily see in everyday life. They would have been covered by skirts. And we do tend, I think,
01:38to eroticise the things we can't see. So it's not too surprising that they were into legs. This is a
01:43period where things like can-can dancing was incredibly popular and it was because it gave a
01:48glimpse of people's legs. There's a common myth about the Victorians that they were so prudish about legs
01:54that they would cover up the legs of tables and pianos because they were just too scandalous.
01:58This isn't really true. In fact, it starts as a rumour about Americans who were considered more
02:03prudish in the 19th century and gradually then becomes one that was told about the Victorians.
02:08I don't want to give you the impression though that all Victorian pornography was that vanilla,
02:12because if you actually look at the properly hardcore stuff, you'll see all sorts of things from
02:17sex toys to orgies, gay sex, you know, all manner of kind of role play. So it wasn't all about legs,
02:23but it was definitely a big part of their sexual culture. Historical Fun asks,
02:27It's amazing how many times Queen Victoria survived assassination attempts. She's actually faster than
02:32a speeding bullet or a Jedi. She did survive run-ins with seven different assassins. Each of them,
02:38she came out largely unscathed. Now you mentioned a speeding bullet and that's actually the real heart
02:44of many of these cases. So the first guy who shot at Queen Victoria in 1840, he fired at her carriage.
02:50Everybody saw him do it. They heard the gunshot. And at the end of it, he said,
02:54I am the one who did it. But Victoria wasn't harmed. Her carriage drove on. And he was of course
02:57prosecuted. But the government couldn't prove that his gun was definitely fully loaded. He was using
03:04what were known as muzzle loading pistols. And to load them, you would have to tip a bit of gunpowder in,
03:08you would force in a bullet wrapped in some wadding, and then you'd fire it. But if you did all of that
03:12without loading the actual bullet, and you fired the gun, it would still go off. But no projectile would fire out.
03:18So after the assassination attempt, the police spend days looking for the bullet,
03:22but they can't find it. So when the case gets to court, the jury are not convinced
03:26that the assassin's guns were actually loaded to kill, and they find him not guilty.
03:32Unfortunately for him, his defense did too good a job at convincing the jury that he was mad.
03:36So he was then committed to an asylum where he spent the next 27 years,
03:40even though doctors reported every year that he was perfectly sane.
03:44The Pixelpaint asks, was it very difficult to wear a bustle? Could they be put on and taken
03:50off without assistance? Could you sit on a chair or ride in a carriage while wearing one?
03:54Did they complicate using a bathroom? And did you have to be extra aware of your surroundings
03:59so as not to knock stuff over all the time? Right, well full disclosure, I've never worn a bustle.
04:04But I have spoken to historical re-enactors who do, and I've got some answers for you on this.
04:09So firstly, a bustle was a kind of padding that you would wear at the bottom of your back,
04:14and it would kind of extend an almost kind of hump out from your hips to kind of make them look
04:18sort of wider at the back. And it would have looked sexy and desirable and fashionable
04:22to wear these kind of clothes at the time. The point of it was to accentuate your curve.
04:25They're actually much more flexible than you might think. So they bend, you can sit down on them,
04:30they're not kind of rigid and hard kind of iron cages. The big question is definitely about using
04:34the toilet, but the practicalities of it actually are not that difficult.
04:38So firstly, Victorian women's underwear would often be kind of parted at the crotch,
04:43or made there be a little flap that you would unbutton, so you wouldn't have to pull your
04:46underwear down. And for the most part, you would use a chamber pot, which you could pick up and,
04:49you know, lift your dress up, insert between your legs and do your business.
04:52And Victorian women would have done this so often that it would have been second nature to them.
04:56While this certainly weren't a fashion that made it easy to do some of these things,
04:59it didn't completely prevent Victorian women from going about in public,
05:02sitting down or going to the toilet. Eddie the Shoe asks,
05:06When did the Victorian age begin? Victoria didn't come to the throne until 1837, did she?
05:11Yeah, that's absolutely right. So the Victorian era begins in 1837 and ends in 1901. So well over 60
05:19years. It's a really long time period. And a lot of big changes happened during that time. So in some
05:24ways, it doesn't really make sense to talk about it as a single historical period. It would be like
05:29imagining the 1950s and the 1990s were identical. By the end of the period, you've got people looking
05:35back nostalgically to a simpler time in the 1840s. Things changed quick during Victoria's reign.
05:41Camisa Roach asks, What are some of your favourite Victorian era technological innovations inventions
05:47and why? As soon as we're filming a video, let's go for the camera. Well, let me show you actually one
05:51of my favourite forms of Victorian photography. It's basically 3D photography, stereoscopic photography.
05:56You can see an example of it here, where you have two images side by side that look identical,
06:01but they're taken with two lenses, your eyes width apart, mimicking the way that we see.
06:05And you put them into a device like this, which is a stereoscope viewer, and you would look into them,
06:11slide the image to focus them, and suddenly it pops into 3D. And in this case, it looks like I'm
06:16suddenly immersed in a flock of birds. It really reminds me of a modern virtual reality headset.
06:23And these were really popular in the 19th century, and they were invented almost as soon as the first
06:28cameras. You could buy packs of photographs that would show you, let's say, a travel around ancient
06:32Egypt. You could get ones of celebrities. You could even get slightly saucier pornographic ones. So,
06:38brace yourself here, but in this one, the lady does have her ankles out and she is smoking a cigarette.
06:43So, you know, deeply scandalous stuff that you could look at in the privacy of your own home.
06:46Classical Futurist asks, how did Victorian style, like fashion, architecture, etc., become the spooky
06:53style? Buildings that were built in largely the first half of the 19th century were inspired by
06:58the medieval period. So the Victorians were kind of looking back to the medieval era as a time of
07:02the supernatural and the spooky when designing their buildings. And now we look at those buildings and
07:06think of them as Victorians. So it's a kind of, it's a kind of chain reaction almost of historical
07:11periods looking back in time. The Victorian period is also when some of our most famous and most
07:15beloved ghost stories and horror stories were first written. Think about, you know,
07:19the work of Edgar Allan Poe or of course Bram Stoker's Dracula. All of them, I guess,
07:24have that classic Victorian aesthetic that we're still recycling in horror movies today.
07:27So traditionalstop2498 says, explain like I'm five. How did newspapers in the 1700s and 1800s
07:34get up-to-date stories from all over the world? So in the 1700s and the first half of the 19th century,
07:41news can really only travel as fast as the person carrying it. So that might mean that
07:45actually news from America might take well over a week to reach Britain. As time goes on though,
07:50the key invention that really transforms this is the telegraph line. It allows information to be
07:54sent all across the world, sort of buzzing down telegraph lines in seconds. In fact,
07:59the time it was called the eighth wonder of the world. And there's a great example of this. Abraham
08:03Lincoln is assassinated in 1865. It takes well over a week for that news to reach Britain,
08:08by which point America is already in crisis. But when President Garfield is shot, there is
08:13a cable running underneath the Atlantic Ocean carrying news. So in the space of 15 years,
08:17we go from America being over a week away to feeling the pulse of a dying president.
08:22So Vladith asks, what sort of humour would be unacceptable to a 19th century audience?
08:27Do we have any edgy jokes from that period? Well, we first got to start with the elephant
08:32in the room, which is this old myth that the Victorians were not amused. That is completely wrong.
08:37They absolutely loved comedy. They produced enormous numbers of joke books like these.
08:42They printed jokes in every weekly newspaper. So they definitely had a sense of humour.
08:48And I've got here a joke book entirely filled with puns, 300 pages. It's called Puniana.
08:54They're eye-wateringly bad. Let me read out one of my favourites. So there it is.
08:59If you were to kill a conversational goose, what vegetable would it allude to?
09:06Asparagus or asparagus. Yeah. Not great, right? But they love these kind of jokes. They were known
09:12as conundrum jokes and they were really popular at dinner parties. They also like jokes about social
09:16situations, jokes about mother-in-laws, lawyers, and actually they particularly loved jokes about
09:22poets. So here's one of my favourites. A young poet goes to see a fortune teller and he says to her,
09:27you know, I'm poor, I'm hungry. The world doesn't recognise my genius. What is going to become of
09:33me? And the fortune teller gazes into a crystal ball and says, you will be very poor until you are 30
09:41years old. And the poet gets really excited and says, and what then? Then, she says, then you will
09:49get used to it. Which kind of feels very relatable from when I was a poor grad student several years
09:55ago. They also quite like jokes where men would be trying to flirt with Victorian women and the woman
10:01would kind of put them down brutally. So one of them goes, a man goes up to a woman and says, oh,
10:06darling, how I wish I were that book that you clasp so lovingly. The woman looks up from the book and
10:10says, yes, how I wish you were so I could shut you up. So yeah, they loved, they loved comedy.
10:16The idea that the Victorians was terminally serious and dour and not amused is not true.
10:22Equal Temporary 1326 argues, is Jack the Ripper so well remembered because it happened in London
10:28during the Victorian era where the newspaper business had been just invented shortly before
10:32the murders occurred? So newspapers go back way before Jack the Ripper, but this was certainly
10:38a time when kind of mass journalism was absolutely taking off. The media are absolutely central to the
10:44myth of Jack the Ripper. So it's absolutely true that five women were brutally murdered in the east end
10:50of London. But the truth is, we know almost nothing about the person who did it, except their capacity
10:55for violence and the fact that they wanted to enact that violence on women. The Jack the Ripper that you
11:00might be imagining is largely an invention of the press. Journalists covered the story in extraordinary
11:06detail. They were publishing details almost every day about the search for the murderer. The media
11:11pause all of its fears, its fantasies about London. And that's where we start to get all these kind of
11:16rumours. But almost all of this has been invented by and stoked by the newspaper press, all desperate
11:22for a story. The name Jack the Ripper is, in all likelihood, invented by a journalist working for
11:27a newspaper called The Star, who we think now fabricated some of those letters that were supposedly
11:33sent by Jack the Ripper, that's been built on since by the movie industry, by the Chamber of Horrors.
11:38So yeah, that's the reason that Jack the Ripper is still with us today. He is not really a creature of
11:42flesh and blood, but like a monster conjured out of paper and ink.
11:46Melissa Ludd asks, what do you know about the Great Stink of London in 1858?
11:52So this is a point where the City of London had been expanding rapidly. Many people were losing
11:56their jobs in rural areas due to the mechanisation of farm work. So people were flocking into London,
12:01and the infrastructure of the city couldn't keep up. So you've got people's homes, businesses, factories,
12:06slaughterhouses, all pouring out filth into the River Thames. And it would pile up on the embankments,
12:13sometimes several feet deep. And it was a particular summer in 1858. It was really hot weather,
12:18the river had dropped, and the stench of it was absolutely unbearable. I mean, there are stories
12:23of people vomiting as they got too close, of them being unable to work in the Houses of Parliament.
12:28It was truly horrifically bad. And their solution was to build an astonishing new sewer system, led by
12:36Joseph Bazalgette, one of the great heroic engineers of the 19th century. They laid about
12:40a thousand miles of new sewers beneath the streets of London, many of which are still in use today.
12:45It is one of the most astonishing feats of engineering in the whole 19th century. And it largely solved
12:50the problem. So a Quora user asks, how did English literature change throughout the Victorian era?
12:55I feel like if I was a literary scholar, I would probably tell you all about writers like Charles
13:01Dickens or the Brontes, Bram Stoker, and all those kind of greats. I want to tell you about a different
13:06form of Victorian literature. I'm talking about popular newspapers and magazines, the kind of
13:11things you pay a penny for every weekend that will be filled with curious stories, cartoons,
13:16odd human interest stories and competitions. And one of my favourites is this newspaper here,
13:21which was called Ali Sloper's Half Holiday. And it stars this character, Ali Sloper, is a kind of odd,
13:28heroic figure. And every week he would get involved in some kind of misadventure, usually some kind of
13:34money-making scheme. And of course it always goes wrong, but we kind of love him. And we think of
13:39him really now as one of the very, very first recurring comic book characters. And he had an
13:44absolutely enormous fandom. Hundreds of thousands of people who bought this paper every week. In fact,
13:50he was so popular that he had his own line of merch. So you could win Ali Sloper pocket watches with his
13:56face engraved on the back. You could buy, this is an Ali Sloper Vesta case. If I pop it open,
14:01you can see it's where you keep your matches. And people started to act almost as if he was a real
14:06person. They would write him letters as if he was a real character. And so he's a product of this new
14:11wave of basically cheap periodical literature that took the Victorian world by storm. So for me, it's not
14:17necessarily your big canonical writers that you might learn about at school or read about at university.
14:22It's actually kind of cheap Victorian literature that really sets the tone for the century.
14:27So a Quora user asks, how did people entertain themselves in the 1800s? So let's imagine you're
14:33in Victorian London and you want to go on a night out. Maybe you go to the music hall and see singers,
14:38acrobats, performing animals. Maybe you go, if it's a nice summer's evening, you'll go to a pleasure
14:44garden and they'll be drinking and dancing and music. One time in the late Victorian period, they turned an
14:49exhibition centre into a miniature version of Venice, complete with canals and gondolas where
14:54you could sort of sail around and eat Italian food. Or you could go to an American bar in London
14:58where you would be served American cocktails. All sorts of opportunities for a grand night out.
15:03If you wanted to be entertained at home, we had a few options there too. It might just be pretty
15:07simple things like reading, playing music if you were able to. Victorians also loved parties with a bit
15:12of organised fun and some parlour games. And my favourite bit of those games actually were the forfeits.
15:18So the forfeit might be something like, kiss the woman that you most admire, but find a way to
15:22conceal it. And they suggest the only way to do it was to kiss every woman in the room. So plenty of
15:27fun to be had, whether you're at home or out in the city. Marxis8 asks, and with an E may be curious
15:33about hygiene during the Victorian era. Urine to wash clothes? Stank. Yeah, so throughout history, urine
15:40has been used to clean things, including clothes, and that's because it contains ammonia, which actually
15:45we still use in all sorts of cleaning products today. But I don't want to give you the impression
15:49that like Victorian families were just like loading up their weekly laundry wash in a massive barrel
15:54of pee. They did use hot water and soap, just like we would today. And in fact, you know, cleanliness
15:58was really important to the Victorians. You open up any Victorian newspaper and you will find advert
16:03after advert for soap products and other hygiene products. Yeah, while urine was used to clean things,
16:09it certainly wasn't the main way that people kept their clothes clean. Mad Season 1994 asks,
16:14why was homelessness, low pay and child labour so rampant in Victorian England? Was the economy
16:20overall better or poorer during her reign? This is a time of enormous economic growth. We've got
16:26mass industrialisation, global trade expanding, and of course, you know, the colonisation of the empire
16:32that brought with it a lot of economic benefits for some people in Britain. For ordinary working class
16:36folks, it was a much more mixed picture. And they could be much more at the whims of changes in the economy.
16:41So in the 1840s, sometimes known as the hungry forties, plenty of poor people lived right on the
16:46edge of starvation. And of course, things were horrifically bad in Ireland during the famine of
16:50that period. So the question then is, well, why? I mean, one of the reasons is that we don't really have
16:56a welfare state in the Victorian period as we do now. So no national health service, no unemployment
17:01insurance, no minimum wage. And that meant that a lot of people lost out and worked for very,
17:06very low wages. But plenty of Victorians also managed to earn a living, keep a roof over their
17:10head. It wasn't quite as relentlessly bleak as some of the stories you might read from Charles Dickens.
17:15He was really on a mission to expose some of the social problems in Victorian Britain. So he highlighted
17:20like the conditions of the poorest areas of the city because he was attempting to get people to
17:25drive change. So the appropriately named Victoriporn asks, did you know the Victorians invented the
17:31vibrator? It was for doctors to use on female patients to quote, cure hysteria. Right. Okay.
17:39So this is one of the most enduring myths about the Victorians. So they did invent electric vibrators
17:45in the 19th century, but they were marketed almost exclusively at the time for men and to treat kind of
17:50like muscular injuries. Now, that's not to say that people might have got a bit creative with them. But if
17:55you read Victorian pornography, you never see a vibrator in it. And they had loads of stories about dildos.
18:00So I think if people were using electric vibrators sexually, it must have cropped up in one of those
18:05at some point. The other side of this then is the idea that doctors were basically bringing
18:10their female patients to orgasm as a cure for hysteria. But yeah, the idea that every doctor
18:14was spending every day basically, you know, bringing their female patients to orgasm and was so tired
18:20that they needed an electric vibrator to help out. Yeah, this is not true. So the word hysteria comes
18:25from the Greek word hysteria, meaning uterus. So it is, you know, very closely associated with women
18:31and used as a way to, you know, explain what people perceived as like irrational women's behavior.
18:35So yeah, classic bit of Victorian misogyny at play there.
18:38Maripe asks,
18:40What was everyday life like for middle-class teenagers during the Victorian era?
18:46Well, it would really depend. So if you were a teenage boy, I guess you would spend quite a lot of
18:50your teenage years in some form of education. You wouldn't be expected to work a job at that point,
18:55at least certainly not to support your family. And at the end of your teenage years, you might
18:59be expecting a career in a profession like a doctor or a lawyer, maybe the clergy. And as a man,
19:04you would have actually quite a lot of freedom to move around the city, to go to music halls, to pubs.
19:09If you were a teenage girl, your world would be narrower. So you wouldn't necessarily have as much
19:14schooling. You certainly wouldn't go on to university. Your life would be more focused on developing the
19:18skills needed to be a wife and a mother. But that's not to suggest that the Victorian teenage
19:23girls didn't have fun as well. But yeah, their experiences would really depend on their gender.
19:28TheCopperOwl1 asks, Can anybody recommend movies that take place in Victorian London?
19:33I love the setting of the two Sherlock Holmes movies, and would like to watch things with
19:37similar vibes. This is really hard because whenever historians watch films, we always like
19:42nitpick at the tiny details and get really annoyed at the stuff they do wrong. But let me give you some
19:46examples that I think are pretty good, particularly if you like those Sherlock Holmes movies. Actually,
19:49I really recommend a TV series called Ripper Street that came out a few years ago. It's not
19:54just about Jack the Ripper, but about the police and kind of Whitechapel in that era. It's kind of
19:58like a fun version of a Victorian textbook. If you love Sherlock Holmes, the classic Sherlock Holmes
20:03series from I think the 80s and 90s, starring Jeremy Brett. It's a bit dated, but I still kind of love it.
20:07I also really like a film called The Invisible Woman, which is about Charles Dickens starring Ralph Fiennes,
20:12and it's all about his extramarital affair. So if you want to see a slightly different side
20:16to Dickens, I heavily recommend that. Oh, and look, I've got to recommend the best one,
20:20of course. It's The Muppets Christmas Carol. Every Victorian historian's favourite film,
20:24the best adaptation of Dickens by far is the one with Gonzo and Kermit and Miss Piggy. I watch it
20:29every year. I absolutely love it. And not just because it's The Muppets, it also gets Dickens right.
20:33Dickens was an incredibly sentimental writer. It's one of the things that people often find really
20:37annoying about him. But The Muppets are sentimental too. They're a perfect match for Dickens.
20:41It is a fantastic piece of work. So the thing that annoys me the most in Hollywood films
20:47is that they always get the newspaper props wrong when they do things set in the Victorian period.
20:53The newspapers will always have these massive headlines on the front, things like, you know,
20:56Jack the Ripper strikes again in massive font. Where actually, if you look at the front cover of the
21:01vast majority of Victorian newspapers, like this copy of The Times from the 1840s, they look like this.
21:09It is an absolute wall of text. And it is all tiny adverts, not even news on the front page,
21:15never mind headlines. The Times looked like this until the 1960s. You just didn't get headlines or
21:21images or anything like that on the front cover of newspapers. So here's my message to film directors.
21:25If you want to put headlines or news stories in your Victorian set film, what you need is a newsboy
21:31crying it out. Jack the Ripper strikes again in the voice of a newsboy is totally fine.
21:35Do not put it on the front cover of a newspaper or I'm coming for you.
21:38So a Quora user asks, could sewer powered gas lights, like in the old days in London,
21:42be used to save energy? So this is true. So there were attempts to try and vent off the gas that
21:48would build up in sewers, actually could explode if it was left out unchecked, and to kind of funnel it up
21:53to street lamps that would just be on the streets above the sewers where it would then be burned and
21:58used for gaslight. They were kind of a mixed success in terms of how well they worked, but an amazing bit of
22:02ingenuity. And I believe there's still one around that you can go and see on the Strand in London
22:06today. XCJM asks, why did Victorians think penny farthings were a good idea? And I know why you're
22:13asking because when you see those bicycles, they look absolutely mad because we are used to a
22:17particular image of the bicycle where both wheels are the same size. But the penny farthing was an
22:22important milestone in the invention of the bicycles we know today. And the reason that they were a good
22:27idea is that they allowed you to ride faster. So every rotation of the pedal with a massive wheel
22:32makes you travel a further distance than if you had a really, really small wheel. So actually,
22:36once you were up there and you knew how to ride them, you could go at a pretty good speed.
22:39It's only a few years later in the late 19th century when the so-called safety bicycle was
22:44invented with gears and a chain that would kind of replicate that big wheel effect that you no longer
22:49needed a penny farthing. And I guess it's also worth remembering when we see them, you know,
22:52up there on these bicycles. This is also a time when people were much more used to the idea of
22:56mounting a horse. So the idea of kind of mounting a high bicycle like that perhaps wouldn't have been
23:00that unusual. It was pretty dangerous though. The new bikes were called safety bikes for a reason.
23:04Sifely asks, how did Victorians even court one another? Must have a much jollier time than just
23:10texting and social networking, I can tell you. Courting in the Victorian era would really depend on your
23:15social circumstances. So if you're middle class, you know, you might be introduced to someone through
23:19your friends and family. You might go along to the house of a woman that you admired to kind of pitch
23:24woo to her and try and sort of, you know, convince her to marry you. But you'd have to do it in full
23:29view of her family who would maybe be sitting in the living room with you kind of watching all this
23:32happen. And you'd maybe be hoping, or maybe they'll go upstairs and we can we can kiss or have a bit
23:36of fun. There are lots of other examples of Victorians going out courting, going dancing, going to
23:41shows. In terms of meeting each other though, there are actually things Victorians did that are not so
23:44different to the way we do it now using dating apps. So if you couldn't find a partner through your
23:49friends and family, you could, if you wanted, put an advert in something called a matrimonial column.
23:55So I remember one I found where a man who was promising to whisk away his new bride to his tea
24:01plantation in India, and his only criteria for her was that quote, plumpness was essential. You would
24:06exchange photographs with each other, decide if you like the look of each other, exchange a few letters
24:11as well, a little bit like messaging on a dating app. And at the end of it all, if it worked out,
24:14you wouldn't meet. So yeah, not actually that different from texting and social networking after
24:20all. Let me show you an example. So here we go. A young gentleman, age 23, good looking, tall and
24:25dark and in good position, wishes to correspond with a young lady with a view to matrimony in close
24:30photo, which will be returned to, and here's his pseudonym, Minnesota. I wonder if he ever found love?
24:36Daisy Fluffington is looking for a user-friendly Victorian slang guide.
24:40And she's in luck because the Victorians actually kept loads of different slang dictionaries. And
24:46there are some really great Victorian slang terms that I kind of think we should maybe bring back
24:50into everyday usage. So one I saw the other day was to say, I've got the mobs, which apparently
24:55meant that I was depressed, which I could absolutely see people using now. What else was there? Oh yeah,
25:00sausages were known as bags of mystery, which I think it's kind of, you know, probably a little bit
25:05too close to the bone if you've ever seen how sausages are made. We tend to think of the 19th century
25:09as a time when, you know, the Queen's English was the main thing that was spoken and Americanisms
25:13didn't come in until, I don't know, Hollywood movies. But it's not true. The Victorians loved
25:16American slang terms. The phrase to go the whole hog, which we use regularly in Britain now,
25:20that's an Americanism. If we say the word skedaddle, meaning to run away, that comes from the United
25:25States. There's a great online dictionary called Green's Dictionary of Slang, which I recommend,
25:29where you can look up all sorts of slang terms from all different periods and find out where they came from.
25:33Raquel McKay says, it's just an accessory, they said. She's talking here about Victorian hatpins.
25:39And Victorian women had all sorts of really elaborate hats that they would buy. And they
25:43weren't the kind of things that would always kind of rest comfortably on your head. So you needed
25:46to pin them in place. But a hatpin could also be used for other things. So in the Victorian period,
25:51street harassment was a real problem for women. They would often be approached by men.
25:56Many Victorian women simply wouldn't even go out alone without a chaperone. But for those that did
26:00find themselves in public and needed a way to defend themselves, well, a sharp hatpin was a handy weapon,
26:07the kind of thing that you would always have on you. And that if a man was pressing his advances
26:11a little bit too enthusiastically, or was outright going to potentially assault you, then a jab with
26:16a hatpin was almost like carrying your own little dagger. So yeah, this was a way that Victorian women
26:21could protect themselves when they were out and about, perhaps left alone in a train carriage with
26:26a dodgy bloke. Wernstrom asks, when did it become clear to the world that America would become a superpower?
26:32Was it only after World War II? No, it happened way before. And you can trace the roots of it
26:37right into the Victorian era. So by the 1870s, they already knew that the United States was becoming
26:42more powerful economically. So yeah, the Victorians were aware that their time at the top of the tree
26:47would probably come to an end and that America would want to take their place. This is also a time
26:52when American culture was becoming incredibly popular in Victorian Britain. So you have guys like
26:58Buffalo Bill, the performing cowboy bringing his Wild West show to Britain, at which point
27:02Victorians fall in love with the idea of being a cowboy and living out in the Wild West. You've
27:06got writers like Mark Twain who became household names. You've got inventors like Edison promising
27:11new technologies that are going to transform people's lives. So America was really associated
27:16with the future, with the new. And lots of Victorians absolutely loved that. So more than half a
27:21century before Hollywood movies come in and show that kind of glamorous side to American life,
27:25the Victorians were already fascinated with life on the other side of the Atlantic.
27:29Ian Soforth says,
27:30I just read a book on Victorian forensics and now I'm as clever as Sherlock Holmes.
27:34Like, at least as clever. You know what, lots of Victorians thought this too.
27:37I think one of the things that made Sherlock Holmes so successful and relatable is that like,
27:41in one sense, he's basically a superhero, right? A kind of mega brain who will unravel
27:46any mystery and sort of cure the city's problems. But on the other hand,
27:49he makes it seem as if anyone could do it. As if it's all just a product of
27:53reason and a kind of rational thinking, that there is a system that you could use to apply
27:58this kind of logic. And Victorians absolutely loved it. So yeah, you're not alone at thinking
28:03you could be like Sherlock Holmes. I think that's part of the joy of the character.
28:06Spearblade asks, what were human and women's rights like in the Victorian era?
28:11In many respects, women did not enjoy the same legal rights as men. Victorian women in some ways
28:16were treated almost like children in that certainly married women didn't have any property of their own,
28:21didn't have their own, their own bank accounts. It was all owned by their husband, at least in a
28:26legal sense. And the most famous example, of course, is that they couldn't vote, but they also
28:30have fewer rights over custody of children in the event of a divorce. And you could go on and on.
28:34And all of this, of course, when there was a queen on the throne, and we might perhaps imagine that
28:38things would change for women. But even though Victoria was the head of state and a powerful figure,
28:43she wasn't really a feminist. She was very much more a traditionalist. She wasn't leading the charge
28:47for changes to women's lives. Janae asks, why was openly showing feelings frowned upon in the
28:53Victorian era? I think it partly comes from the images we get of Victorians in photography,
28:58where of course they had to keep incredibly still in order to get a clear image from the camera. And
29:03it does kind of make them look rather sort of dour and emotionless. Having said that though,
29:06there is definitely some truth to that idea that, particularly among the middle classes,
29:11to be in control of your feelings was a marker of respectability. But I don't want to give you the
29:16impression that all Victorians were like emotionless robots. Of course, they laughed,
29:20they cried, they fell in love, they felt the full gamut of emotions. And while they might not have
29:24put them on display publicly, they did absolutely have a full emotional experience. They were humans,
29:29you know, just like we are. Well, that's everything for today. I hope you learned some
29:32new things about the 19th century. Thanks for watching, Victorian England Support.
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