Susan in NC’s Reviews > How to Be a Victorian: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Victorian Life > Status Update

“ It took the Great Stink of 1858, when sacking soaked in chloride of lime had to be hung at the windows of parliament to combat the nauseating smell rising from the river, before the politicians were sufficiently convinced that a solution to the problem had to be found.”

“Even for people who believed in the miasma theory of disease, this was considered to be highly unpleasant, but the direct link between polluted groundwater and illness was only just being discovered in the 1830s and 1840s. After all, the water from these wells both looked and smelled clean. It would be the pioneers of epidemiology and germ theory who would first see the danger signs.”

“Mayhew records that most city cesspits were brick-lined and held about a cubic yard of sewage. Many, however, were unlined…Some people left the base unlined to allow liquid matter to drain away into the soil: it was only the more solid waste that was hauled away by the night-soil men; the rest would leach into the soil. Basement dwellers were known to find it oozing in through their walls.”

“… journalist Henry Mayhew frequently wrote about the living conditions of the poor…he accompanied the night-soil men as they went about their business emptying out the cesspits... A special long-handled shovel was their main tool, used to haul the excrement into large wooden buckets, which were then slung on to a pole…and carried…out to a cart in the street. Mayhew described the smell as ‘literally sickening’.”

“…they may be bulky and awkward in twenty-first-century environments, I have nevertheless found Victorian clothes to be perfectly practical in a Victorian setting. With no central heating and no clutter below waist level, many of the problems of Victorian clothes in a modern locale simply fall away.”

“The difficulty in walking was in part the point: it prevented such fashions being easily emulated by women who had to work. The trick…is to adopt a slightly circular gait…. it pays to move the foot outwards…rather than just stepping forwards…such a gait gives a swaying motion to the hips, which the tight skirt is very good at showing off. A woman wearing such clothes and walking in this manner could look alluring…”

“ One of the reasons all these support garments were so popular was that they could be used to transform the style of an existing dress. If a woman got the general silhouette right, a fashionable look could often be achieved economically, with little amendment to the outer garment itself. They all, of course, presented their own challenges to wear.”

“The belief that a woman’s internal organs required support was a strong and persistent one…In Victorian thought, the womb and other reproductive organs made female midriffs more delicate and problematic. Ironically, this may well have come to be the case, as a corseted woman…did lose muscle tone. With a corset…the back and stomach muscles…went largely unused and therefore became, to some degree, weak and atrophied.”

“…indoor and outdoor temperatures in Victorian Britain were not so far apart. Most people, including the wealthy, lived in much colder rooms than we do now. The weight and fineness of a twentieth-century wool suit, which is lighter and less substantial, would have been considered suitable only for colonial service in the Victorian mind – something to be worn in the tropics.”